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I was a complete prisoner in this environment because I had no choice on where we would go, and often my father wouldn't even tell me where we were going to sail to next.
So you're completely imprisoned in this.
World and you can't even step off the boat and go to school or bring somebody up or anything like that.
From MoMA may you're listening to no filter. I'm mea Friedman and when I was about seven, my parents decided we'd go on a road trip around Australia. We're away for about six weeks, but it felt like six years, and I hated every single second of it. Here's a hot tip. Most little kids don't have an appetite for adventure, not the kind of advent that takes them away from their friends and pets and grandparents.
Kids like routine, They like being at home.
When Susan Haywood was seven and her little brother was six, they were told by their parents that they'd be leaving the UK, leaving school, leaving their dog and their grandparents to go and see around the world for three years. Suzanne had a doubt about what that would be like, but like so many little girls, she trusted her dad.
He was her hero. But as you're going to hear today, there's a fine line between adventure and survival, between an extended family holiday and well being held captive by your parents for ten years.
Because what was supposed to be.
A three year journey turned into a decade long odyssey where Suzanne was severely injured, hospitalized, put in a very unsafe environment with strangers as a teenage girl, and ultimately abandoned in a country where she knew nobody. This story is kind of like a Greek myth or an action adventure, complete with shipwrecks and desert islands. But for Suzanne, it
was her life and it's her story. And with such a big story like this, I often think about where I want to begin these conversations, But with her story, I was curious to know where she actually begins. When she tells other people about this incredible thing that happened to her, what's the beginning for her?
So the beginning for me is the moment where my father says, I want to sail around the world, and you're coming with me.
It's going to be.
Three years because my whole life changed at that moment, And so that is the beginning of the story. And up until that point, I'm quite a normal little girl living a normal life. I'd go to school, I've got friends, everything is normal, and then it changes because of that decision that he made.
That day was in nineteen seventy six. You were only seven, Your brother John is six. You're eating your cereal and your dad Gordon announced his plan over.
The breakfast table.
Had he always had a fascination with Captain Cook? What exactly did he tell you all that his plan was?
So he had had a fascination with Captain Cook. My maiden name is actually Cook, and he comes from a similar part of the UK to Captain Cook. And for many years I believe that we were related to him, but I now understand we're not. But it was enough of a connection for him to feel that fascination. And he'd always loved sailing. He hadn't sailed very far. They'd had various small boats, and they'd gone as far as
crossing the Channel. He didn't really know how to navigate at that point, and anyway, as a six year old, you don't really question these things. Okay, So my dad's trying to sail around the world.
You know, he's a hero.
Hero worship my dad like a lot of little girls do with their father. Okay, you know, we're going on this adventure, and I was worried because I was leaving behind all my friends, my dog, Rusty water spaniel, my grandparents. I was very close, in particular to my Nana, my father's mother. But we were going to be back in three years and it was going to be a great adventure.
You didn't question, of course, you kind of don't even get the opportunity to question things. Well, maybe kids do now, but back in the seventies, we didn't get the chance to question things when our parents told us their plans. But how did your mother, Mary, and your brother John, who was about the same agency, how did they react to the proposition, particularly your mom.
So my mom was madly in love with my father and really would go along with anything that he wanted to do. They had one of these dynamics where, you know, my father made all the big decisions and my mother made all the little decisions, the day to day decisions, but the thing was my mom hated, and I knew that even as a little girl. My father would often go saiving. My mother would not go with him. But I think for my mother, the idea that he would
go sailing without her was inconceivable. And then if she was going, of course us kids would go. My brother I don't really remember expressing much review. He's a year younger than me, so he was five at this point, so he didn't really have much review, certainly not at that point. But my mother was absolutely going to go. I don't remember her.
Being enthusiastic about it.
This was my father's dream, not hers, but she was absolutely part of it.
Tell me about your mom. Your relationship with her wasn't easy, you write in your book. My father was a hero to me, and it seemed to everyone else. My mother was a glamorous, if somewhat unwilling and unmaternal accomplice speak to me about unmaternal.
As a small child, I didn't really question how my mother was.
She just was.
I mean, you just accept your mother as the person, and she is. But as I got older, it became increasingly apparent not only that she was not maternal. I mean, at one point in the book, she leaves me overnight at an orphanage, but also she has very clear favorites. So my brother becomes very much like a golden child on the boat, and I become the Cinderella type character and talking to other children, particularly children who were taken
out of the norm into very physically adventurous circumstances. That is a pattern which I'm hearing from other people as well, because of course girls are less suited for that sort of environment. And then you get into a dynamic where because the boy is enjoying it more, they're the good child. Because the girl is not enjoying it as much, and often girls are craving friendships and normality, they're the bad child. And that dynamic was one that my mother played into.
