We all remember the Netflix hit Adolescence. Jack Thorn, the writer of Adolescence is adapting the incredible story of Suzanne Heywood into a new 4 part series.
Suzanne is an author, a business leader, and child survivor of an extraordinary and scary life at sea. Suzanne spent nearly a decade (ages 7 to 17) living on board her parents’ boat Wavewalker, following her father’s dream of recreating Captain Cook’s third voyage. But, what was meant to be a three year family adventure actually became a childhood of captivity.
Suzanne was isolated, unable to receive a proper education and at one point she spent weeks with a fractured skull that required multiple operations without anaesthesia on a tiny remote island. Suzanne survived shipwrecks, emotional neglect from her parents, and eventually battled her way to Oxford and a career at Cambridge.
Today we talk about:
- Suzanne’s childhood in captivity on the boat
- How life at sea felt like a cult
- The neglect and ‘jealousy’ of her mother
- Having multiple surgeries for her fractured skull on a remote island without anaesthesia
- Suzanne’s determination to get an education
- Being abandoned at 16 in New Zealand without a visa and their attempts to deport her
- Her relationship with her parents now
- No authorities intervening and why we should question these situations when kids are involved
You can get a copy of Wavewalker from Suzanne’s website
You can find Suzanne on Instagram
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode was recorded on Cameragle Land. Hi guys, and
welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Brittany
and I'm Laura. Today is a guest that I am
extremely excited about. Now we all remember the Netflix kit Adolescence.
(00:23):
Remember it was number one on Netflix in seventy countries
for three or four weeks. It was that series. If
you missed it, that was all shot in like one
long scene. Do you remember everyone? It took over everything.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
It took over everything.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Well, I, along with literally the rest of the world,
became obsessed with it, and whilst I was doing one
of my deep dives on it, one day, I saw
that Jack Thorne, who was the writer of Adolescence, was
adapting a biography of a new series, and so obviously
I went down that rabbit hole and wanted to see
what that was going to be because I thought it
would be just as brilliant. And that is how I
(00:58):
stumbled across our next guests. So today we're joined by
Suzanne Haywood. Now, Suzanne is an author, a business leader,
and a child survivor of a pretty extraordinary and scary
life at sea. Suzanne spent nearly a decade from age
seven to seventeen, living on board her parents' boat, Wavewalker.
This was following her father's dream of recreating Captain Cook's
(01:20):
third voyage, but what was meant to be only a
three year family adventure ended up becoming this wild story
of childhood captivity. For want of a better word, Suzanne
was isolated, unable to receive a proper education, and at
one point she spent weeks with a fractured skull that
required multiple operations on this tiny island in the middle
(01:42):
of the sea, and she didn't even have access to
anesthesia to go through that. So I just cannot imagine.
She has survived shipwrecks, emotional neglect from her parents, and
eventually battled her way to Oxford and a career at Cambridge,
which is one of, I mean, one of my favorite
parts of the stories, which will obviously going to get
to because that is at the end. But Suzanne, I'm
(02:03):
so excited to talk to you today. Welcome to Life
on Cut.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Thank you delighted to be here.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Suzanne. The story that you have to share, it's such
a huge story and it also spans over so many years.
But what was your life like prior to your dad
having this idea of going out and you know, going
on this boat. What was it like your childhood prior
to that time?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
See my recollection of my childhood prior at that time?
It was very normal. So we were living in a
house in England, living in a town called Warwick, which
is right in the middle of the UK. We wouldn't
have been quite a kind of nice life. My mother
was a teacher. My father was running a hotel that
he'd set up and doing various other kind of bits
and pieces. I was going to a little local school.
(02:45):
I remember. I was learning how to ride a horse.
I was learning how to play the violin, not very
well as I recall, but there we go. I had
various friends. I had a very beloved dog called Rusty,
who was a water spaniel. Normal childhood really.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
And then your dad comes out of nowhere in a
way and says we're going to go around the world
to see on a boat for a couple of years.
Or was he an avid sailor? Like, how did this
come about?
Speaker 2 (03:13):
So? My dad was a keen sailor. He used to
go out sailing with friends on the weekends. He didn't
go very far. He occasionally went across the channel, and
then he suddenly announced, I've got this great idea. We're
going to sail around the world following Captain Cook. And
I should explain that my maiden name is Cook, so
he had always been kind of fan of Captain Cook.
(03:35):
It was his name. Were not actually related by the way,
I grew up thinking that we were, but annow that
we're not.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
He did an ancestry test.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Exactly exactly, well, all Captain Cook's children died without air.
But the idea was that we were going to follow
Captain Cook around the world and recreate, more specifically his
third voyage. So we were going to set sail on
the exact anniversary of Captain Cook's third voyd, and we
were going to sail around the world. But it was
going to be a three year adventure. So we're going
(04:06):
to sit sail when I was seven. We're going to
be back by the time I was ten. Everything would
go back to normal. I go back to school. Rusty
my dog would be waiting for me. My doll's house,
which was my favorite toy, would be waiting, my grandfather's attic.
It would all be there when we came back.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
It also sounds so incredibly exciting.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
When you say it like that and you think, you know,
I mean, there's parents these days who take their kids
out of school for X amount.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Of time and they go sailing.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
It sounds magical and in your situation and what unfolded
was anything but that. What was it like when your
dad said, Okay, this is what we're doing. Was the
reaction from the whole family excitement? Was it enthusiastic? Were
you nervous about it? What was that time like?
Speaker 2 (04:49):
I remember having quite mixed feelings. I mean, like many
little girls, I hear or worship my dad. I thought
my dad could do anything, and my dad is a
bit of a polymath. He can do anything. So I
absolutely was going to go on this thing. And anyway,
I was seven years old. You don't question your parents totally.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
It didn't have a choice anyway, You.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Don't really have a choice, which is one things that
we might come back to. Kids just don't have a choice.
On the other hand, I also remember being really upset
about leaving my best friend behind, my dog, and my
doll's house in particular, those were the three things that
I really regretted, and I remember crying a lot about that.
So it was a it was a kind of mixed experience,
but there was never any question that I would go,
(05:30):
and also that my younger brother, who was six one
year younger than me, would go as well.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
And so the family was you and your brother, your dad,
and your mom.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
How did your mom.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Feel about this? Was she also a sailor, Because I
feel like it's a pretty big endeavor to say, for like,
you know, a weekend sailor are sometimes sailor that dabbles
in it. To say I am going to take my
family that involves small children in it around the world
alone for a year like that is a pretty big undertaking.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
So my mother never expressed any doubt at that point
in front of us that I can recall. There was
a bit of a discussion about how we were going
to get schooling, which they were very laid back about.
I was worried about that a little bit because I
loved school. Actually, I was quite a kind of academic child,
and so there was a promise that my mother, who
was a school teacher, was going to kind of bring
(06:24):
worksheets and that would all be absolutely fine. I don't
remember at that point my mother expressing concern, although I
already knew that my mother was not a keen sailer,
so my father was the sailer and my mother never
never was the sail up.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
What was normal day to day life like when you
actually transported your life in arrow on this boat.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
What was it like at the start of this journey.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Well, it was a shock, to be honest, because we
get on this boat and it's as you say, it's
my mother and my father and my brother and me.
We have three crew on board at the start of
the boat because she's quite a big boat. She is
sixty nine feet long, very narrow, quite old fashioned looking,
so we needed some crew to help sail it. One
(07:07):
of the crew actually had some saley experience, which was
very helpful because my father would never had a hope
so so Owen, one of the crew actually had crossed
the notion before, so that was quite helpful as well.
But what was the shock is we got out to
see my mother went to bed, because it turns out
my mother gets very badly seasick, so she went to
(07:28):
bed and she disappeared for seventh day, and my brother
and I basically left on our own, age seven and six,
in the main cabin, they kind of tossed around, because
what happens at sea is the adults, if they're not ill,
like my mother would be for kind of several days
every time we went to see they would either be
up on deck on watch, or they'd be asleep in
(07:50):
their bunks. So as kids, you're kind of left on
your own in the middle, kind of in the main cabin.
And quickly, you know, working out that every time a
wave hits the deck, lots of salt water comes down below,
so there's places to sit, places not this hit. Trying
to work out what you can do all day, you know,
in a world where it's just you and your brother
(08:11):
and you're just sitting in this cabin, not allowed up
on deck because it was very stormy, at least for
the first few days at sea.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
I mean, even when you describe the first week or
so on this boat, it feels I understand that with
bad weather and everything else, your parents probably had to
be doing what they needed in order to keep everyone safe,
but it also feels like it started off quite negligible
in terms of your and we might be jumping ahead
here a little bit, but in terms of your perspective
(08:37):
and as a child, you don't really understand what's going on.
You don't really comprehend that maybe the behavior of my
parents is inappropriate. We seem to do their therapy work
afterwards and put those pieces together. But how old were
you when you started to realize this is not okay,
Like this is not how a child should be treated
or behave, or like when was it that you started
putting the pieces together that this wasn't an acceptable life.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
It was a lot later, actually, I think it was
in my early teens that I really started to rebel.
And really it was after Hawaii, after we had the vote,
which we will come to. That was that kind of
pivot moment for me on the voyage, because that was
the point at which I knew beyond all doubt that
(09:20):
I was there against my will. So early on you
just kind of accept what that world is like. But
this wasn't a bleachure cruise. The first voyage that we
had was from the UK all the way down to
South America, and that is a six to seven week
trip at sea. We stopped kind of briefly up the
Deer in the Canary Islands, but then six seven weeks
(09:41):
at sea, so you're not seeing anyone for six or
seven weeks. Were before the internet, so you've got no
contact with anybody. By the time we got to South America,
we were quite severely short of food. It's not a
kind of fun experience to put a kids through. Really.
Now kids are incredibly resilient. So my brother and I
eventually kind of figured out various games we could play.
(10:03):
We made up kind of kingdom with our stuffed animals,
and you know, I remember, particularly in kind of later years,
creating an entire imaginary world out of a chess set.
You know, so each of the kind of pieces on
the chest set had a kind of character, and it
was an entire kind of kingdom. But you're you're doing
this out of desperation because you just don't have very much,
(10:24):
you know, to do on the boat.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
But there's no simulation. What would a typical day look
like for you? I know, it's probably not a typical,
I guess in a way if there's storms and you're
facing all these different kinds of adversity. But did you
you said you your mum was a school teacher. Did
she come prepared with things to teach you? Was she
too sick to teach you? Like what were you doing
all day for seven weeks at a time.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
So on that first voyage, we were just trying to
entertain ourselves and kind of subsist really my mother. I mean,
the teaching was very occasional, I have to say. Every
so often my mother would produce a worksheet and kind
of hand it to us, and even early on, I
remember quite a lot of tension between myself and my
mother because you know, my style of learning is that
(11:08):
I question a lot, so so I would kind of
get a worksheet on the kind of rare occasions when
she would give us one, and I'd want to ask
questions about it, kind of why, you know, why is
this like this? And you know, why is this type
of kind of mass like this and this? And she
got very frustrated at that. She didn't want to do that.
She wanted to kind of just give us something and
then she would get on with what she was doing
(11:30):
and you know, not really engage with us about it.
So that was always a great source of tension and
didn't really work very well between me and my mother,
just the kind of way in which I learned. But
otherwise we will get up in the morning, we would
forage around a bit because it wouldn't be any adults
around because they're up on deck or they're in their books.
So we would forage around a bit to see what
(11:51):
we could find for kind of breakfast. At some point,
if it wasn't too stormy, an adult would appear around
lunchtime and there might be some food that was prepared,
and the same around kind of dinner time. Otherwise you
were on your ope, you know, trying to figure out
what you could do, you know, with your kind of
stuffed animals and kind of other bit. It's the weather
became much better, which it did after we passed the
(12:13):
equator after three or four weeks. Then we could occasionally
go up on deck. So most of the time, you see,
you're a trap down below. I mean you're not even
up you know, you don't even see the light because
you're down below. And then we were allowed on deck
for kind of brief periods of time we could sit
on deck, which was you know, huge releas as you
could imagine. And I should explain for those listeners who
(12:36):
are not sailors, we were sailing the wrong way around
the world. So most people who sail around the world
sail from east to west, and if you sail from
east to west, you can sail around near the equator
and generally the winds are pretty good and it's not
a bad sail most of the time, as long as
you time it well. We were sailing the other way.
We were sailing from west to east because that was
(12:58):
where Captain Cook went, and we were follow in Captain Cook.
And what I hadn't understood when my father announced We're
going to follow Captain Cook on his third voyage is
we were following an incredibly dangerous route because the sound
from west east you've got to go very very fast south.
