Speaker 1: This episode of Headgame was recorded on gadigal Land.
Speaker 2: It's nineteen eighty five and we're in a hut in
Speaker 2: a small lakeside town in New Zealand. This is where
Speaker 2: sixteen year old Suzanne Hayward will call home for the
Speaker 2: next nine months as her parents take off on another
Speaker 2: sailing adventure. For the last ten years, she's been on
Speaker 2: board the Wavewalker, fulfilling her father's dream of sailing the world.
Speaker 2: While the idea of a childhood filled with sun, sea
Speaker 2: and adventure sounds idyllic, the reality is much tougher, with
Speaker 2: access to healthcare, formal education, and friendships all near impossible
Speaker 2: to come by. Suzanne is desperate to learn and has
Speaker 2: been hassling her parents about trying to go to university instead.
Speaker 2: Inside this wooden shack, she's been tasked with looking after
Speaker 2: her younger brother, helping him to get an education, ensurre
Speaker 2: and the house is clean and that he is fed.
Speaker 2: She does exactly that, but refuses to abandon her aspirations.
Speaker 2: In the process, she starts to write letters to every
Speaker 2: university she's ever heard of, Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard, and
Speaker 2: against the odds, she hears back from Oxford I'm at
Speaker 2: Middleton and this is headgame today. Susanne Hayward on pursuing
Speaker 2: her own dream despite being forced to live her fathers.
Speaker 2: I am super delighted to have Susanne Haywood first and foremost.
Speaker 2: How are you.
Speaker 1: I'm good, Thank you, very good to be talking to
Speaker 1: you this morning.
Speaker 2: Do you know what I couldn't wait to talk to
Speaker 2: you because I reenacted the mutiny on the Bounty from
Speaker 2: seventeen eighty nine in twenty seventeen, and you know, I
Speaker 2: thought that was quite the adventure. Then I read your
Speaker 2: let's call it a resume your career and I was
Speaker 2: just like, you just sunk my ship completely. So I
Speaker 2: can't wait to get into it. To be fair, I'm
Speaker 2: super excited about this one. And I'm going to go
Speaker 2: right back to the beginning, Susanne, because at the age
Speaker 2: of six, your father made a choice to drag you
Speaker 2: all out of England and to sail around the world.
Speaker 2: But that was at the age of six years old
Speaker 2: to super young, going back before then, what was your
Speaker 2: first ever memory?
Speaker 1: So my first memory is being a little kid in
Speaker 1: England and I have a younger brother who's a year
Speaker 1: younger than me, and I remember standing next to his crib,
Speaker 1: and in fact, there's a very there's an incident very
Speaker 1: early on when I was very little where I found
Speaker 1: a kind of set of I think they were kind
Speaker 1: of Paris. They were aspirins actually in the cupboard, and
Speaker 1: they were at the time they were multi colored, and
Speaker 1: I apparently kind of fed them to him through the
Speaker 1: kind of bars with his crib as results of which
Speaker 1: I think both of us had to be rushed off
Speaker 1: to the hospital to have our stomachs pumped. I think
Speaker 1: it was done out of you know, kind of love,
Speaker 1: not hatred as it were. I thought I was. I
Speaker 1: was sharing a good thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. At the age of six, between your first
Speaker 2: memory and when your father sort of decided to leave
Speaker 2: and live his dream and drag you along with him,
Speaker 2: what was your childhood like? Was it where you just
Speaker 2: come from a normal family? Can you remember, you know,
Speaker 2: it being just a just a normal you got You've
Speaker 2: got your brother, you got your mother, you've got your father,
Speaker 2: and everything was normal.
Speaker 1: So I have very distinct memories of living in the
Speaker 1: house we were living in in Warwick, which is in
Speaker 1: the center of the UK. My father was working at
Speaker 1: Warwick Castle. We were living in a house on a
Speaker 1: street that actually was kind of under you know, ran
Speaker 1: alongside the wall of the castle down to a river
Speaker 1: at the end. And I think we were having a
Speaker 1: kind of relatively well to do but not wealthy, middle
Speaker 1: class existence in Warwick, in this middle sized town in
Speaker 1: the UK. I was going to school. I was learning
Speaker 1: how to ride a horse. I was trying to learn
Speaker 1: how to play the violin. I don't think I was
Speaker 1: very good, but I was trying to learn how to
Speaker 1: play the violin. I had a best friend called Sarah.
Speaker 1: I had a dog called Rusty. But life, you know,
Speaker 1: was pretty normal. I don't remember feeling particularly different to
Speaker 1: any other kind of little girl. At that sort of age.
Speaker 2: Your life took a drastic change. And do you remember
Speaker 2: your father coming in and telling you that you were
Speaker 2: just about to embark on a on a journey of
Speaker 2: a lifetime for the good or bad, and that all
Speaker 2: of that would be a distant memory.
Speaker 1: I do remember him telling us, and I was about
Speaker 1: six at the time, and I remember it was over
Speaker 1: the kitchen table in our house in Warwick, the one
Speaker 1: that I just described, and I remember him sitting there.
Speaker 1: My parents both smoked very heavily at the time. You
Speaker 1: got to remember, this is the kind of nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: So it was in kind of wreaths of smoke as
Speaker 1: I remember it, and he was telling us that this
Speaker 1: was this fantastic adventure that we were going on. We
Speaker 1: were going to sail around the world. We're following Captain Cook.
Speaker 1: He presented it as a bit of a noble mission
Speaker 1: to follow Captain Cook on the two hundredth anniversary. Now
Speaker 1: kind of now, given what I know, I slightly questioned
Speaker 1: some of that story which I was given at the time.
Speaker 1: This was a big adventure. I loved my father, like
Speaker 1: a lot of the little girls. I thought he was
Speaker 1: a bit of a hero. So I was worried about
Speaker 1: leaving everything behind. But he assured me we were going
Speaker 1: to be back in three years time and then everything
Speaker 1: would go back to normal. You know, my friends would
Speaker 1: be waiting for me, my dog will be there, my
Speaker 1: favorite toy, which was a doll's house, which was an
Speaker 1: old dolls house that he painted, that would be waiting
Speaker 1: for me in my grandfather's attics. So everything would go
Speaker 1: back to normal.