My mother was always somebody who had favorites people, She liked people who flattered her. I now understand, at least I've been told, she is quite a narcissistic person. So if you flattered her and she liked what you were doing, you were wonderful. If you didn't, she disliked you. So this relationship I had with her went seriously downhill when I became a teenager, and looking back, I now understand I was probably in her eyes, competing for attention. You
have become a pretty teenager. I was academic, and I think she just found me really hard to deal with on the boat. But her response to that was to be really quite unpleasant. And of course you're trapped in a tiny boat and you can't go anywhere. As a teenage girl, I couldn't go and be a friend. I couldn't get off the boat. There was nothing I could.
You literally couldn't run away. You couldn't even slam a door. And you go for a walk to the park. Can you tell me your dad went and found this boat with the Wavewalker, which is also the name of your incredible book.
What did the boat look like like? What was it like? The actual physicality of it on board?
So wave Walker was a very beautiful boat from the outside, a very old fashioned looking boat with a raise that's called a kind of poop neck up at the back. She was a wooden boat, a schooner, which means the mast at the front is smaller than the mass of the back gaffrig, which means that the sail between the
two masts square. So she looked really old fashioned and rather beautiful with a long bow sprit at the bow or the front, so she was very graceful, but the reality of what it was like to live on her was quite different. She was a very narrow boat, so down below you didn't have a lot of space, certainly not a space to live on for many years, and particularly because over time my father ran completely out of money.
We were never very wealthy, but we became very poor over time, which is another thing that happens with long term sailors, because of course you often don't have a real source of income and it's very expensive to try and just keep the boat going, so there was no money for, you know, anything frivolous at all. I don't remember having a new item of clothing as a child.
So he started taking paying crew on the boat six seven a crew usually men on board and downstairs down below, the space was very limited, so I was often sharing a cabin with these kind of male crews. There was only one working bathroom or head, very narrow kind of galley, one table that sat kind of five people, but not enough space for everybody to sit down, so quite constrained. And then imagine being in that environment as a teenage girl.
Where you want, You want a degree of kind of privacy, you know, and of.
Course you can't get off the boat.
So and this is this wonderful, really interesting thing for me about the contrast between the parents' dream. My father had the dream of standing around the world, and for heim it was freedom and independence. And you know, if they fell out with somebody, which they often did, they would pull up the anchor and sail to somewhere else. But for me, I was a complete prisoner in this environment because I had no choice on where we would go, and often my father wouldn't even tell me where we
were going to sail to next. So you're completely imprisoned in this world, and you can't even step off the boat and go to school or bring somebody up or anything like that.
After this short break, what was supposed to be a three year voyage beginning when Susann was seven, drags out for years and years, and she becomes a young woman on the yacht, which brings a whole new set of challenges and dangers.
Stay with us.
Tell me about school, because I imagine when he sold it to you, the prospect of not going.
To school at first for a kid.
Is kind of great, But what did you do about lessons and about school?
Did you do it? By correspondence?
So the initial premise was that my mother was going to teach us. And my mother was a trained primary school teacher, so she had various worksheets that she was going to use.
And I know you say.
That the kind of promise for most kids would be quite exciting not going school, but actually I was taken out of school when I was seven, and I was quite an academic child, and I enjoyed school anyway. My mother did do a few worksheets, particularly in the first year or so, but it was very haphazard because she wouldn't do any at sea because she got seasick. She didn't really like doing them in port because then she'd
want to go ashore. So every so often it would happen, but very very sporadic, and then within the first couple of years it stopped altogether. And by the time we got to Hawaii, by which point we've been at sea for four years, she's long given up any sort of education. And I'm incredibly bored, and I just to learn, So I'm trying to read every book I can find. I'm trying to talk to everybody I can kind of talk to. But I'm just desperate to learn, both for the sake
of learning but also for friendships. I'm really really missing friends. And people say to me, but you know what was the problem? You know, you had the University of Life, to which I say, well, the University of Life is great, but I wanted to be a scientist. And how do you learn maths and physics and chemistry when you're sitting on a boat sailing around the world.
You just said four years. I mean originally your dad had said three years. What was the intention to like sail for what a few weeks at a time and then go into port and.
Like live in different cities.
Or to just be spending the whole time on the ocean, Like what was the plan? And also then how did it turn out?
