Lady Suzanne Heywood on a childhood spent at sea

I first knew about this journey when I was six years old when my father announced over breakfast one morning that he wanted to sail around the world and his reason was that he wanted to celebrate Captain Cook's third voyage and the idea was that we would set sail on the 200th anniversary of that voyage and that is what we did. So, in July 1976, we set sail from the UK, embarking on this three-year voyage around the world.

Thank you very much. Do call me Suzanne, and I'm delighted to be here.

So really, I first knew about this journey when I was 6 years old when my father announced over breakfast one morning that he wanted to sail around the world. And his reason for wanting to sail around the world, as he explained it to me, was that he wanted to celebrate Captain Cook. And I should explain here that my maiden name is Cook. Although it turns out that we're not related to Captain Cook, but he was a big admirer of Captain Cook and he wanted to celebrate Captain Cook's third voyage. And the idea was that we would set sail on the 200th anniversary of that voyage. And that is what we did. So in July 1976, we set sail from the UK embarking on this three-year voyage around the world. And you asked me what point did I start to tire of this? And really my first indication that this was not going to be the exciting adventure that my father had promised was after we'd sailed from the UK down to South America, which by the way is a very long voyage. It's about six, seven weeks at sea.

And then all the way from South America to South Africa. And I should explain here to your listeners if they're not sailors that we were sailing the wrong way around the world. Something I didn't understand as a child. But the normal way to sail around the world is that you sail from east to west. However, we were sailing from west to east. And the reason for that was that that was the way that Captain Cook went because he went the other way around the world. Now, the problem with sailing the wrong way around the world is that you're sailing into the wind unless you go very, very, very far south. And that's what we did. So we were sailing across the very southern Atlantic Ocean from South America to South Africa. And then we set sail across the very southern Indian Ocean, which is one of the most dangerous oceans in the world.

And halfway across that we were shipwrecked. We were hit by an enormous wave which was three times higher than our main mast. So 90 foot high. It smashed through the deck out through the side of the boat and I was flung against the ceiling of the main cabin. I was standing down below in the galley or kitchen and against the side of the hole. I broke my skull, broken nose and so on. And we ended up shipwrecked on this tiny little atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I bet not all of your podcasts start like this by the way, but there we go.

We ended up shipwrecked on this tiny atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean called Amsterdam, which turns out to have a very small French scientific base on it. Luckily, there was a doctor there, very small kind of group of basically male French scientists, all men, and he operated on me because I had a blood clot on the brain and it was threatening brain damage. And I ended up having seven operations, but sadly, you know, given that I was shipwrecked on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, no anesthetic. They didn't have any suitable anesthetic. So, seven head operations with no anesthetic. And you can just imagine, you know, screaming, pain. And my mother, and this I think, you know, even then there was a kind of this struck me as very odd. She refused to join me for any of these operations. So I went through all of them on my own. And I think that was the moment where everything started to kind of turn. Now, not completely because I'm still a small child. I'm still only 7 years old. You know, I'm still with my parents. You've got no options in life. You know, you're kind of with your parents at that stage in your life. And to some extent you have to trust them. But a lot of the trust was gone. I mean I no longer believed that this was going to be a safe adventure and that they were going to kind of care for me. So that was one year in to this voyage.

So, to my knowledge, they never did. So, what happened was my father was just very determined to get the boat repaired and then to continue this voyage. The French and the British government refused to let my mother and my brother and I get back on board the boat because they said it was too badly damaged. So my father sailed the boat to Australia. We had two crew members on board at the time and they sailed with him. And my mother, my brother and I, after a few more weeks, we were rescued by a passing cargo ship and we were taken to Australia and we reunited with my father in Fremantle, Western Australia. And then we spent about a year while my father repaired the boat. And I actually managed to go to school for a bit that year, which was wonderful. I never remember my father talking about stopping, regretting the fact that we were, you know, we'd been put in that position. And in fact, he later wrote a book about that first year and a half of our voyage. And when I read that book, it also surprised me because there's no sense in there of any sort of kind of regret. You know, this was just something the world did to him. He was a hero because we didn't in the end sink and we got to the island, but there was no kind of sense of regret about it. In fact, my father later gave an interview to the papers where he said that actually I got off lightly in the accident, but actually, you know, I had a fractured skull and a broken nose. I mean, I almost ended up with brain damage. So he was very much of the kind of adventurer who really is completely focused on the adventure, not really focused on the kids he's dragging along with him or the impact on them.