Speaker 2: And was there a sense of excitement, was You're going
Speaker 2: off on this big adventure. Obviously the man that you love,
Speaker 2: that's your father that you trust, you know explicitly, you
Speaker 2: know you're going along with it. Was there a sense
Speaker 2: of excitement to go do you know what, let's go
Speaker 2: on this adventure? Or was it a case of, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm not too sure about this? How did you feel
Speaker 2: at the time?
Speaker 1: I think it was mixed. So I was excited to
Speaker 1: be particularly was my dad, who I thought was a
Speaker 1: bit of a hero. I think I struggled ready to
Speaker 1: have a kind of concept of what this thing was about.
Speaker 1: Apart from the factor it was three years of sailing,
Speaker 1: which did seem if you can imagine to a kind
Speaker 1: of six seven year old, that's.
Speaker 2: A long half your life.
Speaker 1: So I think excited would be uvestating it. But it
Speaker 1: was a mixture of kind of you know, I I
Speaker 1: was kind of intrigued. I definitely wanted to go on it.
Speaker 1: I mean, if my father was going to go on it,
Speaker 1: I didn't want to be left behind. But I was
Speaker 1: upset about leaving my friends and my dog, you know,
Speaker 1: So so it was quite a kind of mixed emotion.
Speaker 2: And how did life change for you? You know, You've
Speaker 2: got this this great life, you're living. You know, you're
Speaker 2: you're the ultimate sort of family unit. You know, one boy,
Speaker 2: one girl, mom and dad, and then your life changed.
Speaker 2: How drastically does it change? And how obvious was it
Speaker 2: at the time?
Speaker 1: It was very obvious. So there was a long period
Speaker 1: because it took about a year of preparing for this voyage,
Speaker 1: and you know, we went down to the boat as
Speaker 1: kids quite a number of so my dad was spending
Speaker 1: increasingly almost all of his time down at the boat
Speaker 1: preparing the boat, loading stores on the boat, getting the
Speaker 1: sails for the boat, and everything else. And then we
Speaker 1: set sail, and that was almost like walking through a
Speaker 1: door into a different world because we set sail and
Speaker 1: we almost immediately went into a storm. My mother immediately
Speaker 1: retreated to her cabin and disappeared for about three days.
Speaker 1: My father was up on deck steering the boat through
Speaker 1: this storm. We had three crew on board at the time,
Speaker 1: but they were basically on the wheel or sleeping. So
Speaker 1: my brother and I were seven and six and left
Speaker 1: downstairs in the main cabin basically kind of clinging on
Speaker 1: on our own for about three days. And I remember
Speaker 1: being well, first of all, I remember just trying to
Speaker 1: kind of deal with the circumstance because the cabin is
Speaker 1: kind of being thrown backwards and forwards as you're going
Speaker 1: through the wave waves. I have waves and water coming
Speaker 1: down through the main hatch, which was never very well sealed,
Speaker 1: so whenever you had a wave landing on the deck,
Speaker 1: a degree of water would come down below. So you
Speaker 1: got very I got very good, very quickly at kind
Speaker 1: of moving out of the way every time we'll kind
Speaker 1: of wave hit or kind of finding bits that were
Speaker 1: a little bit drier. And eventually I worked out there
Speaker 1: wasn't going to be any food, so we started eating.
Speaker 1: We'd be given a fruit cake before we left, and
Speaker 1: we started kind of eating that. So you can imagine,
Speaker 1: I mean, I will just just changed overnight. You know,
Speaker 1: We've gone from being normal little kids going to school,
Speaker 1: playing with our friends, just sitting on sitting down below,
Speaker 1: kind of clinging on it. It's kind of wet, it's
Speaker 1: kind of cold, there's no food, and my mother's disappeared.
Speaker 2: This is the boat that you're going to be living
Speaker 2: on for three years minimum, right, Okay, so just can
Speaker 2: you just quickly describe the boat? What did the boat
Speaker 2: look like?
Speaker 1: So wave Walker was a very beautiful boat.
Speaker 2: The Wavewalker. That's brilliant.
Speaker 1: The name of the boat, wave Walker is the name
Speaker 1: of the boat, name of the book as well. Actually,
Speaker 1: in fact, our Dingy, which is the little boat that
Speaker 1: you'd take to go ashore, we named ripple Runner quite appropriately.
Speaker 1: I went for a number of them over the years,
Speaker 1: ripple Runner, one, two, three, I think we got up
Speaker 1: to about eight. But anyway, wave Walker was the name
Speaker 1: of the boat. And she was a very beautiful boat.
Speaker 1: She looked very old fashioned, with a big bowsprit, this
Speaker 1: thing at the front which kind of extends over the water,
Speaker 1: and what's called a poop deck at the back, which
Speaker 1: is like a slightly raised deck like one of those
Speaker 1: old kind of galleons. She was quite long, sixty nine feet,
Speaker 1: but that includes about nine foot for this bowsprit, which
Speaker 1: is basically like a kind of plank of wood at
Speaker 1: the front. And she was very narrow so down below,
Speaker 1: although she wasn't small and she had good headrooms you
Speaker 1: could stand up down below, there wasn't a lot of space,
Speaker 1: you know. There was only really one working bathroom. There
Speaker 1: was a second one, but it never worked. So one
Speaker 1: working bathroom, one working toilet or head as they're called
Speaker 1: on a boat. There was one little kind of sofa
Speaker 1: area that you could sit on which would sit about
Speaker 1: four five people, which is where I would sit trying
Speaker 1: to dodge the waves. And then my parents had a
Speaker 1: cabin at the back of the boat at the stern,
Speaker 1: and my brother and I had bunks that we slept in,
Speaker 1: and over time, as we had kind of crew on board,
Speaker 1: we would share cabins with the crew because you know,
Speaker 1: there wasn't enough space to have your own cabin, so
Speaker 1: I never had my own cabin. It's interesting since the
Speaker 1: book came out, I've actually met relatively recently one of
Speaker 1: the people who helped to build Wavewalker before my father
Speaker 1: bought her, and he said to me, Suzanne, you need
Speaker 1: to realize this boat was never built to sail around
Speaker 1: the world. This boat was built as a holiday boat,
Speaker 1: a very beautiful, almost like a kind of historic replica
Speaker 1: type boat, and she was designed to sail in waters
Speaker 1: around the UK. She was never designed to sail around
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 2: Wow. So it's a good job you didn't know that
Speaker 2: at the time. Now, at the time you're dodging waves,
Speaker 2: your life is literally turned upside down. Talked to me
Speaker 2: about the storm that you got into from quite quite
Speaker 2: an early stage where you ended up in a really
Speaker 2: really bad state physically and then psychologically thereafter.