So we went all the way down to South America
to Rio and then cross the very southern Atlantic Ocean,
(13:19):
which was a very stormy crossing, and then we had
to cross the Southern Indian Ocean, which is probably one
of the most dangerous bits of motion in the world.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
How do you and we are jumping around here, but
how do you reconcile as an adult that you know
when you understand more the danger that your father chose
to put you in. Because it's one thing to be
circumnavigating the world, I mean in the safest way possible,
but it's another to actively choose to go the direction
that nobody goes, knowing it's going to put yourself and
(13:51):
your family in direct danger. How do you grapple with
that as an adult?
Speaker 2 (13:55):
I find it very difficult. I just don't understand an
I'm now a parent myself, I have three children. I
don't understand the thought process that makes you think. So
I understand the thought process of this is a great adventure,
and I'm excited about the adventure. There are people in
the world who just love doing that. You know, they
see a mountain and they want to quiet climate. They
(14:17):
see an ocean that they want to cross it, and
that's great. You know, you can take a decision as
an adult to put your own life at risk, but
to take a decision as an adult to put the
lives of small children in known risk. I mean we
were sailing on our own, we weren't sailing in a
flotilla with other boats. We had very limited safety equipment
(14:37):
on board. That decision I just find incomprehensible, and I
find it incomprehensible today. And actually it was the point
at which my children became a similar age to the
age i'd been when i'd been on Waywalker that I
started to write because that was the point where something
inside my head kind of clicked and I went, this
just doesn't make any sense. I just don't understand decisions
(15:00):
here that were made.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
What ended up happening at the three year mark. I mean,
that was what was promised to you. Originally, you think
you're going back to your life, to your dull house,
your dog, and then three years comes and goes and
it's far from the case. Was there a discussion with
you about it or was it just an expectation that
we're going to keep on going.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Well, you see what had happened by the time we
got three years as we were shipwrecked on that second
very difficult voyage. So after we went from South America
to South Africa. On that voyage from South Africa to Australia,
we were very very badly shipwrecked. Were hit by an
enormous wave which my father, who'd been up on the wheel,
he looked behind himself and saw something that he described
(15:39):
as being three times as big as our main mass.
A huge wave which crushed over the boat, went through
the center of the deck outside you, and then through
the hole and I as a little girl still seven
years old, have been standing below and I was thrown
against the ceiling of the cabin and then against the
wall of the cabin, and I fractured my skull and
broke my nose, and the boat was filling up with water,
(16:01):
so we almost started, Yeah, we almost died. We were
incredibly lucky to find a tiny little atoll in the
middle of the Indian Ocean called our l Amsterdam, and
we found it three days later. And I say incredibly
lucky because we were in a storm and you can't
take I mean, the only navigation we had on board
was a sextant, which is a very old fashioned piece
(16:25):
of equipment where you basically measured the angle between the
sun or a star and the horizon, which obviously you
can't do in a storm. So we didn't know where
we were, so my father guessed where we were. We
found this atoll three days later. We wouldn't have stayed
afloat long enough to get to Australia, so it was
a very very kind of close thing. And then when
(16:46):
we found this at all, because I was so badly
injured with this kind of skull fracture, with a big
blood cloth on the brain. I had all of these
head operations on this island, which didn't have suitable anesthetic
for a kind of seven year old. They were all
done without anesthetic, and all done on my own as well,
because my mother didn't come in because she doesn't like
(17:06):
the sight of blood, so I did all of those
on my own.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Southing, we need to wind it back here, because that
is one of the most wild stories I've ever heard. Okay,
you've got a fractured skull and break and nose. Was
a family aware of how injured you were?
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah, I had an absolutely massive kind of lump on
my head, and you know, one of the shocking things
actually about writing the book was a lot of what
happened on the boat I'd kind of packed away in
the back of my head, and then I got on
with my life because I just wanted to move forward.
And it was only when I stopped and wrote the
book that I then tried to gather every piece of
(17:42):
kind of documentation that I could find about what had happened.
And one of the things that I managed to get
hold of and take a copy was of was my
mother's diary. And my mother's diary when I read it
was really quite kind of sobering because my parents always
tried to kind of played down my injury. I mean,
I remember being horrific. I mean I have really kind
(18:05):
of horrific, kind of jagged memories of what happened in
that time in that accident. But reading my mother's diary,
which she wrote kind of at the time and factually
kind of wrote it on the island, all all the
bits up to it, it is equally horrific because she
talks about my head being deformed and my you know,
my huge swelling and me screaming in pain and all
(18:28):
of this. So I now know that what I remember,
those kind of jagged bits of memory in my head
are actually kind of correct. But I packed a lot
of that away for a long time, and as I say,
my parents then kind of played it down for years
in my childhood. And I now know that a lot
of what happened. And this is one of the kind
of difficult things about this is when you grew up
(18:48):
on a boat, particularly for such a long period of time,
it's a little bit like growing up in a cult.
You know, there was a particular philosophy about why we
were there, what we were doing. We were following Captain Cook.
It was a kind of grand and noble purpose. My
father was a fantastic sail or. You know. What happened
in the Indian Ocean that was a one off in anyway,
(19:09):
It wasn't that bad. Yeah, my father late wrote that
I got away lightly from the accident. You know. There
was just this ongoing attempt to kind of play everything down.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Okay, so you're in this tiny island in the Indian
Ocean that you've stumbled across. How did it come about
that there was a doctor there that was able to
operate on you? Was this just by chance? What kind
of a doctor was he, if you're remember, and what
kind of operations was he performing on you? Without anesthesia?
Speaker 2 (19:36):
So on our Amsterdam there's this tiny scientific face and
people can look it up. Actually it's quite interesting. They
have about every I think it's about every twelve months,
they drop off another team of scientists and they take
the last team of scientists off and there's a group
of about it's about twenty. It was all men when
we were there. I don't know whether it's now kind
(19:59):
of more mixed. And they are doing you know, weather
testing and various other things on this tiny at all
in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I think it's
a very interesting place to be, and they do have
a doctor on the team, but the medical facilities, as
you can imagine, are very limited because you're really just
trying to deal with what might happen for twenty men
(20:20):
on an ireland doing science experiments. They're not geared up
to do major operations. Since the book came out, I've
actually been able to well, actually, when I was writing
the book, I was able to correspond with the doctor
who operated on me. He didn't speak very good English,
so this was I'm very google Translate kind of emails
(20:40):
back and forth. Since the book came out, and the
book has recently come out in French, I've been approached
by somebody called Pierre, and it's been a little bit
in the in the newspapers. And Pierre was actually present
during the operations and is a little bit younger, and
he has explained to me it's funny how these little
facts of your background starle to kind of come together,
(21:01):
because one of my big questions was why didn't you
give me anesthetic? Because what they had to do is
they had to cut open my head, not through the bone,
but on to release this pressure the kind of massive
blood pot that I had on the brain, and it
was such a huge swelling. They had to do six
seven operations to relieve the swelling. And you can imagine
(21:23):
somebody cutting into a massive swelling on your head six
seven times. I'm screaming with pain and repeatedly screaming. I
have to say the only French swear word I knew,
because the doctor spoke French and not English and I
couldn't speak French. So we were and I was on
my own because, as I said, my mother didn't want
to come in and she said she didn't like the
sight of blood, which, by the way, indication, which became
(21:45):
kind of clearer as I grew up. You know, my
mother was never a very maternal person because frankly, you know,
one of my kids had been in that situation, I
would have been there, even if I blindfolded myself, you know,
I would have been there.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
So Pierre said, the reason why they didn't give me
an anesthetic is they did have some general anesthetic, but
they had nowhere working out the dose for a seven
year old, and they thought if they tried to give
me it they could, you know, they could easily kind
of kill me, and then they had some local anesthetic,
but when they tried that, they discovered it wasn't working.
(22:19):
So for the net result was I had no anesthetic.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
How did your parents like at this time, obviously they've
gone through all of this. How long did you end
up spending on the island in total before you were
able to set sail again?
Speaker 1 (22:32):
How long was that?
Speaker 2 (22:34):
So my father was on the island I think for
about three or four weeks, and then he set sail
again with the crew. He'd done some very basic patching
up of the boat the very limited facilities on this
island it's basically a volcanic atoll in the middle of nowhere,
so he nailed some bits of steel over the whole
of the side of the boat and on the deck.
But you know, the boat was still very badly damaged.
(22:55):
So my brother, my mother and I were banned from
going back on board by the French and British government
because they said this is just too dangerous for you
to go back on board. So it was several weeks
later when a passing cargo ship came by and my
brother and my mother and I were basically kind of
rescued from this island. It was a very dramatic rescue actually,
(23:16):
because we were taken out in the little supply ship
that the island had, because it happened to be at
the moment when they were bringing in more supplies. And
then we transferred at s across this cargo ship and
I remember clinging onto the ladder. It was like one
of these electric ladders going up the side of this
container ship, which is I mean, they're huge, They're like
(23:37):
twenty stories high. But anyway, we got to Fremantle and
met up with my dad, and then we were in
Fremantle for about a year, during which I got to
go to school briefly, which was fantastic. I mean I
love that. I mean going to school in Freemantle. I
remember making friends. I remember being able to learn and
(24:00):
instrument I've always loved music, so I remember doing that,
which of course was not something I could do very
easy on the boat, although later on I taught myself
to the guitar, so that was great. But then, of
course my father wanted to keep sailing, so we kept sailing.
We went round the kind of bite of Australia up
to Melbourne and then up to Sydney. We sailed in
(24:20):
the Sydney Homart, but not officially down to Tasmania then
tacked on. Well, yes, I mean my father decided he could,
you know, he either didn't want to pay for he
couldn't enter the race officially, so but he decided to
be fun to sail with it. So the only issue
was he couldn't get a chart, so he sailed based
on the map that he managed to get on the
(24:41):
back of a barmac, so that he failed with Sidney Hobart.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Your dad is a cowboy, a wild cowboy.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Yeah, complete cowboy, complete cowboy.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
What was happening with your parents' relationship at the time.
Was there a point where your mum's perspective changed on
wanting to be on the boat or whether she verbalized
that she didn't want to be there, or was she
quite willing for this whole experience.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
So my mother was always very clear that she hated
faintly and she said that a lot, and every time
we left port she would go to bed for three
days and nobody was allowed to bother her. She would
just kind of go to her bed and that was it,
you know. She also used to suffer from migraines and
kind of go to bed as well, you know, so
my mother would disappear a lot at see. You know,
(25:26):
I just got used to as a kid. My mom
would not be around for quite a lot of time
when we were at sea. She always hated that. On
the other hand, my parents' relationship is very close. And
somebody once gave me a kind of quote. I didn't
know where it came from, but it kind of summed
up my childhood. And the quote is the child of
lovers is an orphan and it felt like that, you know,
(25:47):
on the boat, the kind of key relationship was between
my parents and my brother and I were really quite
tangentle to that. You know, we were along for the trip,
but it wasn't about uh at all.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
As you grew up and you became a little bit
more self aware and you've got smaller levels of education
here and there, which will chat about what were the
roles that were laid upon you and your brother and
how did they start to differ with age?
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Yeah, they really did, and really it started to kind
of change after Hawaii. So we went all the way
up the Pacific from there to Hawaii, and that was
the moment where everything changed because we got to four years.
The voyage was supposed to have been three years, but
it was four years to get there because of the
shipwreck and the year spent repairing the boat in Fremantle.
And my father had always promised, and this was always
(26:35):
a promise of the voyage, that the voyage was something
that we were all doing together, that we all wanted
to do. Now, of course, I now know that this
is completely false. You know, a child of seven can't
decide to do this. You have no choice. You have
to do it. And there'd also been a decision to
keep going in Fremantle, but again I was eight years old,
(26:56):
so you don't really have a choice. By the time
we got to Wai, so we're four years in and
then we stayed in Hawaii for about a year and
a half. I was eleven twelve, and I desperately wanted
to go back to the UK or frankly anywhere where
I could settle and go to school and have friends.
I was desperate to get an education, I was desperate
(27:19):
to have friendships, do that all the normal things that
a kind of teenage girl would do. And you know,
living in that sort of environment is a bit like
being in a cult. You know. What my father said
was what we were all supposed to believe. And my
father was the captain, which is a bit like being
a king. And so we had to vote, and I
voted to come home, and my brother voted to come home,
(27:42):
and my parents both voted to keep sailing. And then
at the end of all this, my dad took another
swig of rum. My parents were very heavy drinkers, as
kind of goes with a lot of sailors, and he said, well,
you know what I didn't tell you is that this
isn't a democracy. This is a kind of benevolent dictatorship.
