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Join Suzanne, a plucky young child, as Wavewalker, their 70 foot wooden schooner, sails from the UK through cold Southern Ocean to Hawaii and the remote Solomon Islands in the Coral Sea and beyond. In desperation she rang a child helpline and was advised to make a friend, someone she could talk to. In desperation she had telephoned Childline, and finally boarded a flight back to England funded by her father. Suzanne, by then seven, and her brother would be tutored on board by their parents, both qualified teachers.
Her worst, though, was 'being trapped inside someone else's dream' — her father's — from the age of seven to almost 17.Suzanne's memoir exposes, scene by scene, the bare reality behind the romantic notion of sailing round the world. The shadow darkened and gained substance, becoming a craggy rock lurking under a cloud, while the ocean filled with writhing jellyfish.
When I asked about other subjects, such as history, art or science, she said she wasn’t going to bother with those – if we were good at maths and English, everything else would sort itself out. My experience on the boat and standing up to my parents in a quiet way, and then keeping it very fact-based, enabled me to stand up for Jeremy. Stuck on a coral reef; stuck in 'the Doldrums', mid-Atlantic; stuck in mid-ocean with a flat battery and broken engine; stuck in a cyclone; stuck on various tropical or volcanic islands for months while her cashstrapped parents desperately tried to make money. But the reality for their daughter was bleak: hunger; fear (she still has nightmares); violent storms; two shipwrecks; a gendered division of labour, in which she was expected to clean and cook below with her mother, to feed the crew; and a profound disregard for her need to learn.
It was not the sailing that was the problem; there is something magical about sailing, which other sailors will understand. Suzanne's memoir exposes, scene by scene, the bare reality behind the romantic notion of sailing round the world . It was that the choice of voyage was incredibly dangerous and the way in which it was done, with a certain foolhardiness around the details: taking a novice crew on board, never seeming to have any backup, the length of distances travelled involving such small children with no real provision to look after us.
Aged just seven, Suzanne Heywood set sail with her parents and brother on a three-year voyage around the world. I found the book a little slow at times but mostly gripping as I wanted to find out that Suzanne would be ok even though I knew she must be. Running out of drinking water; living on tinned corned beef; curled up in pain on her bunk bed when her first period started . Eventually, she left the island on a container ship with her mother and brother to catch up with her father, who had sailed on ahead in the damaged boat. I really enjoyed this book: it was a well written and easy to read account of someone who had a very different childhood but managed to survive it.Fees paid by travellers joining the vessel as ‘crew’ (in the loosest sense) – eager to use it as a means of transport – became vital to the continuation of the voyage. The needs of various ragbag paying crew they took on along the way were similarly prioritised over those of the two young children. I read this book after reading the article in The Guardian and raced through it in a couple of days - I loved it.
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