Speaker 1: Yes, So what happened was we set south from the
Speaker 1: UK and sailed down to South America. And just to
Speaker 1: give people a bit of context, that takes about five
Speaker 1: or six weeks at sea. It's a very long way.
Speaker 1: And after that first very difficult week which I described,
Speaker 1: actually things got a bit better. Eventually my mother reappeared
Speaker 1: after about three four days. The weather got a bit better,
Speaker 1: and we saw a whale, we saw flying fish. You know,
Speaker 1: there are beautiful things about being at sea. It got
Speaker 1: pretty tricky as we had as we got close to
Speaker 1: South America because we started to run out of food,
Speaker 1: so that was tough. Then we set sail from South
Speaker 1: America to South Africa, and that was another difficult crossing,
Speaker 1: partly because we lost our compass part way through. It broke,
Speaker 1: so we were a danger of circling around and around
Speaker 1: around the South Atlantic. And I should also explain that
Speaker 1: we were sailing the wrong way around the world. So
Speaker 1: my father not only was he sailing a boat that
Speaker 1: was not designed to go around the world, but he'd
Speaker 1: also chosen to go the most difficult way around the world.
Speaker 1: So most people who sail around the world, they sail
Speaker 1: from east to west, and if you sail east to west,
Speaker 1: you go kind of near the equator and the windsor
Speaker 1: behind you. But because my father had chosen to follow
Speaker 1: Captain Cook's the void, Captain Cook went the other way.
Speaker 1: He went from west to east, and to go west
Speaker 1: to east you have to go very far south to
Speaker 1: catch the winds. So that was why we went all
Speaker 1: the way down to South America and then across the
Speaker 1: Southern Atlantic Ocean to South Africa, and then we set
Speaker 1: sail across the most dangerous ocean in the world, which
Speaker 1: is the Southern Indian Ocean from South Africa to Australia.
Speaker 1: And that is a huge ocean. And not only is
Speaker 1: it a huge ocean, but it's a huge ocean with
Speaker 1: almost nothing in it. I mean, it's a very very
Speaker 1: empty ocean. And I should say that by that point
Speaker 1: on board, you have myself, I'm still seven, my brother
Speaker 1: who's six, my mother who's still getting very badly seasick
Speaker 1: and hate sailing. My father and my parents are falling
Speaker 1: out with all of our original crew, and the new
Speaker 1: crew are two guys who just happened to come down
Speaker 1: to the wharf just before we set sail from South
Speaker 1: Africa and they never sailed before.
Speaker 2: What was the routine because like you said, you're weeks
Speaker 2: into this voyage. Now took me through the daily routine
Speaker 2: on ship? Or it would it differ every day.
Speaker 1: So I would wake up in the morning kind of
Speaker 1: crawl my way out of the bunk because on this
Speaker 1: voyage across the Southern Indian Ocean, we're in a storm
Speaker 1: almost from when we leave port. So the boat is
Speaker 1: healed over, tilted over on an extreme angle on its side,
Speaker 1: so my bunk is either way up in the air
Speaker 1: or it's way down kind of at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the cabin. So you're either climbing your way out of
Speaker 1: your bunk or you're levering yourself out of your bunk
Speaker 1: and then kind of falling across the cabin, so you
Speaker 1: get out of bunk, and then making my way into
Speaker 1: the main cabin and trying to find something to eat
Speaker 1: because most of the time there were no adults, because
Speaker 1: what happens to a boat when you're sailing like that
Speaker 1: is the adults are either on the wheel or they're sleeping,
Speaker 1: you know, so, and then most of the day my
Speaker 1: brother and I would hang on down below, you know,
Speaker 1: brace ourselves by the table, try to find things to do.
Speaker 1: We would make up games, you know, I had my
Speaker 1: soft toys and he had hiss and we each had
Speaker 1: a kind of kingdom and we tried to kind of
Speaker 1: make up games that we would play. But basically we're
Speaker 1: on our own most of the time. We weren't certainly
Speaker 1: on that voyage, we were barely allowed on deck because
Speaker 1: it was too dangerous. So the only time that you
Speaker 1: would see outside was when somebody would open the hatch
Speaker 1: to come down below or go back up on deck,
Speaker 1: and they would walk past, take their wet weather gear off.
Speaker 1: You would have a kind of brief conversation with them,
Speaker 1: and then that was it. So a very strange world
Speaker 1: for a little kid to live in. You know, you
Speaker 1: can't go outside, you can't run around, you can't see friends.
Speaker 1: You're basically on your own most of the time.
Speaker 2: And there was a responsibility of you. When did you
Speaker 2: really start to take care of your brother as well?
Speaker 2: Was that was that later on or you know, or
Speaker 2: or did you do that from the very get go?