And the captain always gets the final vote, and I'm
(28:03):
voting that we keep sailing. And I remember being completely shocked,
because when you grow up in that kind of cult
like situation, you accept the kind of doctrines of it,
and then all of a sudden it's turned on its
head and you realize that was never true. That was
never true. It was never true. It was only true
(28:23):
while I agreed. At the point at which I disagreed,
it became untrue. And then from that moment onwards, of course,
I knew that I was there against my will. You know,
we turned the boat around, we sailed back down to Australia.
But I was never there by my own choice. There's
a vote in a way, which was a conceit that
(28:44):
my father has I now realized as an adult, to
kind of legitimize everything. You know, will you call complain
about it because you decided to be here. Suddenly it
kind of blew up because when it didn't work, the
opposite happened in my head anyway, which was I never
chose to be here. I was very clear I didn't
want to be here, and my kind of choice was overridden,
(29:07):
and my relationship was my mother was deteriorating really quite badly.
My mother was my mother and I had a very
difficult relationship, which got really bad after I got to
kind of early early teens, and I to this day
don't know why. She was so kind of unpleasant to me,
is the only way of describing. I mean, she would
(29:27):
not speak to me for kind of days, sometimes weeks
on end. On the boat. She would call me names.
She refused, I mean little things that you know now
seem quite small but at the time were very big.
Like she refused ever to buy me a bras because
and you know, she would kind of mock me, and
you know, but those are very big things when you're
living in a tiny space and you don't have anybody
(29:49):
else to go to.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
But it's not even I mean even a part of
me now and forgive me, but it even sounds like
there's a part of you still downplaining a little bit,
like they're pretty huge things for the person that's supposed
to be raising you and looking after you and caring
for you. And not only that, but they are the
only point of contact that you have, like you are
you are below deck with no sunlight. That is your
(30:11):
only person. Not only is it supposed to be your
care but it's the only person that is belittling you
and mocking you. It almost sounds like maybe she was
resentful of you both, you know, having children, and maybe
it's impacted her life. I don't know, is that how
you feel?
Speaker 2 (30:27):
So the relationship she had with my brother was very
different to the relationship with me, and this kind of
plays into the question you were asking about the kind
of different genders on board. So the way in which
it kind of played out is my brother was allowed
to be on deck and was allowed to sail. He
enjoyed doing that, and he was celebrated as doing that,
(30:47):
you know, and he became a very kind of golden child.
My brother could do no wrong. He was the kind
of one who was kind of strong and on deck.
And my role as a girl was I was expected
to be down below helping my momud cook and clean.
And by this point we'd run completely out of money.
We never had a huge amount of money, but we'd
run completely out of money, and my father started taking
(31:08):
crew on board who were paying us to come on board,
so it became a bit like a floating hotel. So
therefore they had to be cooked for and cleaned for,
and usually they were men. So I'm a kind of
teenage girl. We've got kind of multiple male crew on board.
I'm sharing a cabin with them. I don't have my
own cabin. There's only one working head or toilet as
(31:29):
they're called it, So you're in very kind of combined
and I'm expected to call work down below six seven
hours a day of cooking and cleaning. And my relationship
with my mother is completely different to her relationship with
my brother, and I think a lot of it frankly
if I look back as an adult now and having
done a little bit of kind of therapy around this
to try and understand her and me, I think a
(31:50):
lot of it was jealousy. You know, we were I
was a very academic child. My mother was not very academic.
I was becoming a very pretty teenager. You know, my
mother was at a point in her life where I
don't know whether she was feeling insecure about that. I
had a very good relationship superficially was my dad. I
say superficially because we got on very well, but I
(32:13):
mean that was on his term so long as I
didn't challenge the kind of pieces of the voyage or
anything like that, and that was her only relationship, So
maybe she was jealous of that as well. I mean,
I don't know why I'm hypothesizing, but you know, all
of these things led to a very difficult relationship. You know,
she was very emotionally abusive to me. I would never
(32:33):
used that language as the chart, but I would now
say that I saw another parent doing it to another
little girl. That's what I would call it.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
S is that at what point was it that you
really realized how dysfunctional it was that you were like
the life you were living and the relationship that you
had with your parents, And I guess like the unpacking
of this sense of being held captive against your will
in a situation that you had no ability to consent to.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
It was only afterwards, to be completely honest, because when
you're in that situation, and it went on for years,
When you're in that situation, first of all, you've got
nothing to compare it to, and you don't have anyone
to talk to because I'm kind of trapped on this boat,
So who are you going to talk to? And it's
also very difficult, as it's been kind of explained to me,
(33:22):
since it's very difficult for a child to challenge their
parents because even inside your own head, because if you
challenge your parents and you decide that your parents are
not good parents, where does that leave you? And particularly
where does that leave you if you're kind of stuck
on a boat with them, you know you've got nowhere
else to go. So actually it was only as an adult,
(33:43):
once I'd kind of formed my own world, you know,
I've got my own family, I've got my own kids,
I was able to look back and now I'm very
kind of critical of what they did and how they
treated me. At the time, I didn't get into any
of that. At the time. My only focus was on
how am I going to get out of here? I
don't like where I am. I kind of accept it's
(34:04):
just as it is, and maybe my parents are just
like everybody else's parents, just a little bit more extreme.
I kind of knew they were more extreme. My main
focus is getting out of here because I don't like
this world.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
In saying that as well, you know, when you talk
about like how other kids might think that their parents
are extreme when you have literally no reference point because
you don't have the stability of friendships, You don't have
the stability of aunts and uncles or other friends' parents
to do the comparison. Yeah, and the smaller your world is,
the more that world is normal to you because as
a child, because there's no reference point for anything else,
(34:38):
there's so much more to your story in terms of
like when you left, how did you escape that situation?
How did your parents respond to it? But what age
were you when you decided I'm not going to stay
here anymore? And how did your mom and dad react
to that?
Speaker 2 (34:51):
So I never told them that in that way. What
I decided inside my own head was I was going
to try and educate myself off this folk because I
couldn't think of any other way to get out of it.
I mean, I hadn't spoken to or had any contact
of any sort with any of my relatives since we
left England. For a long time. I didn't even have
my own passport. I was just on my parents' passport.
(35:13):
I had no money, but a little bit of money
I earned at various points babysitting. My father would take
from me because he would say, okay, well we need
that money to run the boat, so you need to
kind of give us that money, and he wouldn't kind
of give it back. So I had almost no autonomy.
But the one thing I decided I could do was
to educate myself, because I managed to give into my
parents to let me register with a correspondent school actually
(35:36):
the kind of Queensland Secondary Correspondent School as it was
then called, and I started working on this in the
bits and pieces of time that I had. Now, I
didn't have a lot of time because I was expected
to work cooking and cleaning on this boat, and my
mother hated me study to the point where she would
actively try to disrupt me. So I would be sitting
(35:58):
there was one little table on the boat that only
sat kind of four or five people, so you'd have
to fight for a place with the crew, and my
mother would come in and turn the radio up to
full volume if she saw me studying, and then I
would say, you know, mom, I can't study it, so
I'd turn it down, and then she would come and
turn it back up again, and she would play this
game and again. Kind Of looking back, I can't quite
(36:18):
understand why, apart from a if I was doing that,
I wasn't working, you know, working doing stuff she wanted.
I think she did find it threatening somehow that I
had this thing that I was doing that wasn't kind
of hers. And she just didn't really like me. I
mean it was just as basic as that, and that
app but I did understood even as a child, I
(36:40):
knew that she didn't like me. That's so sad, but
I still kept on studying.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
How did it end up being your eskatee route? You said,
do you wanted to educate your way off the boat?
How did that come into fruition?
Speaker 2 (36:51):
So the final stage is that we not to New Zealand,
by which point my parents were worried about my brother's education.
My brother, as I say, was always the kind of
goal child in our family, and he wasn't studying. He
gave up studying, and I don't blame him at all
for that. It was almost impossible to study off the boat.
But they were very worried about that, unlike kind of me,
(37:11):
because as my father would say to me, your brother,
when he grows up, he needs to support a family
and you won't, so you know, we need to worry
about your education. So they left my brother in New
Zealand and he was fifteen, and they left me looking
after him age sixteen, and they kept sailing. They left
us behind, so we were basically abandoned in New Zealand.
(37:33):
I was left as kind of caregiver to my brother
and he was going to school. I wasn't going to school.
I was still trying to teach myself and then look
after him. And in the book, that is the most
difficult chapter. Although I had said that it's a dawn
before you know, it's the darkest part of the night
before the dawn, because after that it gets a lot better.
(37:55):
But that is very difficult. I'd become very depressed. You know,
I just can't cope. I remember ringing up childline, and
you know, I just couldn't kind of deal with being
left all on my own with no adults at all
in New Zealand, trying to kind of cope as an
adult when I was only sixteen.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
I can't even fathom it. I like, I just can't
found them at a time where there's you know, there's
no internet. You're sixteen, You're in a foreign country with nobody,
you haven't had the proper education. Where are you living?
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Like?
Speaker 1 (38:23):
How like how are you physically surviving?
Speaker 2 (38:26):
So my father had hired a little holiday hut or
a batch as they're called in New Zealand, and we
were living in that. But it was incredibly basic. I
mean particularly, I mean it gets pretty cold. We were
in road to Eura and the center of North Island,
and it gets really cold, and I remember getting this
guy to come and bring me some logs of wood
which I was chopping up to try and kind of
get this little burner to work. So that was very basic.
(38:49):
We didn't have a kind of washing machine or anything
like that. So why I was I had a very
clapped out car that my father had also left behind
that I was driving into rot to Rura, which is
about forty minutes away, trying to washing and get kind
of food. He'd left a very small amount of money.
My father was always very difficult about money. He left
a very small amount of money in a bank account
(39:09):
separate to his bank account, which I could access, but
because I was so young in New Zealand at the time,
you couldn't have an account before you were eighteen, so
I could only access it by forging his signature. One
way or another. I was making do, but I mean
it was very difficult. But as I say, that was
the kind of darkest point before the light, because I
(39:31):
then wrote from that hut in New Zealand to every
university I had ever heard of in the world. I
made up the addresses because I had nowhere finding the addresses.
So I wrote to Oxford University, Oxford, England, and Cambridge
University and Sydney and Auckland and London and Harvard, and
(39:52):
I mean a lot of the elite universities, not because
I thought I was elite, but they were just the
only universities I'd ever heard of. And in all of
them wrote the same thing. I said, I'd kind of
grown up on a boat. I hadn't really been to school.
I'd taught myself and I really wanted to come and
study zoology and would they at least consider me. And
most of them wrote back and said, well, they either
(40:12):
didn't write back because the address was wrong. Turns out
Harvard University is not in Harvard.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
But I said, what else he supposed to do? Like
you'd think that somebody would say Harvard and deliver it
to Harvard.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Well, yeah, maybe they got it and they didn't reply.
But anyway, they didn't reply. I do now know it
was the wrong address. Quite a lot of other places
wrote back and said no. So Sydney wrote back and
said no, because you're not Australia. You know, you've only
got a British passport. In fact, I was illegally in
New Zealand and they tried to deport me twice during
this year because my parents didn't leave me on a
(40:44):
proper visa, so they kept on fine to deport me.
So all Colunds wrote back and said I couldn't go
there either. Most of the British universities wrote back and
then incredibly and said no. And then incredibly Oxford wrote
back and said, well, Whight's a couple of essays, And
then I wrote them a couple of essays and then
they said, well, if you can get here, we'll interview you.
(41:05):
So I went and picked key refruit, which was the
only way in which I could earn any money because
I was illegal, so you can't cut it, and got
myself enough money for a plane ticket and came back
to the UK, did that interview, and incredibly they offered
me a place and it completely turned my life around.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Did your parents ever face any sort of repercussions for
firstly leaving you or for how they raised you? Like?
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Was there ever any intervention or anything for this? No?
Speaker 2 (41:34):
And one of the reasons why I wrote the book
is it shocks me looking back. But there never was
any intervention. I mean even when they tried to deport
me in New Zealand because I turned up and I
tried to get my visa renewed and they said not
without a parent. And then I managed to get my
father to come down from on the boat. He came
down for like two days, turned up. Then they saw him,
(41:56):
they stamped the passport I mean, nobody ever asked any questions.
Nobody ever asked any questions when we arrived in a port,
you know, one of these kind of kids going on board.
I don't remember anybody ever intervening. And when my parents
came back to the UK, of course they celebrated. You know,
this was a kind of great, you know, great achievement.
They'd kind of done this big voyage. You know, my
(42:19):
father wrote a book about the first year and a
half where he's the kind of hero of the whole story.
