Wavewalker: THE INTERNATIONAL BESTELLING TRUE-STORY OF A YOUNG GIRL’S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM AND EDUCATION

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The local universities wouldn’t consider me because I was an English citizen, and the English ones wouldn’t consider me because they thought my qualifications were too hard to assess. I read this book after reading the article in The Guardian and raced through it in a couple of days - I loved it.

It’s an amazing account of her childhood and for everyone who begrudgingly sets off to school each day - a strong reminder of what a gift that is. After repairing Wavewalker, we sailed from Fremantle to Sydney, and then across to New Zealand before turning north-east to make our way up to Hawaii. The two siblings actually lived such a fictional-seeming life, spending their entire formative years without ever going to school, labouring as unpaid crew on the boat, and dealing with situations no child should ever have to experience.My father set sail from England in 1976 on the Schooner Wavewalker with my brother, mother and me on board for what was supposed to be a three-year voyage but turned out to be a decade-long trip. Here she documents her struggle to live a normal childhood in which she can be educated while her parents hurtle around the globe on Wavewater. I think it’s Ilha de Santo Antão in the Cape Verde islands,” said Dad, “which means we’re about 400 miles off the most westerly tip of Africa and halfway to Rio. This is truly the story of a miracle because if anybody had told me that you could get into Oxford as an undergraduate after sailing on a boat for 10 years and getting an education through correspondence school, I would have blown him/her off. While it was clear to me that my only possible escape was through education, studying by correspondence on a boat was very difficult.

This gave an approximate position line but, with no chance of any more sights, no accurate position. She required seven operations, and there was no anaesthetic in the hospital of the tiny island that was their first land after the storm. Despite concerted efforts from her family, Sue Heywood (nee Cook), has emerged a survivor with a stoic determination to live life on her terms and thrive. As the boat lurched on to its side, my fingers let go and I was flung against the ceiling and back on to the galley wall.After a while, I went up on to the aft deck to sit next to my father in the cockpit, watching him attach a compass to the binnacle, the wooden instrument stand in front of the ship’s wheel. Falling in love with him had brought all the emotional security Suzanne had longed for: ‘One of my big emotional scars was this fear of being abandoned because I was repeatedly abandoned by my parents. Heywood reveals the journey she has had both literally and personally in an immensely moving book which above all is a testament to a determined self belief to live the life you want. As my father once explained it to me, my education was less important since I would never have to support a family. What might at first seem like an idyllic childhood turned into anything but as she had to fight for an education and in the end was relieved to escape.

With Suzanne and her younger brother Jon, their mother Mary – who suffered from seasickness and was ambivalent about boats – and Gordon, there would be a crew on board (which was to change along the way, until it largely comprised untrained volunteers). There was no attempt to make any provision of space or even help me get my schoolwork back [from PO boxes]. When my children reached the same age I was when I was struggling with my loneliness and lack of access to education, I at last saw my childhood through a mother’s eyes. Allowing for all the variable factors Gordon estimated that the actual position of the schooner was somewhere in a rectangle five hundred miles long by two hundred miles wide, an area of one hundred thousand square miles - Ile Amsterdam was barely two miles wide.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. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance. Sometimes I would hide myself inside a sail at the front of the boat to study, knowing no one would come looking for me there. She felt no regret, no remorse whatsoever and she was just a very strange person who really, really disliked me. She was operated on seven times by a doctor on the remote Ile Amsterdam, which their father somehow found because he was an expert navigator, using Wavewalker’s big, heavy compass.