Speaker 1: I think from pretty early on. Actually, I mean, people
Speaker 1: talk about the fact that, you know, girls tend to
Speaker 1: be a bit more mature than boys early on, and
Speaker 1: I was a year older than him. And as I say,
Speaker 1: my mother was often kind of absent, either seasick, which
Speaker 1: she would be for the first three or four days
Speaker 1: of every voyage, so she would disappear altogether, or she
Speaker 1: was you know, taking her role in doing watches. So
Speaker 1: I was generally kind of left in a kind of
Speaker 1: quasi parental position with my brother. But we would also
Speaker 1: play together, particularly when we were in that kind of
Speaker 1: early phase, we would do less so later on when
Speaker 1: things became much more difficult on.
Speaker 2: Board and take me to now take me to the star.
Speaker 2: So this is quite bad. Take me back to when
Speaker 2: you realized that it was. It was seriously bad. That
Speaker 2: something is you know, it's something you know, a state
Speaker 2: of emergency basically was happening on the ship.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, we went from what I was getting
Speaker 1: used to, which was being in a storm and the
Speaker 1: boat being on a big heel and kind of going
Speaker 1: up and down through the waves, to a position where
Speaker 1: the waves outside were enormous and I now know the
Speaker 1: waves outside were thirty forty feet high and the boat
Speaker 1: was surfing down the waves and then coming up, and
Speaker 1: of course I'm experiencing this as a little kid down below,
Speaker 1: and what you can feel is the boat kind of
Speaker 1: tipping forward and then tipping backwards, and then at the
Speaker 1: top of the wave kind of keeling over and kind
Speaker 1: of dropping down. And you can also see it in
Speaker 1: the kind of eyes of the kind of adults as
Speaker 1: they come downstairs. People were getting very frightened about the
Speaker 1: situation that we were in and the fear that if
Speaker 1: the boat, if we lost control of the boat, she
Speaker 1: could be flipped over by a wave. This went on
Speaker 1: for about two days, just kind of holding on basically
Speaker 1: down below. Eventually what happened was a huge wave came
Speaker 1: up behind the boat. My father has described several ways,
Speaker 1: probably combined together. They broke over the stone the back
Speaker 1: of the boat, smashed through the deck of the boat,
Speaker 1: and created a huge hole in the deck above. The
Speaker 1: table went out through the side of the hole. I
Speaker 1: was standing down below at the time. My mother had
Speaker 1: just come down below and we hadn't eaten for some time,
Speaker 1: so she told me to come and help her try
Speaker 1: to get some food. So I was standing next to
Speaker 1: her in the galley, and I was picked in the
Speaker 1: galley of the kitchen, and I was picked up and
Speaker 1: thrown against the ceiling of the cabin, fractured my skull,
Speaker 1: broke my nose thrown against the kind of wall of
Speaker 1: the cabin, and I ended up kind of conscious on
Speaker 1: the floor of the cabin. And the boat almost sank.
Speaker 1: I mean, the boat started filling up with water, because
Speaker 1: as you can imagine, you've got a big hole in
Speaker 1: the decks. Every further wave that hits the boat just
Speaker 1: kind of funnels down below, and the boat is filling
Speaker 1: up with water. I mean, I come to and I
Speaker 1: find myself in a bunk. Somebody's shoved me in a
Speaker 1: bunk in one of the forward cabins, and I have
Speaker 1: a huge lump on my forehead which is growing and growing.
Speaker 1: It's extremely painful. We were incredibly lucky because we would
Speaker 1: not have stayed afloat long enough to get to Australia,
Speaker 1: and the boat was so weak we couldn't have gone
Speaker 1: We couldn't have turned around and gone back into the wind.
Speaker 1: We were too the boat was too weak to do that.
Speaker 1: We were very lucky to stumble across a tiny island
Speaker 1: called our l Amsterdam, which is in the middle of
Speaker 1: the Indian Ocean, and on that island is a small base.
Speaker 1: And I describe all of this a lot more on
Speaker 1: the book, because that base is a very mysterious place,
Speaker 1: a very strange place. But it did have a little
Speaker 1: tiny doctors. It had a doctor and a little tiny
Speaker 1: surgery there. And he operated on my head and saved
Speaker 1: my life because otherwise, he told me, and I've contact
Speaker 1: I contacted him when I was writing, I would have
Speaker 1: ended up with brain damage. Yeah, I had a huge
Speaker 1: swelling on my head which he had to kind of
Speaker 1: sort out. But unfortunately he had to do that without
Speaker 1: any anesthetic, because you can imagine on a tiny island
Speaker 1: in the middle of the Indian Ocean, there was no
Speaker 1: general anesthetic. And you can't what was the island used for. Well,
Speaker 1: as I said, it's a bit of a mysterious place.
Speaker 2: I can't tell you.
Speaker 1: It has a small has a small French quasi military
Speaker 1: scientific base on it. We were told not to walk
Speaker 1: around the island without supervision. They were certainly doing lots
Speaker 1: of scientific experiments, sending up kind of weather balloons and
Speaker 1: things like that, but frankly, we weren't going to ask
Speaker 1: any questions. Had we not found the island, we would
Speaker 1: have we would have died. And I owe my life
Speaker 1: to this doctor, doctor Sennelart, who operated on me seven
Speaker 1: operations on my head and saved my life because otherwise
Speaker 1: that the pressure from this swelling would have caused god
Speaker 1: of brain damage.
Speaker 2: Over what period of time? How long would you end
Speaker 2: up saying?
Speaker 1: Therefore, so we end up being on the island I
Speaker 1: think for about six or seven weeks with them.
Speaker 2: And they fed you, they gave you water, they did
Speaker 2: they did so they literally saved your lives.
Speaker 1: They did save our lives. They did save our lives.
Speaker 1: And of course, being a French base, when these scientists
Speaker 1: were dropped on this island and they would have a
Speaker 1: kind of change over every year of the scientists they were,
Speaker 1: they were left with plenty of nice French cheese, nice
Speaker 1: French wine. So we ate very well. Though I also
Speaker 1: remember at one point they tried to feed us wild cat,
Speaker 1: which my mother and I refuse to refuse to eat.