So no, no, no repercussions whatsoever, and nor have they
ever wanted to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
I feel like your entry into university is quite remarkable
and we probably brushed over it a little bit too quickly.
But do you remember the essay that you wrote to
Oxford to get into Oxford? Was it about your story
or what was it?
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Yeah, I've still got the essays. I've still got the essays.
I wrote two essays. I thought about it quite a lot.
And the one person, by the way who was helping
me is a wonderful teacher that I had at the
Correspondent School, guy called Roger Wooler. He was my biology
teacher at the correspondence school. And it's an amazing story
for me anyway, because I'd never met him, because my
(43:06):
father always refused to go to the school to kind
of let me meet my teachers because that would have
been you would have taken time out and he would
have had to have inconvenienced himself. But I did go
and find Roger when I was writing the book. I
went back as an adult and found Roger, and I
discovered which I'd never known, that kind of Roger suffered
from polio as a child and was in a wheelchair,
(43:27):
and that was why he was teaching at the school.
But he was a wonderful teacher, and he, for example,
sent me books when I was in New Zealand that
weren't actually part of the course, but he just found
them and sent them to me. And he also was
the one person I could talk to about things like,
you know, what were these essays going to be? I
decided I had to write two essays that were different
to what anybody else would write. So if I tried,
(43:49):
I was trying to apply to read biology. So I
decided if I wrote something like the Discovery of DNA,
how was I going to compete with somebody who was
at the school and they could go to a library
and they could read books amount it and the teacher
to help them with it. It be impossible, So my
essays had to be different. So one was it was
called Science at Sea and it was basically describing how
(44:12):
I tried to teach myself science whilst living at sea.
So you know, for example, I had to do one
dissection for my senior biology course which involved me actually
trying to catch a frog on an island in order.
So that was I think nobody else was going to
write that one. And then the other one was just
very obscure. It was basically an essay about whether or
(44:34):
not humans are a domesticated species, so a bit like
kind of dogs. You know, their ancestry as wolves and
then they became domesticated. Have we domesticated ourselves as a species?
And I just thought that was and I think it
was originally suggested by Roder. I just thought that was
an obscure enough and intriguing enough topic that nobody else
(44:56):
was going to write about it.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
And there worked there's sirening less in this. I mean,
one shoot your shot, anything is possible. I think feel
like that's a really obvious lesson to come out of
your side of the story. But there's something that gives
me goose bumps, makes me emotional to think about just
how much Oxford going out on a limb and giving
somebody a shot that, you know, for want of a
(45:18):
better word, might not have deserved a spot at Oxford
because they weren't as well educated, But the fact that
they did and they took a risk on someone literally
changed the course of the rest of your life. What
is your relationship like now with your parents and your brother?
Speaker 2 (45:32):
My mom died in twenty sixteen, and by that point,
my parents knew that I was writing the book, because
I started writing the book back in twenty fifteen, and
she was very angry that I was writing. I mean,
she always refused to talk about it with me. At
one point, she'd kind of come up to London to
have lunch with me, which by the way, was unheard
(45:54):
of event. I mean, my mother never asked to talk
to me on my own. And she confronted me with,
you know, what was that you didn't like about your childhood?
And I said, well, you know the fact that you
didn't talk to me for weeks on end and I
wasn't able to get an education, and then you abandon
me in New Zealand and she kind of stomped up,
refusing to kind of talk about any of it. And
then she's very sadly kind of suddenly died in twenty sixteen,
(46:18):
leaving me a very unpleasant letter which I found kind
of afterwards, which was very accusatory. You know, this was
all my fold. I was a miserable child, and you
know I should be grateful for my kind of privileged childhood.
And you know, it was actually, you know, an unbelievably
unpleasant letter. It was a lot more unpleasant than that
(46:39):
kind of claiming the one. But there was a lovely
woman in New Zealand. Actually her name was Pam Crane,
and she looked after me right at the end, just
before I went to Oxford, I had to go up
Talkward to sit my final exams with the Correspondence School,
and she took me in for two weeks and looked
after me. And she told me afterwards, as I just looked,
you know, I look close to collapse. I hadn't really
(47:00):
eaten a lot for a long time. I was very tired.
Because of course, the thing is if you're working on
your own, you've got no one to compare yourself to,
so you don't know when stopped. So I just kind
of just kind of kept on going. And I was
in a you know, I was in a terrible state,
and she just kind of took me in and she
was wonderful. So my mother and this letter said, you know,
Pam Crane always disliked you. I mean, it was a
(47:23):
very unpleasant letter. So the point where I actually remember
ringing up Sadly, Pam died, so she wasn't alive at
the time, but I rang up her son, who said, no, no,
it's completely lie. You know, Pam loved you. So that
was my mum, and then my father. We kind of
patched things up a little bit. He was also angry
that I was writing, also refused to ever talk to
me about it, also refused to read copies of the book.
(47:46):
But he turned up in twenty nineteen, and I should
say I was widowed in twenty eighteen, so I'm a
kind of widowed by this point. There's kind of three kids,
his three grandchildren, and he's due to come and stay
with us for Christmas, and he got very angry about
me writing the book and told me I wasn't allowed
to and I had no right to, and with a
(48:07):
lot of swear, Woods condosphoned in and I said, no,
I'm going to I'm going to write this story. Yeah,
I have every right to write this story. And he
stormed that I haven't seen him since well, or my brother,
because my brother has always, as the golden child, been
very aligned with my parents. But I don't really blame
my brother. I mean, I would like to think that
had it been the other way around, I would have
(48:28):
been more caring of the child who was kind of
obviously the black sheep. But it wasn't my brother who
decided any of this. This was kind of my parents
who decided it, not him.
Speaker 3 (48:39):
And the reality is is your brother's experience at that
time is very different to yours, you know, and he
was a child himself. But I think you can grow
up in the same household and have a very different
experience to your sibling, especially when there's these dynamics where
there's a golden child and potential narcissism carrying on and
everything else. When you made the decision to write the book,
(49:02):
and knowing how much your family were against it, how
did you rationalize with that, because it would have taken
a great amount of strength to go again. Everybody who
was there and also experience this doesn't want me to
do this, but I'm going to do it anyway.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
So to start with, I didn't know that they didn't
want to do it. In fact, they were so when
I first told them I was going to write it,
I think they assumed I was going to write their version.
And they actually let me kind of borrow all of
their kind of papers, which I copied and gave back
to them, And I think they assumed I was going
to write their version because they'd always refused to talk
to me about anything. So their version was the only
(49:38):
version that was allowable, which was my father was a hero.
It was all the kind of wonderful thing. And anyway,
it all worked out fantastically because I went to Oxford,
so you know, what was to complain about. I think
it was only during the writing process that it became.
And they never actually said, until that last kind of
encounter with my father, you know, don't write it. You know,
(49:59):
they just clearly we're getting more nervous about it, I think.
But as they were getting more nervous, I was getting
much clearer about the story because I was reading all
this and kind of reliving it, so I was becoming
kind of clearer and clearer. I think the kind of
question that was in my head, which I think goes
through the head of a lot of people who are
writing a book like this, is how honest should I be?
(50:21):
You know? So there's a spectrum, as it were, of
writing a kind of candy floss version where you don't
you know, you don't really confront anything, and it becomes
a bit of a travel log in my case, through
to something which is really vitriolic. And the first version
that I wrote, I remember I gave it to somebody
and they said, well, it's really interesting since Anne, but
(50:42):
what's really odd about this book is your mother is
not in this book. And I realized that what I'd done,
in an attempt to try and make it palatable to
my parents, was I'd written my mother out of the story,
so she was on the boat, but she never did anything,
because of course it was my mother who was most
unpleasant to me. And what that made me realize is
(51:05):
I can't cheat the reader like that. You know, the
reader notices I mean that that's kind of you got
to kind of you got to be honest on the
other hand of the book. And I think if people
read the book, books not at all vitriolic. I mean
the book just kind of in a very neutral way,
just explains what happened as we went on. And anyway,
I didn't feel vitriolic when I was a child. I
was just dealing with the universe that I was being
(51:26):
presented with. So by the time it became clear that
my parents were going to be very difficult about it,
I was absolutely clear I was going to write it.
I had every right to kind of write it. I
wasn't writing it in a nasty way. But they couldn't
stop me. I mean they you know, they'd taken this
decision to take me to see and to basically take
(51:47):
away my whole childhood. I have the right to tell
that story in my own words.
Speaker 3 (51:53):
How do you feel now in terms of I mean,
it's a really big conversation that the fact that children
don't have consent and that parents have to make the
decisions that are the best decisions that they feel for
their kids. And I mean there's a lot of expectation
that parents are going to make the right decisions I
think most parents want to do the right thing by
their children. But then in your experience, there are parents
(52:13):
who disregard what is best for their kids and prioritize
what's best themselves. How do you I mean, I mean,
what is your interpretation of this now in terms of
children and consent, and how it's informed how you raised
your children, like what impact that it's sad for you.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
So there's a couple of things here. First of all,
I think parents need to realize that most kids, not
every kid, because every generalization is kind of incorrect in
some instances. But most kids want to be normal, you know.
Most kids want to grow up and have friends and
be normal. As most people remember from their own childhoods,
it's actually horrible to be a child and not be normal,
(52:50):
you know, because you're bullied, people mock you. It was
very difficult in those different bits when I went to
school because I was always so weird, you know. So
kids want to be normal. So the motivations behind a
parent kind of doing something extraordinary are often very you know,
they come from a very good place, but they need
to understand that the motivations for the child are very different,
(53:12):
and the impact on the child's is very different. You know,
you as an adult deciding to step out of normal
life and go and live in the outback or kind
of going you know, on a beach in the safe
shells or take a boat or whatever it is. Your
motivation is because you want to take a break from
normal life, where you even want to leave normal life,
And that's a decision that you're taking kind of knowing
(53:33):
what that is the child. You're affecting their entire future.
And there's only a certain period of your life where
you are a parent with a dependent child. I mean,
I know it feels like it goes on for a
long time, but it's really only fifteen years out of
an adult's life where you've got that kind of dependency.
So that's the kind of first thing. And then I
think for everybody who's not the parent, I just think
(53:56):
we need to be more questioning. It reminds me a
little bit of those kind of signs that you now
see in airports where they say, you know, kind of
ask if somebody is a kind of slave. There's something
about just just ask people the question. As you know,
you know, Instagram is full of parents putting out pictures
of kind of them and their kids walking on the
sandy beach or kind of you know, living in the
(54:16):
middle of nowhere, or going on the boat or whatever.
I think we all need to question that. I don't
think we should just assume that that's always a good thing.
And that applies both to kind of you know, friends
and family, but also to authorities. It still shocks me
that nobody ever asked whether we were okay in this
entire time.
Speaker 3 (54:36):
I mean, it happens a lot. I think that now
there's a little bit more of a lens of curiosity.
I think, not even just curiosity, but there's a standard
that has held, you know, and I think about this
in terms of like domestic violence. People do ask more questions, not.
Speaker 1 (54:51):
Enough, not enough.
Speaker 3 (54:52):
You know, there's people don't want to overstep. But I
even think about, you know, when we were in school,
there wasn't the framework for teachers to ask the right
questions if they thought something was not right in the household,
whereas now teachers are. They are taught what are the
things to look out for? They're taught how do you
approach these conversations with kids? And when you sort of say,
people that are living these kind of exciting lives, so
(55:15):
to say on social media. I mean, there was the
family who had their entire family aboard a boat and
the youngest child fell overboard and passed away, and they've
been banned from ever living on a boat again. When
you actually hear about the circumstances of which that family
were living, it seems outrageous that that ever was a possibility,
and then it took an immense tragedy for that to
(55:37):
come to an end.
Speaker 2 (55:38):
Well, one thing that has happened since where Walker came
out is because the book has done so well, I've
been approached by many people who've had some sort of
extraordinary childhood or I've been introduced to them, or I've
going to come across them, And there are many different
versions of this story. I mean, there are kids out
there absolutely who have a wonderful time and normally that
(56:00):
because the time period is not so long you come
from a kind of very caring family, they do make
provision for you to have kind of friendships and schooling
and so on, so that can all work out very well.
But unfortunately there were a lot of cases where it
doesn't and then it's kind of covered up and your
example of the kind of family where someone drowned. I mean,
(56:21):
in a lot of these other cases, there were examples
of kind of drowning or near drowning that takes place.
I mean, frankly, a lot of these worlds where you
can live off grid, they are more dangerous, so you
have to be very careful. But unfortunately, some of the
parents who have the mindset of stepping outside of society
don't have that sort of kind of caution and child
(56:44):
protected divide.