Well, the plan was a slightly crazy plan. So he had this idea of recreating Captain Cook's third voyde around the world. And the reason why he did that, I now believe, is because that was a way of raising money to do the voyage, because it felt like, you know, something that people would donate money too.
What did he do for a job? Your dad before all of.
This so he first of all trained as a teacher himself, though he hated teaching and only did it for a few weeks, and then he ran various things. I remember he kind of ran a bowling alley at one point, and at the point at which we sold everything to buy the boat, he was running Warwick Castle in the UK, which is an old castle. So he was always an entrepreneur, not a very wealthy entrepreneur, but he was always an entrepreneur. He always had ideas, so that's what he was doing.
And then he had this big idea that he was going to sell around the world and then he made it the Byzentinary Voyage. So he was able to raise some sponsorship for that, which was good because we didn't have a huge amount of money. So that was the idea. Now the problem we're standing around the world following Captain Cook's third voyage is Captain Cook took a very dangerous
route on his third voyage. So whereas most people who sail around the world, they do so standing east to west around the equator, So you go from the UK, if you're starting from the UK, across the North Atlantic, through the Panama Canal down through the Pacific and so on.
We weren't going that way.
We were going the other way, which basically you don't do unless you're a very extreme sailor. We went down to South America and we sailed from west to east. That meant that we went across the Southern Atlantic Ocean, which is a very dangerous ocean, the wrong way.
I e.
Into the winds. And then we went even worse across the Southern Indian Ocean. And these trips, by the way, you're at sea four ten twelve weeks, weeks, weeks, yes, and there's a little kid. You're trapped down below because you can't come up on deck because it's too dangerous. And in the Southern Indian Ocean we hit a terrible, terrible storm. The ways became bigger and bigger, and eventually, and I talk about it in the book, were very
badly shipwrecked. The boat or the sinks, and I am quite badly hurt because I'm flung against the ceiling of the cabin and against the wall, and I fracture my skull and break my nose. And we end up on a tiny little atoll island in the middle of the Indian Ocean called ourl Amsterdam where I have seven head operations without an esthetic, sous.
That is a lot. And you're how old at this age?
So I'm still seven, you're still seventh.
This was in year one of the great adventure.
Yeah, one of the great adventure. But that's why the end of the voyage what is a major you know? The turning point of the voyage was supposed to be Hawaiian because Hawaiian was where Captain Cook was killed on his third voyage, at which point we were supposed to then turn around and come back through the Panama Canal to the UK, and that was the end of the voat. But by the time we got to Hawaii, mother, than being three years in, we were four years in because
of the shipwreck. It took the best part of a year to repair the boat in Fremantle. We were in Fremantle. I went briefly to school in Fremantle, which I remember really loving.
What school did you go to?
I can't remember the school. It was a little local school near the boatyard in Fremantle, and I remember there were these very nice twin boys who used to compete over who would carry my school bag back to the boatyard every day.
That was very sweet.
You must have loved playing with other kids.
Yeah, it was wonderful because we were going to school. We were at one level having a somewhat normal life. At another level, we weren't because the boat was very badly damaged and in that shipwreck we lost all our toys. So we had no toys. We had virtually no money because everything was being spent that we had on repairing this boat. We were living on this boat which was
half wrecked, in this boatyard. But when I left the boatyard and I put my little kind of saturl on and went to school, I could pretend to be normal and it was great. I remember kind of practicing a musical instrument, the tambourine, I seem to remember for the school band. I remember, for a little while, our life is normal, And then my father said, now we're saving again, and we set off.
You must have been devastated. What was a typical day in the life for you, like as a child on the.
Boat, Well, days were very governed by the weather. So when we set sail from Fremantle, we were sailing across the Great Australian Bite to Melbourne. And actually that's a pretty rough piece of sea as well, so you will have some days where you're completely becalmed with no wind, in which case I would get up in the morning, you know, find something for breakfast. We often didn't have very organized meals because everyone was doing watches. All the
adults were doing watches. So it's not that you would get up in the morning and somebody would be there, because you'd have one or two adults on watch and everybody else.
Would be asleep. But you would find yourself some breakfast.
I'd go up if it was calm enough, I could go up and sit in the cockpit with whoever was on watch, and I could talk to them, and then I would go down and spend the rest of the day trying to entertain myself.
You know. I would have a few books, I would draw, I.
Would try to find things to do. But we didn't have any organized schooling, and we had very limited toys on board. The one thing I will say is is kids aren't endlessly inventive. So my younger brother and I would invent a lot of games, and I would also in ment a lot of games. I would play by myself. I mean, I remember using we had a chess set on board. It was one of the few things that we had, and I remember turning that into an entire kingdom,
you know. But looking back, and particularly now as a parent, and I'm a parent of three children myself, it's a very deprived world forcing your to I mean, it's almost like if my parents have kind of locked me in a flat for a decade, we would all say that's kind of terrible. But actually being stuck at sea as a child, particularly a small child, you're down below in a very limited space with very few things to do.