Speaker 1: I mean, conditions on this island were pretty basic, but
Speaker 1: I had these head operations and my mother refused to
Speaker 1: come in for these operations because she doesn't like the
Speaker 1: sight of blood, so I had them on my own,
Speaker 1: and of course I was conscious. So now I'm a
Speaker 1: seven year old kid, I've been through the storm, I'm
Speaker 1: now frightened at the ocean, and I've had this very
Speaker 1: traumatic experience of these head operations. So I'm beginning to
Speaker 1: question whether everything my father has told me about this
Speaker 1: voyage is really correct.
Speaker 2: The Benny drops is like, this is not quite what
Speaker 2: I've been kind of told, right, wow, So I can
Speaker 2: only imagine. And this is why it's so fascinating. Ultimately,
Speaker 2: shipwrecked let us call it shipwrecked on this island always
Speaker 2: you're getting this medical attention, and is is your father
Speaker 2: trying to fix the boat? What's happening with the boat?
Speaker 1: So my dad is trying to patch up the boat
Speaker 1: enough to get it to Australia. I mean there were
Speaker 1: very limited facilities on this island. I mean it's basically
Speaker 1: a volcanic atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean,
Speaker 1: so there's no shipyard or anything like that. But he
Speaker 1: hammered metal across the holes and the boat, and then
Speaker 1: the French government and the British government basically said that
Speaker 1: my mother and my brother and I were not allow
Speaker 1: back on board because it was too dangerous. If my
Speaker 1: father wanted to put his own life at risk, that
Speaker 1: was his choice. So eventually he set sail with these
Speaker 1: two poor novice crew, Larry and Herbie, off to Australia,
Speaker 1: leaving my mother and my brother and I on the island,
Speaker 1: and we were eventually kind of rescued from the island
Speaker 1: by a passing containership that picked a up and took
Speaker 1: us to Melbourne.
Speaker 2: Do you know what the question pops into my head?
Speaker 2: And excuse me if this is this is insulting or
Speaker 2: if I've overstepped the mark, but I must ask. It
Speaker 2: was your father, Okay, did he did he suffer from
Speaker 2: any sort of mental health issues or what? You know?
Speaker 2: What did he want to do? You know, to to
Speaker 2: leave you on the island and be so fixated on
Speaker 2: what I'm completing this journey or doing this journey. It
Speaker 2: seems like there's there's something going on upstairs with with
Speaker 2: with your father. I don't know if you'd know now
Speaker 2: if you knew at the time, but it seems like
Speaker 2: that he's, uh, yeah, he's not on the same page
Speaker 2: as as as you all are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a very interesting question. And something I didn't
Speaker 1: really ask myself at the time. I mean, I just
Speaker 1: assumed that all fathers were like this. You know, my
Speaker 1: father had his mission, which was to sail around the world,
Speaker 1: and that was the only thing that he was focused on,
Speaker 1: you know, so everything was in order to achieve that,
Speaker 1: and as I say, when we first set out, he
Speaker 1: kind of painted it as a as a kind of
Speaker 1: moral you know, or kind of noble quest. It became apparent,
Speaker 1: I have to say it had already started to become
Speaker 1: a parent even by this point, but it became increasingly
Speaker 1: apparent then actually we weren't following Captain Cook, or at
Speaker 1: least not properly. So for example, Captain Cook, I said
Speaker 1: we went down to South America. Captain Cook did not
Speaker 1: go to South America on his third voyage. So I
Speaker 1: now have a theory that what my father was trying
Speaker 1: to do was he wanted to be a hero and
Speaker 1: he found a reason to do this voyage, which was
Speaker 1: to follow Captain Cook around the world, which generated a
Speaker 1: lot of press interest at the time when we first
Speaker 1: set sail from the UK. It also, by the way,
Speaker 1: meant that he could get some sponsorship from the voyage
Speaker 1: because we weren't particularly wealthy, but I think his motivation
Speaker 1: was to be a hero, you know, to be kind
Speaker 1: of famous, to you know, somehow kind of prove himself
Speaker 1: in the world, and that for him was his overriding motivation.
Speaker 2: You're on this island with the with the French, your
Speaker 2: father's patched the boats up away. He goes, what's the
Speaker 2: game plan from that moment that you wave goodbye to
Speaker 2: your father?
Speaker 1: So the game plan had been that somehow my mother
Speaker 1: and my brother and I were going to get rescued
Speaker 1: by a passing ship and meet my father in Australia.
Speaker 1: But I was very worried. I mean I was, even
Speaker 1: at that age, I was very you know, I was
Speaker 1: closer to my father than to my mother, who I
Speaker 1: viewed my father as a bit of a hero. My
Speaker 1: mother was always quite cold as a mother. I mean
Speaker 1: I mentioned that she didn't even come in when I
Speaker 1: had these operations, and she certainly wan and a heroic
Speaker 1: figure to me. So I was worried about being left
Speaker 1: on this island and no obvious way to escape. But
Speaker 1: we did. We found a kind of passing boat that
Speaker 1: kind of took us to Melbourne and we met my father.
Speaker 2: How do you do that, because how do you find
Speaker 2: a passing boat? Is it radio communications? Is it? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Are you on their radio? They're on their radio systems,
Speaker 2: and you're like, if you're passing by this island and
Speaker 2: you're going to Australia, please can we can we hit you?
Speaker 1: Please?
Speaker 2: Really? Yeah?
Speaker 1: No exactly. So the so the island was putting out
Speaker 1: kind of radio calls and and then actually and you
Speaker 1: know again, it's a kind of it's a whole story
Speaker 1: within a story. It's not easy to get off a
Speaker 1: kind of volcanic adol onto a container ship. So there's
Speaker 1: a whole story there about how we were taken out
Speaker 1: into the ocean by the small supply ship that supplied
Speaker 1: the island, and then we had to kind of get
Speaker 1: down into a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean,
Speaker 1: go across the waves to this container ship and then
Speaker 1: up the side of the container ship on one of
Speaker 1: these kind of moveable ladders. And content ships are huge,
Speaker 1: of course, so that was a that was a pretty
Speaker 1: kind of frightening experience. My mother was petrified, absolutely petrified,
Speaker 1: but we did. We got to Melbourne. We met my
Speaker 1: dad back at Fremantle. We flew from Melbourne to Fremantle,
Speaker 1: and we spent almost a year in Fremantle repairing the boat.