Speaker 1 (56:45):
Suzanne, thank you so much for sharing your story. It's
truly fascinating and I've never ever come across anything quite
like it. I cannot wait to see this adaptation for
the series. Your memoir wave Walker, a memoir of Breaking
Free list in twenty twenty three. Anyone that wants to
go and read it, We're going to put all the
links for it. But we cannot wait to see the series.
Speaker 2 (57:08):
Thank you. Can be fantastic and wonderful to talk to
you both today. Thank you so.
Speaker 3 (57:12):
Much, Thanks so much for coming and being part of
the pard Susan, it's been amazing.
Speaker 2 (57:16):
Thank you.
This episode was recorded on Cameragle Land. Hi guys, and
welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Brittany
and I'm Laura. Today is a guest that I am
extremely excited about. Now we all remember the Netflix kit Adolescence.
(00:23):
Remember it was number one on Netflix in seventy countries
for three or four weeks. It was that series. If
you missed it, that was all shot in like one
long scene. Do you remember everyone? It took over everything.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
It took over everything.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Well, I, along with literally the rest of the world,
became obsessed with it, and whilst I was doing one
of my deep dives on it, one day, I saw
that Jack Thorne, who was the writer of Adolescence, was
adapting a biography of a new series, and so obviously
I went down that rabbit hole and wanted to see
what that was going to be because I thought it
would be just as brilliant. And that is how I
(00:58):
stumbled across our next guests. So today we're joined by
Suzanne Haywood. Now, Suzanne is an author, a business leader,
and a child survivor of a pretty extraordinary and scary
life at sea. Suzanne spent nearly a decade from age
seven to seventeen, living on board her parents' boat, Wavewalker.
This was following her father's dream of recreating Captain Cook's
(01:20):
third voyage, but what was meant to be only a
three year family adventure ended up becoming this wild story
of childhood captivity. For want of a better word, Suzanne
was isolated, unable to receive a proper education, and at
one point she spent weeks with a fractured skull that
required multiple operations on this tiny island in the middle
(01:42):
of the sea, and she didn't even have access to
anesthesia to go through that. So I just cannot imagine.
She has survived shipwrecks, emotional neglect from her parents, and
eventually battled her way to Oxford and a career at Cambridge,
which is one of, I mean, one of my favorite
parts of the stories, which will obviously going to get
to because that is at the end. But Suzanne, I'm
(02:03):
so excited to talk to you today. Welcome to Life
on Cut.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Thank you delighted to be here.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Suzanne. The story that you have to share, it's such
a huge story and it also spans over so many years.
But what was your life like prior to your dad
having this idea of going out and you know, going
on this boat. What was it like your childhood prior
to that time?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
See my recollection of my childhood prior at that time?
It was very normal. So we were living in a
house in England, living in a town called Warwick, which
is right in the middle of the UK. We wouldn't
have been quite a kind of nice life. My mother
was a teacher. My father was running a hotel that
he'd set up and doing various other kind of bits
and pieces. I was going to a little local school.
(02:45):
I remember. I was learning how to ride a horse.
I was learning how to play the violin, not very
well as I recall, but there we go. I had
various friends. I had a very beloved dog called Rusty,
who was a water spaniel. Normal childhood really.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
And then your dad comes out of nowhere in a
way and says we're going to go around the world
to see on a boat for a couple of years.
Or was he an avid sailor? Like, how did this
come about?
Speaker 2 (03:13):
So? My dad was a keen sailor. He used to
go out sailing with friends on the weekends. He didn't
go very far. He occasionally went across the channel, and
then he suddenly announced, I've got this great idea. We're
going to sail around the world following Captain Cook. And
I should explain that my maiden name is Cook, so
he had always been kind of fan of Captain Cook.
(03:35):
It was his name. Were not actually related by the way,
I grew up thinking that we were, but annow that
we're not.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
He did an ancestry test.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Exactly exactly, well, all Captain Cook's children died without air.
But the idea was that we were going to follow
Captain Cook around the world and recreate, more specifically his
third voyage. So we were going to set sail on
the exact anniversary of Captain Cook's third voyd, and we
were going to sail around the world. But it was
going to be a three year adventure. So we're going
(04:06):
to sit sail when I was seven. We're going to
be back by the time I was ten. Everything would
go back to normal. I go back to school. Rusty
my dog would be waiting for me. My doll's house,
which was my favorite toy, would be waiting, my grandfather's attic.
It would all be there when we came back.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
It also sounds so incredibly exciting.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
When you say it like that and you think, you know,
I mean, there's parents these days who take their kids
out of school for X amount.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Of time and they go sailing.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
It sounds magical and in your situation and what unfolded
was anything but that. What was it like when your
dad said, Okay, this is what we're doing. Was the
reaction from the whole family excitement? Was it enthusiastic? Were
you nervous about it? What was that time like?
Speaker 2 (04:49):
I remember having quite mixed feelings. I mean, like many
little girls, I hear or worship my dad. I thought
my dad could do anything, and my dad is a
bit of a polymath. He can do anything. So I
absolutely was going to go on this thing. And anyway,
I was seven years old. You don't question your parents totally.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
It didn't have a choice anyway, You.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Don't really have a choice, which is one things that
we might come back to. Kids just don't have a choice.
On the other hand, I also remember being really upset
about leaving my best friend behind, my dog, and my
doll's house in particular, those were the three things that
I really regretted, and I remember crying a lot about that.
So it was a it was a kind of mixed experience,
but there was never any question that I would go,
(05:30):
and also that my younger brother, who was six one
year younger than me, would go as well.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
And so the family was you and your brother, your dad,
and your mom.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
How did your mom.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Feel about this? Was she also a sailor, Because I
feel like it's a pretty big endeavor to say, for like,
you know, a weekend sailor are sometimes sailor that dabbles
in it. To say I am going to take my
family that involves small children in it around the world
alone for a year like that is a pretty big undertaking.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
So my mother never expressed any doubt at that point
in front of us that I can recall. There was
a bit of a discussion about how we were going
to get schooling, which they were very laid back about.
I was worried about that a little bit because I
loved school. Actually, I was quite a kind of academic child,
and so there was a promise that my mother, who
was a school teacher, was going to kind of bring
(06:24):
worksheets and that would all be absolutely fine. I don't
remember at that point my mother expressing concern, although I
already knew that my mother was not a keen sailer,
so my father was the sailer and my mother never
never was the sail up.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
What was normal day to day life like when you
actually transported your life in arrow on this boat.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
What was it like at the start of this journey.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Well, it was a shock, to be honest, because we
get on this boat and it's as you say, it's
my mother and my father and my brother and me.
We have three crew on board at the start of
the boat because she's quite a big boat. She is
sixty nine feet long, very narrow, quite old fashioned looking,
so we needed some crew to help sail it. One
(07:07):
of the crew actually had some saley experience, which was
very helpful because my father would never had a hope
so so Owen, one of the crew actually had crossed
the notion before, so that was quite helpful as well.
But what was the shock is we got out to
see my mother went to bed, because it turns out
my mother gets very badly seasick, so she went to
(07:28):
bed and she disappeared for seventh day, and my brother
and I basically left on our own, age seven and six,
in the main cabin, they kind of tossed around, because
what happens at sea is the adults, if they're not ill,
like my mother would be for kind of several days
every time we went to see they would either be
up on deck on watch, or they'd be asleep in
(07:50):
their bunks. So as kids, you're kind of left on
your own in the middle, kind of in the main cabin.
And quickly, you know, working out that every time a
wave hits the deck, lots of salt water comes down below,
so there's places to sit, places not this hit. Trying
to work out what you can do all day, you know,
in a world where it's just you and your brother
(08:11):
and you're just sitting in this cabin, not allowed up
on deck because it was very stormy, at least for
the first few days at sea.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
I mean, even when you describe the first week or
so on this boat, it feels I understand that with
bad weather and everything else, your parents probably had to
be doing what they needed in order to keep everyone safe,
but it also feels like it started off quite negligible
in terms of your and we might be jumping ahead
here a little bit, but in terms of your perspective
(08:37):
and as a child, you don't really understand what's going on.
You don't really comprehend that maybe the behavior of my
parents is inappropriate. We seem to do their therapy work
afterwards and put those pieces together. But how old were
you when you started to realize this is not okay,
Like this is not how a child should be treated
or behave, or like when was it that you started
putting the pieces together that this wasn't an acceptable life.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
It was a lot later, actually, I think it was
in my early teens that I really started to rebel.
And really it was after Hawaii, after we had the vote,
which we will come to. That was that kind of
pivot moment for me on the voyage, because that was
the point at which I knew beyond all doubt that
(09:20):
I was there against my will. So early on you
just kind of accept what that world is like. But
this wasn't a bleachure cruise. The first voyage that we
had was from the UK all the way down to
South America, and that is a six to seven week
trip at sea. We stopped kind of briefly up the
Deer in the Canary Islands, but then six seven weeks
(09:41):
at sea, so you're not seeing anyone for six or
seven weeks. Were before the internet, so you've got no
contact with anybody. By the time we got to South America,
we were quite severely short of food. It's not a
kind of fun experience to put a kids through. Really.
Now kids are incredibly resilient. So my brother and I
eventually kind of figured out various games we could play.
(10:03):
We made up kind of kingdom with our stuffed animals,
and you know, I remember, particularly in kind of later years,
creating an entire imaginary world out of a chess set.
You know, so each of the kind of pieces on
the chest set had a kind of character, and it
was an entire kind of kingdom. But you're you're doing
this out of desperation because you just don't have very much,
(10:24):
you know, to do on the boat.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
But there's no simulation. What would a typical day look
like for you? I know, it's probably not a typical,
I guess in a way if there's storms and you're
facing all these different kinds of adversity. But did you
you said you your mum was a school teacher. Did
she come prepared with things to teach you? Was she
too sick to teach you? Like what were you doing
all day for seven weeks at a time.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
So on that first voyage, we were just trying to
entertain ourselves and kind of subsist really my mother. I mean,
the teaching was very occasional, I have to say. Every
so often my mother would produce a worksheet and kind
of hand it to us, and even early on, I
remember quite a lot of tension between myself and my
mother because you know, my style of learning is that
(11:08):
I question a lot, so so I would kind of
get a worksheet on the kind of rare occasions when
she would give us one, and I'd want to ask
questions about it, kind of why, you know, why is
this like this? And you know, why is this type
of kind of mass like this and this? And she
got very frustrated at that. She didn't want to do that.
She wanted to kind of just give us something and
then she would get on with what she was doing
(11:30):
and you know, not really engage with us about it.
So that was always a great source of tension and
didn't really work very well between me and my mother,
just the kind of way in which I learned. But
otherwise we will get up in the morning, we would
forage around a bit because it wouldn't be any adults
around because they're up on deck or they're in their books.
So we would forage around a bit to see what
(11:51):
we could find for kind of breakfast. At some point,
if it wasn't too stormy, an adult would appear around
lunchtime and there might be some food that was prepared,
and the same around kind of dinner time. Otherwise you
were on your ope, you know, trying to figure out
what you could do, you know, with your kind of
stuffed animals and kind of other bit. It's the weather
became much better, which it did after we passed the
(12:13):
equator after three or four weeks. Then we could occasionally
go up on deck. So most of the time, you see,
you're a trap down below. I mean you're not even
up you know, you don't even see the light because
you're down below. And then we were allowed on deck
for kind of brief periods of time we could sit
on deck, which was you know, huge releas as you
could imagine. And I should explain for those listeners who
(12:36):
are not sailors, we were sailing the wrong way around
the world. So most people who sail around the world
sail from east to west, and if you sail from
east to west, you can sail around near the equator
and generally the winds are pretty good and it's not
a bad sail most of the time, as long as
you time it well. We were sailing the other way.
We were sailing from west to east because that was
(12:58):
where Captain Cook went, and we were follow in Captain Cook.
And what I hadn't understood when my father announced We're
going to follow Captain Cook on his third voyage is
we were following an incredibly dangerous route because the sound
from west east you've got to go very very fast south.
So we went all the way down to South America
to Rio and then cross the very southern Atlantic Ocean,
(13:19):
which was a very stormy crossing, and then we had
to cross the Southern Indian Ocean, which is probably one
of the most dangerous bits of motion in the world.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
How do you and we are jumping around here, but
how do you reconcile as an adult that you know
when you understand more the danger that your father chose
to put you in. Because it's one thing to be
circumnavigating the world, I mean in the safest way possible,
but it's another to actively choose to go the direction
that nobody goes, knowing it's going to put yourself and
(13:51):
your family in direct danger. How do you grapple with
that as an adult?
