From the high seas to corporate boardrooms: Suzanne Heywood in conversation | LSE Event

Walker. Yeah, thank you. Well, wonderful to be here. I should apologize in advance. Probably like some others in the room, I've been suffering from a flu which I had last week. It's all gone now, so I'm no longer contagious, but if I start coughing, please excuse me. I will stop and I'm not going to keel over, hopefully I won't, but I'll clutch my glass of water just in case. So the story really begins when I was seven years old, well actually begins when I was six years old. My father suddenly announced that he wanted to sail around the world, and the idea was to follow Captain Cook around the world. I should say my maiden name is Cook, although I'm not related to Captain Cook, but it was enough of an excuse to sail around the world. My father wanted to sail around the world to commemorate Captain Cook's third voyage. So that was the idea. We were going to set sail when I was ten, it was going to take three years, and then we were going to come back. I would be ten years old, go back to school, my dog, which was a water spaniel, would be waiting for me, my doll's house which was going to my grandfather's attic would be still waiting for me. Everything would go back to normal. So we set sail from the UK and we sailed all the way down to South America. We sailed across the southern Atlantic Ocean to South Africa. Here I should say, for anybody who's a sailor, we were actually sailing a very odd way around the world. Normally you would sail east to west, but Captain Cook on his third voyage decided to go the other way, from west to east, which required going very far south. That meant sailing across the southern Atlantic, a rough ocean, and then even worse across the southern Indian Ocean. We were very badly shipwrecked halfway across that ocean. But to make a long story short, we eventually made it after four years to Hawaii. Hawaii should have been the end point of our voyage. We had a family vote. I was desperate to come back, bored, no education, no friends. My mother and I had a difficult relationship. I voted to come home, my brother voted to come home, but my parents voted to keep sailing. My father said he was captain and we continued. We sailed for another six years before I managed to escape. It was a decade in total. Along the way, I began educating myself. My relationship with my mother worsened. Eventually my parents abandoned my brother and me in New Zealand when I was 16 and he was 15. That was very difficult. I managed to get back to the UK and into university. I spent most of my life with people not realizing how odd my childhood was. I was determined to tell the story with all its light and dark.

So it kind of grew. I always liked learning. I was one of these nerdy little kids, probably the worst sort of kid to try and put on a boat and take away from school. Even early on when my mother had those early worksheets, I remember endlessly asking her questions about them, which would drive her completely nuts and didn't help our relationship at all. I think where it started to become very acute for me was that period when we were in Hawaii. We got a television, and I discovered this amazing program called Cosmos, which was run by a scientist called Carl Sagan. An amazing series. I remember one for example was about the Lost Library of Alexandria. For me, this was an eye-opening moment because I'd barely ever been in a library. I thought, 'Wow, there's all this knowledge out there, and I have no way of getting at it.' The books we had on board were very limited, mainly Mills & Boon novels and Van Daniken books. But it opened up my mind to the idea that there was a ton of knowledge out there if I could get it. I think it also started my passion for science. I went briefly to school in Australia, and then I managed to convince my parents to allow me to do correspondence. I started teaching myself by correspondence despite multiple obstacles.

It was really difficult. The problem I had was the only way I could educate myself was to get my parents to allow me to do this correspondence course through Australia. But first, this is before the internet, so you've got a pile of books. You write answers, post them off, and the teacher sends them back. But we didn't have an address. I would ask my father where we were going next, send off my lessons to be returned poste restante in Samoa, but halfway there he would change course or we'd leave before the lessons arrived. So lots of lessons I never got back. In addition, I didn't have any space, no room of my own. We had one table down below, but by that point my father was taking paying crew, so the table was for the crew. My mother wanted me to cook and clean for hours. I used to go and hide in the bow of the boat, wrap myself in a sail to study. It really wasn't straightforward, but I kept pursuing it because my education was something under my control in a world where I could control almost nothing.