Speaker 1: And then of course my dad is insistent that we're
Speaker 1: going to keep saying.
Speaker 2: That year that you're in Fremantle, Susan, do you start
Speaker 2: to realize that actually you're you're missing out on a
Speaker 2: whole different childhood, that there's there's a whole different life
Speaker 2: out there, there's a whole normal life out there. And
Speaker 2: and does it scare you to get back on want
Speaker 2: to get back on the boat and continue this journey
Speaker 2: with your father and your family.
Speaker 1: Yes. So while we were in Freemantle, I was able
Speaker 1: to go to school for a little while at a
Speaker 1: little school in Fremantle, and that reminded me what that
Speaker 1: was like. I mean, first of all, I was always
Speaker 1: quite an academic kid. I always love learning, so going
Speaker 1: back to school and being able to do that, but
Speaker 1: also having friends again, you know, I remember kind of
Speaker 1: making friends. Music was always a very big thing for me.
Speaker 1: So I remember, and I'm about eight at this point,
Speaker 1: you know, being in the school band. So all of
Speaker 1: those wonderful things again that I could do. But of
Speaker 1: course I knew it was time limited. As soon as
Speaker 1: the boat was ready, my father would want to sail again.
Speaker 1: And by this point I'm frightened of the sea, and
Speaker 1: kind of probably an even bigger thing is I no
Speaker 1: longer trust that I'm going to be safe on the
Speaker 1: boat with my father, because you know, when I set
Speaker 1: off from England, I had this naive view that, you know,
Speaker 1: nothing bad could happen because my father was heroic, so
Speaker 1: it would all be okay. But of course that's gone now,
Speaker 1: you know, and now I don't. Now I no longer
Speaker 1: believe that.
Speaker 2: And that's a big thing. That's a big step, because
Speaker 2: you know, you lose trust, You ultimately lose faith in
Speaker 2: the person that you think is it will protect you
Speaker 2: at all costs, no matter how big the storm, how
Speaker 2: ugly or dark the nights are, and all of a
Speaker 2: sudden that's whipped away from you.
Speaker 1: That's right now. One good thing happens at this point,
Speaker 1: which is we get three new crew members in Fremantle.
Speaker 1: I mean, as usual, they've got no sailing experience whatsoever.
Speaker 1: But one of them, who I call mister Ray. My
Speaker 1: mother used to insist that we call any adults mister.
Speaker 1: So mister Ray is a lovely man, you know, a
Speaker 1: very gent twenty something, and he becomes almost like a
Speaker 1: kind of father figure or older brother figure to me.
Speaker 1: He's a lovely man. Mister Ray and I are still
Speaker 1: in contact today and he remains as lovely today as
Speaker 1: he was then. And he is on board for about
Speaker 1: four months. He eventually has to leave because he can't
Speaker 1: afford to keep and my father always insisted the crew
Speaker 1: had to pay to be on board, and mister Ray
Speaker 1: could not afford to stay on board very long because
Speaker 1: he didn't have very much money, but that those kind
Speaker 1: of four months of him being on board were really
Speaker 1: important because he was very kind to me. But he
Speaker 1: has said that when we set sail again from Fremantle,
Speaker 1: he remembers looking at me and he remembers seeing how
Speaker 1: frightened I was about going back to see Apparently. I
Speaker 1: used to walk around and I used to carry because
Speaker 1: we didn't have very many toys on board, particularly kind
Speaker 1: of after a shipwreck when a lot of things got lost,
Speaker 1: but we did have a chess set. I don't remember
Speaker 1: ever really playing chess ver much, but I used to
Speaker 1: play with the chess pieces. I used to kind of
Speaker 1: make up games with them, but particularly the White Queen
Speaker 1: and apparently I used to walk around the boat carrying
Speaker 1: the White Queen and I would talk to the White Queen,
Speaker 1: and he thinks that this was a way of me
Speaker 1: trying to kind of feel a bit more secure. You know,
Speaker 1: I had like a friend that.
Speaker 2: I was a survival mechanism of defense, mechanism that helped me,
Speaker 2: helped you through. So when you get back on the boat,
Speaker 2: how long is it until you crave being you know,
Speaker 2: back to being a normal kid, until you want to
Speaker 2: go back to the normal life. And when does that
Speaker 2: moment hit? And did you you know, do you remember
Speaker 2: that moment? Was it something that triggered that or was
Speaker 2: it a case of just a you know, it just
Speaker 2: happened over time and you just got, know, got to
Speaker 2: that stage where you are enough's enough.
Speaker 1: Well what happened is is after that year in Fremantle,
Speaker 1: we kept sailing, you know, notionally or baguely, following Captain
Speaker 1: Cook all the way you know, around Australia, New Zealand,
Speaker 1: up the South Pacific to Hawaii. And by that point
Speaker 1: we've been sailing for four years. It took Captain Cook
Speaker 1: three years, took us four years because of the one
Speaker 1: year after the shipwreck, and that was kind of the
Speaker 1: end of the Captain Cook's third voyage because he was
Speaker 1: killed in Hawaii, and so that should have been the
Speaker 1: end of our voyage, and we were do to come
Speaker 1: back then through the Panama Canal back to the UK,
Speaker 1: and everything was going to go back to normal. But
Speaker 1: I began to realize in Hawaii that my father was
Speaker 1: changing his mind. He didn't want to come back anymore,
Speaker 1: and he delayed and delayed and delayed in Hawaii, and
Speaker 1: eventually in Hawaii he said, right, we're going to have
Speaker 1: a vote on what we do and either going to
Speaker 1: go home going east through the Panama Canal, or we're
Speaker 1: going to turn west and we're going to go back
Speaker 1: down the Pacific again and keep sailing, which would be
Speaker 1: a wonderful thing, wouldn't it. It was very clear where
Speaker 1: his pay I did not want to keep sailing. I mean,
Speaker 1: by that point I was now so we've been at
Speaker 1: sea four years, so I'm now eleven. I don't have
Speaker 1: any friends on this boat because it's just us. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to school, so I wanted to come home.