Speaker 2 (13:55):
I find it very difficult. I just don't understand an
I'm now a parent myself, I have three children. I
don't understand the thought process that makes you think. So
I understand the thought process of this is a great adventure,
and I'm excited about the adventure. There are people in
the world who just love doing that. You know, they
see a mountain and they want to quiet climate. They
(14:17):
see an ocean that they want to cross it, and
that's great. You know, you can take a decision as
an adult to put your own life at risk, but
to take a decision as an adult to put the
lives of small children in known risk. I mean we
were sailing on our own, we weren't sailing in a
flotilla with other boats. We had very limited safety equipment
(14:37):
on board. That decision I just find incomprehensible, and I
find it incomprehensible today. And actually it was the point
at which my children became a similar age to the
age i'd been when i'd been on Waywalker that I
started to write because that was the point where something
inside my head kind of clicked and I went, this
just doesn't make any sense. I just don't understand decisions
(15:00):
here that were made.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
What ended up happening at the three year mark. I mean,
that was what was promised to you. Originally, you think
you're going back to your life, to your dull house,
your dog, and then three years comes and goes and
it's far from the case. Was there a discussion with
you about it or was it just an expectation that
we're going to keep on going.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Well, you see what had happened by the time we
got three years as we were shipwrecked on that second
very difficult voyage. So after we went from South America
to South Africa. On that voyage from South Africa to Australia,
we were very very badly shipwrecked. Were hit by an
enormous wave which my father, who'd been up on the wheel,
he looked behind himself and saw something that he described
(15:39):
as being three times as big as our main mass.
A huge wave which crushed over the boat, went through
the center of the deck outside you, and then through
the hole and I as a little girl still seven
years old, have been standing below and I was thrown
against the ceiling of the cabin and then against the
wall of the cabin, and I fractured my skull and
broke my nose, and the boat was filling up with water,
(16:01):
so we almost started, Yeah, we almost died. We were
incredibly lucky to find a tiny little atoll in the
middle of the Indian Ocean called our l Amsterdam, and
we found it three days later. And I say incredibly
lucky because we were in a storm and you can't
take I mean, the only navigation we had on board
was a sextant, which is a very old fashioned piece
(16:25):
of equipment where you basically measured the angle between the
sun or a star and the horizon, which obviously you
can't do in a storm. So we didn't know where
we were, so my father guessed where we were. We
found this atoll three days later. We wouldn't have stayed
afloat long enough to get to Australia, so it was
a very very kind of close thing. And then when
(16:46):
we found this at all, because I was so badly
injured with this kind of skull fracture, with a big
blood cloth on the brain. I had all of these
head operations on this island, which didn't have suitable anesthetic
for a kind of seven year old. They were all
done without anesthetic, and all done on my own as well,
because my mother didn't come in because she doesn't like
(17:06):
the sight of blood, so I did all of those
on my own.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Southing, we need to wind it back here, because that
is one of the most wild stories I've ever heard. Okay,
you've got a fractured skull and break and nose. Was
a family aware of how injured you were?
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah, I had an absolutely massive kind of lump on
my head, and you know, one of the shocking things
actually about writing the book was a lot of what
happened on the boat I'd kind of packed away in
the back of my head, and then I got on
with my life because I just wanted to move forward.
And it was only when I stopped and wrote the
book that I then tried to gather every piece of
(17:42):
kind of documentation that I could find about what had happened.
And one of the things that I managed to get
hold of and take a copy was of was my
mother's diary. And my mother's diary when I read it
was really quite kind of sobering because my parents always
tried to kind of played down my injury. I mean,
I remember being horrific. I mean I have really kind
(18:05):
of horrific, kind of jagged memories of what happened in
that time in that accident. But reading my mother's diary,
which she wrote kind of at the time and factually
kind of wrote it on the island, all all the
bits up to it, it is equally horrific because she
talks about my head being deformed and my you know,
my huge swelling and me screaming in pain and all
(18:28):
of this. So I now know that what I remember,
those kind of jagged bits of memory in my head
are actually kind of correct. But I packed a lot
of that away for a long time, and as I say,
my parents then kind of played it down for years
in my childhood. And I now know that a lot
of what happened. And this is one of the kind
of difficult things about this is when you grew up
(18:48):
on a boat, particularly for such a long period of time,
it's a little bit like growing up in a cult.
You know, there was a particular philosophy about why we
were there, what we were doing. We were following Captain Cook.
It was a kind of grand and noble purpose. My
father was a fantastic sail or. You know. What happened
in the Indian Ocean that was a one off in anyway,
(19:09):
It wasn't that bad. Yeah, my father late wrote that
I got away lightly from the accident. You know. There
was just this ongoing attempt to kind of play everything down.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Okay, so you're in this tiny island in the Indian
Ocean that you've stumbled across. How did it come about
that there was a doctor there that was able to
operate on you? Was this just by chance? What kind
of a doctor was he, if you're remember, and what
kind of operations was he performing on you? Without anesthesia?
Speaker 2 (19:36):
So on our Amsterdam there's this tiny scientific face and
people can look it up. Actually it's quite interesting. They
have about every I think it's about every twelve months,
they drop off another team of scientists and they take
the last team of scientists off and there's a group
of about it's about twenty. It was all men when
we were there. I don't know whether it's now kind
(19:59):
of more mixed. And they are doing you know, weather
testing and various other things on this tiny at all
in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I think it's
a very interesting place to be, and they do have
a doctor on the team, but the medical facilities, as
you can imagine, are very limited because you're really just
trying to deal with what might happen for twenty men
(20:20):
on an ireland doing science experiments. They're not geared up
to do major operations. Since the book came out, I've
actually been able to well, actually, when I was writing
the book, I was able to correspond with the doctor
who operated on me. He didn't speak very good English,
so this was I'm very google Translate kind of emails
(20:40):
back and forth. Since the book came out, and the
book has recently come out in French, I've been approached
by somebody called Pierre, and it's been a little bit
in the in the newspapers. And Pierre was actually present
during the operations and is a little bit younger, and
he has explained to me it's funny how these little
facts of your background starle to kind of come together,
(21:01):
because one of my big questions was why didn't you
give me anesthetic? Because what they had to do is
they had to cut open my head, not through the bone,
but on to release this pressure the kind of massive
blood pot that I had on the brain, and it
was such a huge swelling. They had to do six
seven operations to relieve the swelling. And you can imagine
(21:23):
somebody cutting into a massive swelling on your head six
seven times. I'm screaming with pain and repeatedly screaming. I
have to say the only French swear word I knew,
because the doctor spoke French and not English and I
couldn't speak French. So we were and I was on
my own because, as I said, my mother didn't want
to come in and she said she didn't like the
sight of blood, which, by the way, indication, which became
(21:45):
kind of clearer as I grew up. You know, my
mother was never a very maternal person because frankly, you know,
one of my kids had been in that situation, I
would have been there, even if I blindfolded myself, you know,
I would have been there.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
So Pierre said, the reason why they didn't give me
an anesthetic is they did have some general anesthetic, but
they had nowhere working out the dose for a seven
year old, and they thought if they tried to give
me it they could, you know, they could easily kind
of kill me, and then they had some local anesthetic,
but when they tried that, they discovered it wasn't working.
(22:19):
So for the net result was I had no anesthetic.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
How did your parents like at this time, obviously they've
gone through all of this. How long did you end
up spending on the island in total before you were
able to set sail again?
Speaker 1 (22:32):
How long was that?
Speaker 2 (22:34):
So my father was on the island I think for
about three or four weeks, and then he set sail
again with the crew. He'd done some very basic patching
up of the boat the very limited facilities on this
island it's basically a volcanic atoll in the middle of nowhere,
so he nailed some bits of steel over the whole
of the side of the boat and on the deck.
But you know, the boat was still very badly damaged.
(22:55):
So my brother, my mother and I were banned from
going back on board by the French and British government
because they said this is just too dangerous for you
to go back on board. So it was several weeks
later when a passing cargo ship came by and my
brother and my mother and I were basically kind of
rescued from this island. It was a very dramatic rescue actually,
(23:16):
because we were taken out in the little supply ship
that the island had, because it happened to be at
the moment when they were bringing in more supplies. And
then we transferred at s across this cargo ship and
I remember clinging onto the ladder. It was like one
of these electric ladders going up the side of this
container ship, which is I mean, they're huge, They're like
(23:37):
twenty stories high. But anyway, we got to Fremantle and
met up with my dad, and then we were in
Fremantle for about a year, during which I got to
go to school briefly, which was fantastic. I mean I
love that. I mean going to school in Freemantle. I
remember making friends. I remember being able to learn and
(24:00):
instrument I've always loved music, so I remember doing that,
which of course was not something I could do very
easy on the boat, although later on I taught myself
to the guitar, so that was great. But then, of
course my father wanted to keep sailing, so we kept sailing.
We went round the kind of bite of Australia up
to Melbourne and then up to Sydney. We sailed in
(24:20):
the Sydney Homart, but not officially down to Tasmania then
tacked on. Well, yes, I mean my father decided he could,
you know, he either didn't want to pay for he
couldn't enter the race officially, so but he decided to
be fun to sail with it. So the only issue
was he couldn't get a chart, so he sailed based
on the map that he managed to get on the
(24:41):
back of a barmac, so that he failed with Sidney Hobart.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Your dad is a cowboy, a wild cowboy.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Yeah, complete cowboy, complete cowboy.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
What was happening with your parents' relationship at the time.
Was there a point where your mum's perspective changed on
wanting to be on the boat or whether she verbalized
that she didn't want to be there, or was she
quite willing for this whole experience.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
So my mother was always very clear that she hated
faintly and she said that a lot, and every time
we left port she would go to bed for three
days and nobody was allowed to bother her. She would
just kind of go to her bed and that was it,
you know. She also used to suffer from migraines and
kind of go to bed as well, you know, so
my mother would disappear a lot at see. You know,
(25:26):
I just got used to as a kid. My mom
would not be around for quite a lot of time
when we were at sea. She always hated that. On
the other hand, my parents' relationship is very close. And
somebody once gave me a kind of quote. I didn't
know where it came from, but it kind of summed
up my childhood. And the quote is the child of
lovers is an orphan and it felt like that, you know,
(25:47):
on the boat, the kind of key relationship was between
my parents and my brother and I were really quite
tangentle to that. You know, we were along for the trip,
but it wasn't about uh at all.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
As you grew up and you became a little bit
more self aware and you've got smaller levels of education
here and there, which will chat about what were the
roles that were laid upon you and your brother and
how did they start to differ with age?
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Yeah, they really did, and really it started to kind
of change after Hawaii. So we went all the way
up the Pacific from there to Hawaii, and that was
the moment where everything changed because we got to four years.
The voyage was supposed to have been three years, but
it was four years to get there because of the
shipwreck and the year spent repairing the boat in Fremantle.
And my father had always promised, and this was always
(26:35):
a promise of the voyage, that the voyage was something
that we were all doing together, that we all wanted
to do. Now, of course, I now know that this
is completely false. You know, a child of seven can't
decide to do this. You have no choice. You have
to do it. And there'd also been a decision to
keep going in Fremantle, but again I was eight years old,
(26:56):
so you don't really have a choice. By the time
we got to Wai, so we're four years in and
then we stayed in Hawaii for about a year and
a half. I was eleven twelve, and I desperately wanted
to go back to the UK or frankly anywhere where
I could settle and go to school and have friends.
I was desperate to get an education, I was desperate
(27:19):
to have friendships, do that all the normal things that
a kind of teenage girl would do. And you know,
living in that sort of environment is a bit like
being in a cult. You know. What my father said
was what we were all supposed to believe. And my
father was the captain, which is a bit like being
a king. And so we had to vote, and I
voted to come home, and my brother voted to come home,
(27:42):
and my parents both voted to keep sailing. And then
at the end of all this, my dad took another
swig of rum. My parents were very heavy drinkers, as
kind of goes with a lot of sailors, and he said, well,
you know what I didn't tell you is that this
isn't a democracy. This is a kind of benevolent dictatorship.
And the captain always gets the final vote, and I'm
(28:03):
voting that we keep sailing. And I remember being completely shocked,
because when you grow up in that kind of cult
like situation, you accept the kind of doctrines of it,
and then all of a sudden it's turned on its
head and you realize that was never true. That was
never true. It was never true. It was only true
(28:23):
while I agreed. At the point at which I disagreed,
it became untrue. And then from that moment onwards, of course,
I knew that I was there against my will. You know,
we turned the boat around, we sailed back down to Australia.