Yes, so this was quite early on. I'm still seven years old. We've gone from the UK to South America, across the southern Atlantic to South Africa, and then we set out across the southern Indian Ocean. On board we had my dad, who had some sailing experience, my mother who hated sailing and got very seasick, me at seven, my brother at six, and two novice crew. About halfway across the Indian Ocean, about four weeks into an eight-week voyage, we ran into an enormous storm. The waves got bigger and bigger, and eventually a giant wave broke over the stern of the boat. My father saw a wave twice as big as our main mast, which was 60 feet, so a 120-foot wave. It crashed through the deck. I was down below and I was flung against the ceiling, ended up unconscious under the table with a fractured skull and broken nose. The boat was filling with water, too weak to reach Australia. Our only hope was to find a tiny island called Amsterdam, which we did by luck. On the island was a French base with one doctor. He operated on me without anesthetic because I had a massive swelling on my head. I had seven head operations with no anesthetic. That experience colored everything. After that, I was really afraid of the ocean. My parents would not talk about the wave; it was forbidden. I had nightmares for years. It was a pivotal moment, going from adventure to something really frightening.

Yeah, well maybe I would have ended up at LSE if I'd known about it. But unfortunately, after being abandoned in New Zealand, I was determined to get into university. I had heard of universities from crew coming on board. When left in New Zealand, I had no access to library or careers counseling. I was living in a hut, my brother was in school, I wasn't enrolled. I wrote to every university I had ever heard of, making up addresses. Oxford University in England wrote back and asked for essays. I wrote deliberately odd essays to stand out. They said if I could get there, they would interview me. I picked kiwi fruit to earn money for a one-way ticket to the UK, got an interview, and incredibly they let me in. Once I got a degree, everything else was wiped out. I tell students that if you manage to get to a place like Oxford, whatever your background, you reset. It jumped me into a completely different life.

The letter was straightforward. It basically said I've grown up sailing around the world on a boat, I've been trying to teach myself by correspondence, I had my junior certificates from Australia, I've seen whales and dolphins, I'm passionate about studying zoology, and please consider me. The essays were weird. I thought if I write about DNA, it would never be as good as someone who went to school. I did six subjects through correspondence with no teachers and limited resources. So one essay was about doing science at sea, like trying to do a frog dissection on a boat. The first challenge is finding your animal — I had to organize a frog hunt on an island.

And I got the crew to help me. We created this ever-decreasing circle and finally I leapt on a frog and caught it. Then challenge number two: having killed the frog, which I did by putting it in the freezer of the fridge where my mother wasn't looking, I had to dissect it when she went ashore on her chopping board, which I then washed in the ocean. I avoided having salad for some time afterwards, and luckily nobody else seemed to be ill, but I never admitted it to anybody. So that was essay number one. Essay number two was whether or not humans are a domesticated animal, which is sufficiently obscure that I thought nobody else would have written about it, certainly not in an Oxford essay, and therefore they wouldn't compare me to anybody.

Well, I had all my financial troubles. My expectation before arriving was that it would be socially amazing – I'd been trapped on a boat for 10 years without sustained friendships. I thought it would be like Party City. But academically I was petrified because I had massive gaps in my education. For biology at Oxford you needed chemistry A-level, and I had none because chemistry wasn't offered by correspondence – too dangerous to study at home. I had studied a lot of maths but never learned my times tables. Also my pronunciation was really weird because the vocabulary on a boat is basic. But academically it turned out to be fun because I had learned how to teach myself. All of a sudden I had libraries and lectures, and I kept thinking there must be a catch. It wasn't that I was a genius; it was like learning to run a marathon by practicing on the moon – it had been so hard that when education was served up, it felt easy. Socially it was a complete disaster. I was in an all-women's college, Somerville, and I thought they were weird; they thought I was weird. Someone told me I was the worst at small talk, and I thought, why would I care about that? I didn't spend 10 years on a boat to do small talk. It worked itself out after a couple of terms, but it was difficult.