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