But I was never there by my own choice. There's
a vote in a way, which was a conceit that
(28:44):
my father has I now realized as an adult, to
kind of legitimize everything. You know, will you call complain
about it because you decided to be here. Suddenly it
kind of blew up because when it didn't work, the
opposite happened in my head anyway, which was I never
chose to be here. I was very clear I didn't
want to be here, and my kind of choice was overridden,
(29:07):
and my relationship was my mother was deteriorating really quite badly.
My mother was my mother and I had a very
difficult relationship, which got really bad after I got to
kind of early early teens, and I to this day
don't know why. She was so kind of unpleasant to me,
is the only way of describing. I mean, she would
(29:27):
not speak to me for kind of days, sometimes weeks
on end. On the boat. She would call me names.
She refused, I mean little things that you know now
seem quite small but at the time were very big.
Like she refused ever to buy me a bras because
and you know, she would kind of mock me, and
you know, but those are very big things when you're
living in a tiny space and you don't have anybody
(29:49):
else to go to.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
But it's not even I mean even a part of
me now and forgive me, but it even sounds like
there's a part of you still downplaining a little bit,
like they're pretty huge things for the person that's supposed
to be raising you and looking after you and caring
for you. And not only that, but they are the
only point of contact that you have, like you are
you are below deck with no sunlight. That is your
(30:11):
only person. Not only is it supposed to be your
care but it's the only person that is belittling you
and mocking you. It almost sounds like maybe she was
resentful of you both, you know, having children, and maybe
it's impacted her life. I don't know, is that how
you feel?
Speaker 2 (30:27):
So the relationship she had with my brother was very
different to the relationship with me, and this kind of
plays into the question you were asking about the kind
of different genders on board. So the way in which
it kind of played out is my brother was allowed
to be on deck and was allowed to sail. He
enjoyed doing that, and he was celebrated as doing that,
(30:47):
you know, and he became a very kind of golden child.
My brother could do no wrong. He was the kind
of one who was kind of strong and on deck.
And my role as a girl was I was expected
to be down below helping my momud cook and clean.
And by this point we'd run completely out of money.
We never had a huge amount of money, but we'd
run completely out of money, and my father started taking
(31:08):
crew on board who were paying us to come on board,
so it became a bit like a floating hotel. So
therefore they had to be cooked for and cleaned for,
and usually they were men. So I'm a kind of
teenage girl. We've got kind of multiple male crew on board.
I'm sharing a cabin with them. I don't have my
own cabin. There's only one working head or toilet as
(31:29):
they're called it, So you're in very kind of combined
and I'm expected to call work down below six seven
hours a day of cooking and cleaning. And my relationship
with my mother is completely different to her relationship with
my brother, and I think a lot of it frankly
if I look back as an adult now and having
done a little bit of kind of therapy around this
to try and understand her and me, I think a
(31:50):
lot of it was jealousy. You know, we were I
was a very academic child. My mother was not very academic.
I was becoming a very pretty teenager. You know, my
mother was at a point in her life where I
don't know whether she was feeling insecure about that. I
had a very good relationship superficially was my dad. I
say superficially because we got on very well, but I
(32:13):
mean that was on his term so long as I
didn't challenge the kind of pieces of the voyage or
anything like that, and that was her only relationship, So
maybe she was jealous of that as well. I mean,
I don't know why I'm hypothesizing, but you know, all
of these things led to a very difficult relationship. You know,
she was very emotionally abusive to me. I would never
(32:33):
used that language as the chart, but I would now
say that I saw another parent doing it to another
little girl. That's what I would call it.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
S is that at what point was it that you
really realized how dysfunctional it was that you were like
the life you were living and the relationship that you
had with your parents, And I guess like the unpacking
of this sense of being held captive against your will
in a situation that you had no ability to consent to.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
It was only afterwards, to be completely honest, because when
you're in that situation, and it went on for years,
When you're in that situation, first of all, you've got
nothing to compare it to, and you don't have anyone
to talk to because I'm kind of trapped on this boat,
So who are you going to talk to? And it's
also very difficult, as it's been kind of explained to me,
(33:22):
since it's very difficult for a child to challenge their
parents because even inside your own head, because if you
challenge your parents and you decide that your parents are
not good parents, where does that leave you? And particularly
where does that leave you if you're kind of stuck
on a boat with them, you know you've got nowhere
else to go. So actually it was only as an adult,
(33:43):
once I'd kind of formed my own world, you know,
I've got my own family, I've got my own kids,
I was able to look back and now I'm very
kind of critical of what they did and how they
treated me. At the time, I didn't get into any
of that. At the time. My only focus was on
how am I going to get out of here? I
don't like where I am. I kind of accept it's
(34:04):
just as it is, and maybe my parents are just
like everybody else's parents, just a little bit more extreme.
I kind of knew they were more extreme. My main
focus is getting out of here because I don't like
this world.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
In saying that as well, you know, when you talk
about like how other kids might think that their parents
are extreme when you have literally no reference point because
you don't have the stability of friendships, You don't have
the stability of aunts and uncles or other friends' parents
to do the comparison. Yeah, and the smaller your world is,
the more that world is normal to you because as
a child, because there's no reference point for anything else,
(34:38):
there's so much more to your story in terms of
like when you left, how did you escape that situation?
How did your parents respond to it? But what age
were you when you decided I'm not going to stay
here anymore? And how did your mom and dad react
to that?
Speaker 2 (34:51):
So I never told them that in that way. What
I decided inside my own head was I was going
to try and educate myself off this folk because I
couldn't think of any other way to get out of it.
I mean, I hadn't spoken to or had any contact
of any sort with any of my relatives since we
left England. For a long time. I didn't even have
my own passport. I was just on my parents' passport.
(35:13):
I had no money, but a little bit of money
I earned at various points babysitting. My father would take
from me because he would say, okay, well we need
that money to run the boat, so you need to
kind of give us that money, and he wouldn't kind
of give it back. So I had almost no autonomy.
But the one thing I decided I could do was
to educate myself, because I managed to give into my
parents to let me register with a correspondent school actually
(35:36):
the kind of Queensland Secondary Correspondent School as it was
then called, and I started working on this in the
bits and pieces of time that I had. Now, I
didn't have a lot of time because I was expected
to work cooking and cleaning on this boat, and my
mother hated me study to the point where she would
actively try to disrupt me. So I would be sitting
(35:58):
there was one little table on the boat that only
sat kind of four or five people, so you'd have
to fight for a place with the crew, and my
mother would come in and turn the radio up to
full volume if she saw me studying, and then I
would say, you know, mom, I can't study it, so
I'd turn it down, and then she would come and
turn it back up again, and she would play this
game and again. Kind Of looking back, I can't quite
(36:18):
understand why, apart from a if I was doing that,
I wasn't working, you know, working doing stuff she wanted.
I think she did find it threatening somehow that I
had this thing that I was doing that wasn't kind
of hers. And she just didn't really like me. I
mean it was just as basic as that, and that
app but I did understood even as a child, I
(36:40):
knew that she didn't like me. That's so sad, but
I still kept on studying.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
How did it end up being your eskatee route? You said,
do you wanted to educate your way off the boat?
How did that come into fruition?
Speaker 2 (36:51):
So the final stage is that we not to New Zealand,
by which point my parents were worried about my brother's education.
My brother, as I say, was always the kind of
goal child in our family, and he wasn't studying. He
gave up studying, and I don't blame him at all
for that. It was almost impossible to study off the boat.
But they were very worried about that, unlike kind of me,
(37:11):
because as my father would say to me, your brother,
when he grows up, he needs to support a family
and you won't, so you know, we need to worry
about your education. So they left my brother in New
Zealand and he was fifteen, and they left me looking
after him age sixteen, and they kept sailing. They left
us behind, so we were basically abandoned in New Zealand.
(37:33):
I was left as kind of caregiver to my brother
and he was going to school. I wasn't going to school.
I was still trying to teach myself and then look
after him. And in the book, that is the most
difficult chapter. Although I had said that it's a dawn
before you know, it's the darkest part of the night
before the dawn, because after that it gets a lot better.
(37:55):
But that is very difficult. I'd become very depressed. You know,
I just can't cope. I remember ringing up childline, and
you know, I just couldn't kind of deal with being
left all on my own with no adults at all
in New Zealand, trying to kind of cope as an
adult when I was only sixteen.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
I can't even fathom it. I like, I just can't
found them at a time where there's you know, there's
no internet. You're sixteen, You're in a foreign country with nobody,
you haven't had the proper education. Where are you living?
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Like?
Speaker 1 (38:23):
How like how are you physically surviving?
Speaker 2 (38:26):
So my father had hired a little holiday hut or
a batch as they're called in New Zealand, and we
were living in that. But it was incredibly basic. I
mean particularly, I mean it gets pretty cold. We were
in road to Eura and the center of North Island,
and it gets really cold, and I remember getting this
guy to come and bring me some logs of wood
which I was chopping up to try and kind of
get this little burner to work. So that was very basic.
(38:49):
We didn't have a kind of washing machine or anything
like that. So why I was I had a very
clapped out car that my father had also left behind
that I was driving into rot to Rura, which is
about forty minutes away, trying to washing and get kind
of food. He'd left a very small amount of money.
My father was always very difficult about money. He left
a very small amount of money in a bank account
(39:09):
separate to his bank account, which I could access, but
because I was so young in New Zealand at the time,
you couldn't have an account before you were eighteen, so
I could only access it by forging his signature. One
way or another. I was making do, but I mean
it was very difficult. But as I say, that was
the kind of darkest point before the light, because I
(39:31):
then wrote from that hut in New Zealand to every
university I had ever heard of in the world. I
made up the addresses because I had nowhere finding the addresses.
So I wrote to Oxford University, Oxford, England, and Cambridge
University and Sydney and Auckland and London and Harvard, and
(39:52):
I mean a lot of the elite universities, not because
I thought I was elite, but they were just the
only universities I'd ever heard of. And in all of
them wrote the same thing. I said, I'd kind of
grown up on a boat. I hadn't really been to school.
I'd taught myself and I really wanted to come and
study zoology and would they at least consider me. And
most of them wrote back and said, well, they either
(40:12):
didn't write back because the address was wrong. Turns out
Harvard University is not in Harvard.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
But I said, what else he supposed to do? Like
you'd think that somebody would say Harvard and deliver it
to Harvard.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Well, yeah, maybe they got it and they didn't reply.
But anyway, they didn't reply. I do now know it
was the wrong address. Quite a lot of other places
wrote back and said no. So Sydney wrote back and
said no, because you're not Australia. You know, you've only
got a British passport. In fact, I was illegally in
New Zealand and they tried to deport me twice during
this year because my parents didn't leave me on a
(40:44):
proper visa, so they kept on fine to deport me.
So all Colunds wrote back and said I couldn't go
there either. Most of the British universities wrote back and
then incredibly and said no. And then incredibly Oxford wrote
back and said, well, Whight's a couple of essays, And
then I wrote them a couple of essays and then
they said, well, if you can get here, we'll interview you.
(41:05):
So I went and picked key refruit, which was the
only way in which I could earn any money because
I was illegal, so you can't cut it, and got
myself enough money for a plane ticket and came back
to the UK, did that interview, and incredibly they offered
me a place and it completely turned my life around.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Did your parents ever face any sort of repercussions for
firstly leaving you or for how they raised you? Like?
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Was there ever any intervention or anything for this? No?
Speaker 2 (41:34):
And one of the reasons why I wrote the book
is it shocks me looking back. But there never was
any intervention. I mean even when they tried to deport
me in New Zealand because I turned up and I
tried to get my visa renewed and they said not
without a parent. And then I managed to get my
father to come down from on the boat. He came
down for like two days, turned up. Then they saw him,
(41:56):
they stamped the passport I mean, nobody ever asked any questions.
Nobody ever asked any questions when we arrived in a port,
you know, one of these kind of kids going on board.
I don't remember anybody ever intervening. And when my parents
came back to the UK, of course they celebrated. You know,
this was a kind of great, you know, great achievement.
They'd kind of done this big voyage. You know, my
(42:19):
father wrote a book about the first year and a
half where he's the kind of hero of the whole story.
So no, no, no repercussions whatsoever, and nor have they
ever wanted to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
I feel like your entry into university is quite remarkable
and we probably brushed over it a little bit too quickly.
But do you remember the essay that you wrote to
Oxford to get into Oxford? Was it about your story
or what was it?
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Yeah, I've still got the essays. I've still got the essays.
I wrote two essays. I thought about it quite a lot.