Speaker 1: You know, this was a you know, the kind of
Speaker 1: atmosphere on board was increasingly kind of unpleasant. We had
Speaker 1: no money, no friends. So we had a vote, and
Speaker 1: my father had always said that these votes were binding,
Speaker 1: you know, he'd always had this kind of mythology around
Speaker 1: the voyage. One mythology was this was a big, noble
Speaker 1: thing that we were doing. The other mythology was we
Speaker 1: were all doing this together, and we'd all chosen to
Speaker 1: do it together. Now, of course I hadn't said no
Speaker 1: at the start, but I've been seven, I mean, and
Speaker 1: I hadn't even said no when we kept sailing in Australia,
Speaker 1: but I mean, i'd still only been kind of eight.
Speaker 1: But this time I'm eleven, twelve, I say no, I
Speaker 1: want to come home. I vote against going on, and
Speaker 1: my brother votes to come home as well, and my
Speaker 1: parents inevitably vote to keep sailing. And then my father
Speaker 1: does something that changes everything, which is he says, this
Speaker 1: isn't a democracy. I have the casting vote, and we're
Speaker 1: going to keep sailing. And at that moment everything changes
Speaker 1: because this is no longer a choice. I'm trapped on
Speaker 1: this vote. I'm here against my will. I have no
Speaker 1: choice anymore. I mean, I'm not sure I had a
Speaker 1: choice before. It's just at that moment it crystallized that
Speaker 1: I had no choice. And then what happened was we
Speaker 1: turned and we sailed back down the Pacific. We have
Speaker 1: no money. So my father by this point is taking
Speaker 1: crew on board who not just like mister Ray who
Speaker 1: was contributing to his food, but now these are people
Speaker 1: who are coming on board for like paid holidays. And
Speaker 1: I'm increasingly as the girl, and I should say there's
Speaker 1: a real kind of gender split on the boat, so
Speaker 1: my brother isn't really expected to do very much. He's
Speaker 1: the boy, so he can help a bit on deck,
Speaker 1: but you know, he's the I'm afraid we did have
Speaker 1: a kind of golden child Cinderella thing that started to
Speaker 1: kind of emerge at this point, and my brother and
Speaker 1: I separate from kind of playing together as kids, now
Speaker 1: were treated very differently. I'm expected to kind of cook
Speaker 1: and clean down below with my mother for these crew
Speaker 1: for hours each day, because you know, by the time
Speaker 1: we have six or seven crew on board, that's a
Speaker 1: lot of work, mainly men as well, and I'm a
Speaker 1: teenage girl, so you know, conditions are really uncomfortable, and
Speaker 1: my relationship with my mother is not getting any better.
Speaker 1: We eventually get to Australia. I go briefly to school
Speaker 1: in Australia, and then I realized that I've got to escape.
Speaker 1: I've got to find a way to get off this
Speaker 1: boat because and it's not easy to work out how
Speaker 1: to do that because I don't have a passport, I
Speaker 1: don't have any money, I have no contact with any
Speaker 1: of my relatives back in the UK. I've had no
Speaker 1: contact with them since we left. I'm an illegal alien
Speaker 1: wherever we are, you know, because my citizenship is kind
Speaker 1: of the UK. Although at that point I don't even
Speaker 1: have a passport. I'm just on my So I hit
Speaker 1: on the idea that if I could educate myself, maybe
Speaker 1: I can convince the university somewhere to let me in.
Speaker 1: And where I get this idea from, I guess I
Speaker 1: kind of know that I'm intellectually curious, but I think
Speaker 1: it's just I couldn't think of anything else. So I
Speaker 1: convince my parents to let me start to study by correspondence.
Speaker 1: It's not easy because of course we don't have an address.
Speaker 1: So each time we get to a port, I run
Speaker 1: to the post office. I post off the lessons back
Speaker 1: to Australias. In Australia, in course, I asked my father
Speaker 1: where we're going to go next. Sometimes he'll tell me.
Speaker 1: Sometimes he'll tell me and then he'll change his mind.
Speaker 1: So lots of this stuff never came back. But I
Speaker 1: will then, like you know, send the lessons back to
Speaker 1: post Restant Tahiti or Samoa or wherever he thinks we're
Speaker 1: going to go next. And then, of course on the boat,
Speaker 1: it's very hard to work because most of the time
Speaker 1: I'm cooking and cleaning, so I'm having to hide in
Speaker 1: those moments when I'm not working up in the bowsprit
Speaker 1: at the very front of the boat, which is where
Speaker 1: the most violent movement of the boat was. And so
Speaker 1: my mother, who always got seasick, didn't really like going
Speaker 1: up the front of the boat. So I was pretty
Speaker 1: kind of safe hiding up there, and I would hide
Speaker 1: inside a sail and that's where I would work. And
Speaker 1: what's really stranger is into an outside eye, this would
Speaker 1: have looked like paradise. There we are on this boat
Speaker 1: that although she's getting very tired by this point, she's
Speaker 1: still a very beautiful boat. Was say in the South
Speaker 1: Pacific Islands with kind of palm trees and white sandy beaches,
Speaker 1: but the reality on the boat was completely different.
Speaker 2: Wow, and was it? And when you were writing these letters,
Speaker 2: was there a glimmer of hope as well? Were you
Speaker 2: always clinging on to hope?