Like in a cell, because like kids need to run and jump and climb, how did you even You couldn't even move much.
So if it was calm, you could go on deck, but there's limited deck space. You certainly can't run around very much. My brother and I had a game where we would try to kind of get from one end of the boat to the other without touching the floor.
I remember.
But you can't swim, and unless you're import you can't go short, so you can't play any sort of ball games or anything like that. So, yes, very limited for prolonged periods of time.
Where was your mum? What would she do on the biat so my.
Mum would do watches with everybody else. She got very badly seasick. So basically for the first three days, every time we left port, she would retreat to her bunk in the aft cabin at the back of the boat, and she was not to be disturbed. So for the first three days you always had to make do once you left port, and then she would appear and she would cook food. I mean, food on board was quite basic, you know, because you had to rely a lot on kind of canned and powdered food.
What would you eat? What were meals like.
Well, quite a lot of corned beef, quite a lot of spam. I don't really recommend. When my father had to cook when my mother was ill, his kind of go to meal was corned beef and powdered mashed potatoes, which actually I remember powdered mash potatoes being remarkably good. Actually, I'm not sure I would eat them now, but they were good. Later on, when we got into the Pacific, we had a wider range of food because we were able when we got to an island to trade and
get bananas or mangoes or whatever. But certainly for those first few years. The food was very limited and we weren't really able to catch fitsch. I mean, you can't really fish in the Southern Indian Ocean again. Kind of later on, when we were in the Pacific, we would trail lines over the back of the boat, and it was very sporadic. But suddenly you would find that you caught a maimi or something and you would have a fish. But the diet was not.
Great, not a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables.
No, certainly not for the first few years. It got better once we were in the South Pacific, and then on the stormy day you were even more restricted because basically you weren't allowed to come up on deck.
I can't get past the bit where you say your mum got seasick and she didn't like sailing, and yet you were on this indefinite journey to Hell. I would have thought from her point of view, I can understand why you wouldn't have had any say. But what made her not pull the pin or even do it in the first place?
Was she just so in your father's thrall, and did he just hold all the power so she didn't have a voice.
So she certainly had a voice but I think my mother's world rotated around my father and always did, and she knew this was his dream. He was going to do it whether or not she went with him, and he was the center of her world, so she was going to go. Unfortunately, because she didn't like sailing. That meant that she was often quite unhappy on the boat. Later on, when we got to the Pacific and the sailing was much easier, I think she enjoyed it more.
And of course she didn't have to deal with the isolation because she was an adult, and obviously she was with my father. We were taking adult crew on the boat, so she had those, you know, those people to kind of talk to, although she often fell out with them,
but she found that part of the sailing. Once we got there, she enjoyed it more and she just didn't seem to worry about the fact that she had two little kids with her who were really getting an education, weren't really able to have friendships.
More of my conversation with Susanne Haywood after this break. How do you go through puberty on a boat, sharing, you know, a tiny cabin, bunk beds with grown men?
How does that go?
It's very difficult. It's really really difficult, and I learned I had to kind of look after myself because my parents.
Just weren't really very interested.
So I kept to myself, and people see in the book what I effectively do is I just become very withdrawn into myself and into my head. I have to be very careful what I do, so I very rarely go ashore on my own, because I realize if you go ashore on your own as a teenage girl, you get harassed quite a lot, or certainly you did then, so I have to be very careful about that. I
keep to myself on the boat quite a lot. This is partly because my relationship my mother is such that she will kind of bully me quite a lot if I'm visible at all. So I keep very quiet, and I write a lot. I have some pen pals, kids I've met along the way, and I write letters to them. I write my diary. One way or another, you find
a way to survive. I'm desperately by this point trying to study and teach myself as a way of keeping because it becomes very clear, particularly after a few years, that the reason why my parents want me to be on board is because they're using me to work on the boat, to cook and clean, and that's they.
Don't want me to leave.
They don't want to leave me with somebody to go to school because I'm actually useful on the boat. So I know I've got to escape because otherwise this voyage could go on forever. You know, we've gone way past four years. You know, we end up five, six, seven, eight years, were still on this boat.
And did you say, hey, Dad, mum, when is this going to end? I mean, I know, even on a long car trip, my kids are like, are.
We there yet? Are we there yet?
Are we there?