And the one person, by the way who was helping
me is a wonderful teacher that I had at the
Correspondent School, guy called Roger Wooler. He was my biology
teacher at the correspondence school. And it's an amazing story
for me anyway, because I'd never met him, because my
(43:06):
father always refused to go to the school to kind
of let me meet my teachers because that would have
been you would have taken time out and he would
have had to have inconvenienced himself. But I did go
and find Roger when I was writing the book. I
went back as an adult and found Roger, and I
discovered which I'd never known, that kind of Roger suffered
from polio as a child and was in a wheelchair,
(43:27):
and that was why he was teaching at the school.
But he was a wonderful teacher, and he, for example,
sent me books when I was in New Zealand that
weren't actually part of the course, but he just found
them and sent them to me. And he also was
the one person I could talk to about things like,
you know, what were these essays going to be? I
decided I had to write two essays that were different
to what anybody else would write. So if I tried,
(43:49):
I was trying to apply to read biology. So I
decided if I wrote something like the Discovery of DNA,
how was I going to compete with somebody who was
at the school and they could go to a library
and they could read books amount it and the teacher
to help them with it. It be impossible, So my
essays had to be different. So one was it was
called Science at Sea and it was basically describing how
(44:12):
I tried to teach myself science whilst living at sea.
So you know, for example, I had to do one
dissection for my senior biology course which involved me actually
trying to catch a frog on an island in order.
So that was I think nobody else was going to
write that one. And then the other one was just
very obscure. It was basically an essay about whether or
(44:34):
not humans are a domesticated species, so a bit like
kind of dogs. You know, their ancestry as wolves and
then they became domesticated. Have we domesticated ourselves as a species?
And I just thought that was and I think it
was originally suggested by Roder. I just thought that was
an obscure enough and intriguing enough topic that nobody else
(44:56):
was going to write about it.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
And there worked there's sirening less in this. I mean,
one shoot your shot, anything is possible. I think feel
like that's a really obvious lesson to come out of
your side of the story. But there's something that gives
me goose bumps, makes me emotional to think about just
how much Oxford going out on a limb and giving
somebody a shot that, you know, for want of a
(45:18):
better word, might not have deserved a spot at Oxford
because they weren't as well educated, But the fact that
they did and they took a risk on someone literally
changed the course of the rest of your life. What
is your relationship like now with your parents and your brother?
Speaker 2 (45:32):
My mom died in twenty sixteen, and by that point,
my parents knew that I was writing the book, because
I started writing the book back in twenty fifteen, and
she was very angry that I was writing. I mean,
she always refused to talk about it with me. At
one point, she'd kind of come up to London to
have lunch with me, which by the way, was unheard
(45:54):
of event. I mean, my mother never asked to talk
to me on my own. And she confronted me with,
you know, what was that you didn't like about your childhood?
And I said, well, you know the fact that you
didn't talk to me for weeks on end and I
wasn't able to get an education, and then you abandon
me in New Zealand and she kind of stomped up,
refusing to kind of talk about any of it. And
then she's very sadly kind of suddenly died in twenty sixteen,
(46:18):
leaving me a very unpleasant letter which I found kind
of afterwards, which was very accusatory. You know, this was
all my fold. I was a miserable child, and you
know I should be grateful for my kind of privileged childhood.
And you know, it was actually, you know, an unbelievably
unpleasant letter. It was a lot more unpleasant than that
(46:39):
kind of claiming the one. But there was a lovely
woman in New Zealand. Actually her name was Pam Crane,
and she looked after me right at the end, just
before I went to Oxford, I had to go up
Talkward to sit my final exams with the Correspondence School,
and she took me in for two weeks and looked
after me. And she told me afterwards, as I just looked,
you know, I look close to collapse. I hadn't really
(47:00):
eaten a lot for a long time. I was very tired.
Because of course, the thing is if you're working on
your own, you've got no one to compare yourself to,
so you don't know when stopped. So I just kind
of just kind of kept on going. And I was
in a you know, I was in a terrible state,
and she just kind of took me in and she
was wonderful. So my mother and this letter said, you know,
Pam Crane always disliked you. I mean, it was a
(47:23):
very unpleasant letter. So the point where I actually remember
ringing up Sadly, Pam died, so she wasn't alive at
the time, but I rang up her son, who said, no, no,
it's completely lie. You know, Pam loved you. So that
was my mum, and then my father. We kind of
patched things up a little bit. He was also angry
that I was writing, also refused to ever talk to
me about it, also refused to read copies of the book.
(47:46):
But he turned up in twenty nineteen, and I should
say I was widowed in twenty eighteen, so I'm a
kind of widowed by this point. There's kind of three kids,
his three grandchildren, and he's due to come and stay
with us for Christmas, and he got very angry about
me writing the book and told me I wasn't allowed
to and I had no right to, and with a
(48:07):
lot of swear, Woods condosphoned in and I said, no,
I'm going to I'm going to write this story. Yeah,
I have every right to write this story. And he
stormed that I haven't seen him since well, or my brother,
because my brother has always, as the golden child, been
very aligned with my parents. But I don't really blame
my brother. I mean, I would like to think that
had it been the other way around, I would have
(48:28):
been more caring of the child who was kind of
obviously the black sheep. But it wasn't my brother who
decided any of this. This was kind of my parents
who decided it, not him.
Speaker 3 (48:39):
And the reality is is your brother's experience at that
time is very different to yours, you know, and he
was a child himself. But I think you can grow
up in the same household and have a very different
experience to your sibling, especially when there's these dynamics where
there's a golden child and potential narcissism carrying on and
everything else. When you made the decision to write the book,
(49:02):
and knowing how much your family were against it, how
did you rationalize with that, because it would have taken
a great amount of strength to go again. Everybody who
was there and also experience this doesn't want me to
do this, but I'm going to do it anyway.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
So to start with, I didn't know that they didn't
want to do it. In fact, they were so when
I first told them I was going to write it,
I think they assumed I was going to write their version.
And they actually let me kind of borrow all of
their kind of papers, which I copied and gave back
to them, And I think they assumed I was going
to write their version because they'd always refused to talk
to me about anything. So their version was the only
(49:38):
version that was allowable, which was my father was a hero.
It was all the kind of wonderful thing. And anyway,
it all worked out fantastically because I went to Oxford,
so you know, what was to complain about. I think
it was only during the writing process that it became.
And they never actually said, until that last kind of
encounter with my father, you know, don't write it. You know,
(49:59):
they just clearly we're getting more nervous about it, I think.
But as they were getting more nervous, I was getting
much clearer about the story because I was reading all
this and kind of reliving it, so I was becoming
kind of clearer and clearer. I think the kind of
question that was in my head, which I think goes
through the head of a lot of people who are
writing a book like this, is how honest should I be?
(50:21):
You know? So there's a spectrum, as it were, of
writing a kind of candy floss version where you don't
you know, you don't really confront anything, and it becomes
a bit of a travel log in my case, through
to something which is really vitriolic. And the first version
that I wrote, I remember I gave it to somebody
and they said, well, it's really interesting since Anne, but
(50:42):
what's really odd about this book is your mother is
not in this book. And I realized that what I'd done,
in an attempt to try and make it palatable to
my parents, was I'd written my mother out of the story,
so she was on the boat, but she never did anything,
because of course it was my mother who was most
unpleasant to me. And what that made me realize is
(51:05):
I can't cheat the reader like that. You know, the
reader notices I mean that that's kind of you got
to kind of you got to be honest on the
other hand of the book. And I think if people
read the book, books not at all vitriolic. I mean
the book just kind of in a very neutral way,
just explains what happened as we went on. And anyway,
I didn't feel vitriolic when I was a child. I
was just dealing with the universe that I was being
(51:26):
presented with. So by the time it became clear that
my parents were going to be very difficult about it,
I was absolutely clear I was going to write it.
I had every right to kind of write it. I
wasn't writing it in a nasty way. But they couldn't
stop me. I mean they you know, they'd taken this
decision to take me to see and to basically take
(51:47):
away my whole childhood. I have the right to tell
that story in my own words.
Speaker 3 (51:53):
How do you feel now in terms of I mean,
it's a really big conversation that the fact that children
don't have consent and that parents have to make the
decisions that are the best decisions that they feel for
their kids. And I mean there's a lot of expectation
that parents are going to make the right decisions I
think most parents want to do the right thing by
their children. But then in your experience, there are parents
(52:13):
who disregard what is best for their kids and prioritize
what's best themselves. How do you I mean, I mean,
what is your interpretation of this now in terms of
children and consent, and how it's informed how you raised
your children, like what impact that it's sad for you.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
So there's a couple of things here. First of all,
I think parents need to realize that most kids, not
every kid, because every generalization is kind of incorrect in
some instances. But most kids want to be normal, you know.
Most kids want to grow up and have friends and
be normal. As most people remember from their own childhoods,
it's actually horrible to be a child and not be normal,
(52:50):
you know, because you're bullied, people mock you. It was
very difficult in those different bits when I went to
school because I was always so weird, you know. So
kids want to be normal. So the motivations behind a
parent kind of doing something extraordinary are often very you know,
they come from a very good place, but they need
to understand that the motivations for the child are very different,
(53:12):
and the impact on the child's is very different. You know,
you as an adult deciding to step out of normal
life and go and live in the outback or kind
of going you know, on a beach in the safe
shells or take a boat or whatever it is. Your
motivation is because you want to take a break from
normal life, where you even want to leave normal life,
And that's a decision that you're taking kind of knowing
(53:33):
what that is the child. You're affecting their entire future.
And there's only a certain period of your life where
you are a parent with a dependent child. I mean,
I know it feels like it goes on for a
long time, but it's really only fifteen years out of
an adult's life where you've got that kind of dependency.
So that's the kind of first thing. And then I
think for everybody who's not the parent, I just think
(53:56):
we need to be more questioning. It reminds me a
little bit of those kind of signs that you now
see in airports where they say, you know, kind of
ask if somebody is a kind of slave. There's something
about just just ask people the question. As you know,
you know, Instagram is full of parents putting out pictures
of kind of them and their kids walking on the
sandy beach or kind of you know, living in the
(54:16):
middle of nowhere, or going on the boat or whatever.
I think we all need to question that. I don't
think we should just assume that that's always a good thing.
And that applies both to kind of you know, friends
and family, but also to authorities. It still shocks me
that nobody ever asked whether we were okay in this
entire time.
Speaker 3 (54:36):
I mean, it happens a lot. I think that now
there's a little bit more of a lens of curiosity.
I think, not even just curiosity, but there's a standard
that has held, you know, and I think about this
in terms of like domestic violence. People do ask more questions, not.
Speaker 1 (54:51):
Enough, not enough.
Speaker 3 (54:52):
You know, there's people don't want to overstep. But I
even think about, you know, when we were in school,
there wasn't the framework for teachers to ask the right
questions if they thought something was not right in the household,
whereas now teachers are. They are taught what are the
things to look out for? They're taught how do you
approach these conversations with kids? And when you sort of say,
people that are living these kind of exciting lives, so
(55:15):
to say on social media. I mean, there was the
family who had their entire family aboard a boat and
the youngest child fell overboard and passed away, and they've
been banned from ever living on a boat again. When
you actually hear about the circumstances of which that family
were living, it seems outrageous that that ever was a possibility,
and then it took an immense tragedy for that to
(55:37):
come to an end.
Speaker 2 (55:38):
Well, one thing that has happened since where Walker came
out is because the book has done so well, I've
been approached by many people who've had some sort of
extraordinary childhood or I've been introduced to them, or I've
going to come across them, And there are many different
versions of this story. I mean, there are kids out
there absolutely who have a wonderful time and normally that
(56:00):
because the time period is not so long you come
from a kind of very caring family, they do make
provision for you to have kind of friendships and schooling
and so on, so that can all work out very well.
But unfortunately there were a lot of cases where it
doesn't and then it's kind of covered up and your
example of the kind of family where someone drowned. I mean,
(56:21):
in a lot of these other cases, there were examples
of kind of drowning or near drowning that takes place.
I mean, frankly, a lot of these worlds where you
can live off grid, they are more dangerous, so you
have to be very careful. But unfortunately, some of the
parents who have the mindset of stepping outside of society
don't have that sort of kind of caution and child
(56:44):
protected divide.
Speaker 1 (56:45):
Suzanne, thank you so much for sharing your story. It's
truly fascinating and I've never ever come across anything quite
like it. I cannot wait to see this adaptation for
the series. Your memoir wave Walker, a memoir of Breaking
Free list in twenty twenty three. Anyone that wants to
go and read it, We're going to put all the
links for it. But we cannot wait to see the series.
Speaker 2 (57:08):
Thank you. Can be fantastic and wonderful to talk to
you both today. Thank you so.
Speaker 3 (57:12):
Much, Thanks so much for coming and being part of
the pard Susan, it's been amazing.
Speaker 2 (57:16):
Thank you.
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