Speaker 1: I was? I mean I was doing the education for
Speaker 1: two reasons. Is it was something I could control in
Speaker 1: a world where I could control almost nothing. And secondly,
Speaker 1: I hoped it would get me out. And then eventually,
Speaker 1: when I was sixteen and my brother was fifteen, so
Speaker 1: we're now nine years of sailing, my parents leave us
Speaker 1: in New Zealand. They want my brother to go to
Speaker 1: school because they're worried about his education, as my father
Speaker 1: at one point tells me, you know, he's a boy,
Speaker 1: so he'll have to support a family one day. So
Speaker 1: I'm left to look after my brother in New Zealand,
Speaker 1: which was always my role as the girl, and they
Speaker 1: keep sailing, they leave us behind. I'm on a temporary visa.
Speaker 1: They keep on trying to deport me, and we're just
Speaker 1: surviving in a very basic it's called a batch in
Speaker 1: New Zealand, a kind of basic kind of holiday home.
Speaker 1: But I keep on studying and I then start to
Speaker 1: write every university I've heard of in the world, asking
Speaker 1: if they will consider me, and most of them write
Speaker 1: back and say no. You know, they write back and say,
Speaker 1: you know, sorry, but you know this is you're just
Speaker 1: too weird. You're just too weird. And then amazingly Oxford
Speaker 1: University wrote back and they said, write us a couple
Speaker 1: of essays and we'll think about it. And so I
Speaker 1: wrote them a couple of essays. I wanted to study zoology,
Speaker 1: by the way, inspired by all the animals that we'd
Speaker 1: seen on the boat. And they wrote back and said,
Speaker 1: if you can get to the UK, we'll interview you.
Speaker 1: So I went out and I picked kiwi fruit, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, is a very unpleasant job, but it
Speaker 1: is a job that you can do without a v
Speaker 1: in New Zealand. And that got me enough money for
Speaker 1: a one way ticket and I got on a plane
Speaker 1: and came back to the UK for that interview. And
Speaker 1: I now look back and I think there wasn't really
Speaker 1: a plan B. I had a kind of Plan A.
Speaker 1: There was no Plan B. What was I going to
Speaker 1: do if I didn't get in? But amazingly they did
Speaker 1: let me in and that completely turned around my life.
Speaker 1: When I found actually, actually it sounds a bit weird.
Speaker 1: I had anticipated that academically this was going to be
Speaker 1: very difficult, and socially it was going to be wonderful.
Speaker 1: What I found at Oxford, putting aside the money issues
Speaker 1: that I had because of my parents, what I actually
Speaker 1: found was the opposite that. Actually, academically it was tough,
Speaker 1: but the one thing I'd learned how to do in
Speaker 1: my childhood was how to study, how to be kind
Speaker 1: of motivated, how to be disciplined. That I was really
Speaker 1: good at. What I found really difficult at Oxford was
Speaker 1: the social side. I found it really difficult because we
Speaker 1: had I had nothing in common with all these other kids,
Speaker 1: and so that took some time for me to figure out.
Speaker 1: But I did my degree in the end, and then
Speaker 1: I did a PhD. I went to Cambridge, did a PhD,
Speaker 1: and then I go on and have my career. I
Speaker 1: go from there into the UK Government, and then I
Speaker 1: go from there into McKinsey, which is a consulting company,
Speaker 1: and there to where I go now. And for a
Speaker 1: long time I didn't think about my past until eventually,
Speaker 1: by this point I've become a mum myself, I have
Speaker 1: three kids. I decide I need to kind of write
Speaker 1: the story that you know, just looking at my kids,
Speaker 1: I can no longer excuse everything that happened, and I
Speaker 1: want to tell the story. I want to get across
Speaker 1: two things. One is, I want to start a debate
Speaker 1: about where are the rights of kids versus the rights
Speaker 1: of parents? Where is that boundary? And I want to
Speaker 1: stop people assuming that you know, parents who take kids
Speaker 1: out of society, that this is always just a wonderful thing.
Speaker 1: You know, we should question some of that. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying it's never a bad it's never a good thing.
Speaker 1: And I think some of that is a good thing,
Speaker 1: but you know, these extreme parent parenting is often not
Speaker 1: very good for the kids. And then secondly, which is
Speaker 1: a message more for kind of kids than parents. It's
Speaker 1: just I it sounds a bit obvious, but the power
Speaker 1: of education. I mean, I went from sitting in a
Speaker 1: boat with no future whatsoever, trapped on that boat to
Speaker 1: where I am now, and the only thing that did
Speaker 1: it was education.
Speaker 2: That's a powerful message within itself. And you know, Susan Hayward, listen,
Speaker 2: I'm going to be getting your book and I've got
Speaker 2: one final question. And I'm not sure if you've ever
Speaker 2: been asked this before. But and I don't know if
Speaker 2: you know, but do you ever know what your father
Speaker 2: was running from?
Speaker 1: He was so I don't know. He grew up very
Speaker 1: poor in a mining village in the UK. And I
Speaker 1: think his f who I never met because he died
Speaker 1: quite early of lung cancer, he was a minor coal miner,
Speaker 1: was quite a kind of violent man. I think my
Speaker 1: father was running well, not so much from, but to
Speaker 1: this idea of becoming a hero. That's what he was
Speaker 1: trying to do, I think. And he had a massive
Speaker 1: chip on his shoulder from this kind of very poor,
Speaker 1: very difficult background, and this was a way to transform himself,
Speaker 1: I think. But I don't know. I've never really been
Speaker 1: able to get him to explain the motivation. But that's
Speaker 1: as far as I can work it out. That's what
Speaker 1: it was.
Speaker 2: Okay, Susan, listen, Thank you ever so much for joining me.
Speaker 2: It's been an absolute pleasure. I could talk to you
Speaker 2: for hours. Listen wave Walker the book, Go and get it.
Speaker 2: Go and look up Suzanne Haywood follow us story. You
Speaker 2: can learn so much from it. Absolute pleasure. Thank you
Speaker 2: so much for coming on.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: To find out more about Suzanne's story, pick up a
Speaker 2: copy of our book wave Walker. I'll link the details
Speaker 2: in the show notes. Thanks for listening to this episode
Speaker 2: of Headgame. If you enjoyed it, please share it with
Speaker 2: a friend. I'm Att Middleton. See you in the next episode.