Hit? I can't like, did you just stop asking?
So I did ask, and I kind of begged my father to kind of send me away to school or to let me get off the boat. But my father was somebody is somebody who will not accept somebody challenging his authority. You know, he was a very physically aggressive man. He never hit me, but I saw him hit many other people. And I was quite I mean, I love my father and I hero worshiped him as a child,
but I was also quite frightened of him. You can hold both of those views at the same time, and on the occasions where I did challenge him, he became very aggressive and would kind of swear at me. You know, don't you you know, effing kind of you know it is not your you know you're the child. You're on the boat, you know you do this. There was no no debate whatsoever, and you knew that if you push that, you didn't know what would happen, you know. I mean at one point he left two members of crew on
an island and sailed away. He once put me on shore and you know, refused to let me come back on the boat for a day. I remember sitting on the end of the jetty and I'm a teenage girl, and I'm quite a pretty teenage girl who gets quite harassed if you're.
On your own.
And I remember sitting at the end of the jetty because it felt like the safest place to be. So he was not a man that you could force. And then, of course I had no passport of my own until I was sixteen. I didn't have any money.
I had no.
Contact with any of my relatives back in UK because we left when I was so little. None of them had about you come to see us, which I don't blame them for but it meant I had no contact back with any of them to come back and kind of find anybody. So I just accepted I was trapped. I was completely trapped. I think it's also very difficult, and I've talked to kind of people about it, since it's very difficult as a child to challenge.
Your own world.
I mean, you challenge and you accept that your parents are not good parents to you. Where do you go from there, particularly when you live on a boat and there's nothing else in your world apart from that.
Yeah, you had nothing to compare it to, nor did your brother. And it's interesting when you talk and in the book, your experience was very different to your brother, because there's not a sense if you're in this together against your two crazy parents who've essentially kidnapped you, why is that.
It's really interesting. So when we were little, we played a lot together. I described how we used to make up kingdoms and we were quite close. But what happened was when we became teenagers. So eleven twelve thirteen, my mother chose a favorite, and it was my brother, partly because I suspect he didn't rebel like I did. You know, he never questioned her. Even though I was cautious about how much I challenged my parents, I did challenge, and I was unhappy I would get off the boat. He
never did, to my kind of knowledge. He enjoyed being on the boat more than I did. He enjoyed the physicality of it. He was treated very differently by both of my parents. So my father wanted my brother, because he was his son, wanted him to learn how to sail. So my brother was allowed to be on deck when
we were sailing. My father believed I should not be on deck when we were sailing because I was a girl, and in fact, only bought one set of child size working life jackets, so I had an emergency life jacket, but I didn't have a set that would enable me to work on debt. He gave the only set that he had to my brother and then said, you know,
you can't go on deck because you're a girl. Eventually I rebelled against that and went on deck, even without the kind of safety equipment, so my brother was able to go on deck. You know, it wasn't expected to do too many chores. I was expected to cook and clean down below with my mother. I had this terrible relationship with my mother and I. So we quickly learned, you know, once I hit those teenage years, that if my brother and I ever had a fight, I would
be punished and he wouldn't. So this is kind of treating two children in such a different way. Meant that we separated, and we very rarely rowed. We just separated. I kept as far away as I could because I knew that I would be punished, you know, and he could do as I said. He could do no wrong and I could do no right. And it's very sad looking back, because I think if we had been treated in a similar sort of way, we could together have found a way to create a better life on board
that boat. But because we were treated so differently, we were actually pushed apart. And to me as a child, that felt much more like there was a triangle of my mother, my father, and my brother and then there was me. And it's interesting talking to a lot of other people who've grown up in very different circumstances, that dynamic is not certainly not unique, but it all played out on this boat where you're the one who's the kind of dislike child.
So I kind of thought that would be the end of Suzanne's story because you know she'd grown up. Surely she can get herself off the boat now she's sixteen. But that's actually when things.
Took a really weird turn.
Because before she sort of drifted away from her brother, something extraordinary happened. And here's a little sneak peek of part two of this conversation.
That is the bleakest point of the whole story. I mean, even bleaker than being shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean and having all the head operations because we're effectively abandoned and have nowhere to go to and my job, and this has made very clear to me by my parents, is of course, to look after my brother.
You can listen to part two of the episode right now by the link in the show notes. And what's so interesting about it is that it's really amazing how her relationship with her parents changed when she was no longer under their control.
First of all, what they did to her.
But then it was really not what you would expect once she was kind of out on her own. And the way this story ends is so it's kind of like out of a movie. Have a listen, let me know what you think,