Yeah, I think it's certainly due to two things. First of all, you know, I was born in 69, so we're in the 1970s coming up to the late 1970s. And definitely parenting in that time was very different to parenting now. Parents were much more dismissive of children's needs and much more focused on their own needs. And that obviously has kind of swung, some might say, too far the other way now. But certainly we're in a very different kind of generation of parents. However, I have to say, having compared my experience to other children of 70s parents, mine were at the extreme end. I mean, not many 70s parents were putting their children at mortal risk, living on a boat, often with very little food because we would regularly run out of food. Sometimes we would be running out of water. And no proper provision for schooling or friendships or anything like that. So my parents were off the spectrum even by that generation, but that generation obviously that's part of it. I think the other thing is there is a particular sort of person who does something like this and I've heard it said that if you look at many adventurers who've achieved incredible things, they are amazing people, but you really wouldn't want to be related to them. I mean even Captain Cook himself abandoned his family effectively in England, barely ever saw his children and just kept on going back to sea. So there is something about the sort of person who does this and the sort of mindset that that takes and I think those two factors when you put that together, perhaps, you know, I'm not sure it forgives how my parents behaved but it certainly explains a little bit of it.

Yeah, I loved it. I mean we didn't go to school for very long there. It was about nine months or so to a little primary school in Fremantle. I just loved being with other kids. I was always quite an academic child before we left England. So I loved being in a situation where I could learn things on the boat. I was very limited in what I could learn. I could read every book that we had on board. My mother would occasionally produce a kind of worksheet, but that was relatively rare. So I was craving schooling, odd as it sounds. I was also craving friendship and all the things that you would take for granted in a childhood. So I did enjoy that, but I also knew it wasn't going to last very long because my father was very clear that we were going to keep sailing. So this was a very transient period and I knew it was highly likely that the friends I was making I would never see again. That's quite sad especially because you were enjoying this but you at the same time you have that knowledge of the transient nature of that period in Fremantle. But while you were there I imagine you were thrilled to be able to access books. What kind of books did you read when you were in Western Australia but also at sea because when you're at sea there's no library but you've got a handful of books that are really carrying you and allowing you to dip into your imagination. Was it Enid Blyton? What other kind of books? What captured your imagination back then?

On the boat, we didn't have very many books because we didn't have very much space on a boat. So, we had a few books, but not very many. I remember when we first left England, we were on the relatively early readers books, but I was a voracious reader. So, we also had some of the classics like Emma and all of those kind of classic books, quite a lot of the Dickens books and so on, which I definitely got on to reading later. A lot of the time on board the main books that we had was we had a small bookshelf in the main cabin down below that had space for about 20 books. That was about it. And every time we got to port, my mother would go and take those books and go to the local charity shop and give the 20 books to the charity shop and take 20 back. And so it was whatever the charity shop had. As you can imagine, it was a pretty heavy diet of Mills and Boon, you know, cheap detective stories, etc. But, you know, as time went on, I just read everything because you didn't have any choice. And it was one way of getting a window into the world. Now, in all of that, there were some books that really kind of cut through. At some point I read the diary of Anne Frank, which was incredible. I know it's kind of probably everybody says that, but it really did. And although my situation was completely different to hers and in many ways I shouldn't compare it and you know she was under mortal threat in a way that I wasn't, that feeling of being very trapped in a very small space with your family and in my case with a particularly difficult mother, I really kind of felt for that. And there was another book I read and I've forgotten her name, it's the girl who was deaf and dumb and she wrote her biography. It's an extraordinary book. I think she was called Heidi. And that again really resonated with me. I remember reading it in South Africa because in a different sort of way she was trapped in a very limited world.

So, I did think what I was going through was very unusual. But to be quite honest, as a child, I hated that. I mean, what children want, and this is why, you know, it's one of the things that I'm trying to advocate for now, is to try and get people to understand that the mindset of a child is very different to the mindset of an adult. If you're an adult and you choose to do an extraordinary adventure, that is something that you can kind of boast about. It's something that you want to do. It's something that you've got autonomy to make a decision about and do. You've chosen to do that in your life. As a child, first of all, you haven't chosen to do it. And also children by and large have a great desire to be normal. I mean many of your listeners will know even a small amount of being different as a child will lead you to being kind of outcast from a group or mocked by other children. So imagine being so strange that every time you meet another child they just think that you're weird. It's not a fun experience. Actually certainly what did not seem to me at the time in any way to be a superpower. I did later discover that there were elements of this childhood that became a superpower for me. But I certainly didn't perceive that as a child. My experience was more that I would meet other kids and first of all it would be quite hard to make friends and then when I did make friends we inevitably just left again. So they were very kind of short-term friendships. As I got older, I started to try and preserve those friendships by creating pen pals. But pen pals can never replace actually having a friend to sit down and talk to or go and do something fun with, particularly because we never had an address. So, it was always very irregular sending letters and getting letters back.