To a provincial English girl of just six, the prospect of a voyage to the South Seas to mark the bicentenary of Captain James Cook’s third and final voyage sounded like an exotic fantasy. But even when it was first mooted, Suzanne Heywood, née Cook, was anxious about what she was leaving behind. What about her friend Sarah and dog Rusty? And when would she be back at school again?
All such reservations were blithely swept aside as her father, Gordon Cook (no relation to the captain), who owned and ran a hotel in the Midlands, set his plans in motion. His wife, Mary, wasn’t too thrilled – she didn’t much like sailing, and when she did go out on the waves, got seasick – but they both knew that what Gordon wanted was non-negotiable. So he bought and fitted out a 21m schooner called Wavewalker and the family set off from Plymouth in July 1976.
What started as a three-year adventure ended up stretching over a decade, effectively the childhood of the Cooks’ children, Suzanne and Jon, aged four. Marked with danger, injury, isolation, scarcely any formal schooling and mounting family tensions, it turned from dream to nightmare, at least for Suzanne.
Zig-zagging around the South Pacific, Wavewalker made several stops in New Zealand. In 1986, the stop ran to a year when her parents left Heywood, then 16, and her 13-year-old brother ashore, alone. She kept house, ran the accounts of her parents’ business and, using a correspondence course from a previous stop in Queensland, passed the senior year exams (her brother, by contrast, went to a local school).
Her fantasy of getting home and into university seemed doomed as she did not fulfil any of the requirements. But, extraordinarily, after an interview, Somerville College at the University of Oxford accepted her as a “wild card” – which she most certainly was.
Survival story
Even the barest description of Suzanne Heywood’s childhood and adolescence is astonishing, but meeting the woman herself is almost the opposite. Now aged 54, she is the operations chief of Dutch holding company Exor, and mother of three, all of whom are now at university. She is the widow of top-level civil servant Jeremy Heywood, once described as the “most powerful person in British politics you have never heard of”, and lives in a double-fronted Georgian house in a plush suburb of south-west London. She appears to be a bastion of conventionality and order.
She has now written a book, Wavewalker: Breaking Free, about her experiences that has been likened to the bestseller. Educated by Tara Westover – and there are definitely similarities in terms of children being neglected, with their interests and needs ignored. But rather than Mormon survivalists against modern medicine and education, Heywood’s parents were self-absorbed and deaf to their daughter’s pleas for a more ordinary life.
As she tells it, “Looking back as an adult, I think my sailing-mad father wanted to be a hero and my mother just wanted to be with him. She favoured my brother and she didn’t really like me. It just got worse as I grew older.”
The childhood she describes in Wavewalker is filled with mishaps, accidents and disasters. Probably the most dramatic was in the first year, once they passed through Brazil and South Africa and came into the Indian Ocean en route to Australia. They hit a raging blizzard which crashed a hole in the deck and flooded the cabin.
Heywood, who had been helping her mother in the galley, was knocked unconscious but it wasn’t until days later they came upon a tiny speck of an island, Île Amsterdam, and she could be seen by a doctor. Her nose was broken, her skull fractured and she was at risk of brain damage if she wasn’t operated upon.
She then had a total of seven operations, all without pain relief, and slowly recovered. For years, she suffered from nightmares about the experience: “I woke most mornings in a damp sweat from my night terrors.”
Physical danger was the most extreme fear, but they were also hard up, water and food were often scarce, and there was a continuing round of casual crew who paid to sail with the Cook family on Wavewalker. Mary Cook expected Heywood to help with domestic tasks from the very beginning, and gave little time and attention to the education of the children. Ironic, as both parents were qualified, experienced teachers.
Heywood is adamant that she is not opposed to sailing or family voyages. But those who head off on sailing odysseys do not usually do it as the Cooks did. Sailing in a fleet means children will have other young ones around to play with, some teaching will be planned, and when they come to an agreed endpoint, everyone can be sure it’s back to school, home, normality.
“I’ve spoken to other women who have spent some childhood years on boats and they all complain of the loneliness. You do meet other children, but they might not be the same age or gender, or share your interests. And then they’d be sailing off in a different direction after a week.
“What I missed, particularly as a girl, was real friendship. I wanted somebody I could sit down with and talk to about things. Just go and have a swim and then play a game, lie around.”
But for Heywood, even stronger than a need for companionship was the thirst for education. “There is a myth that you will end up educated in life by a trip like this, but what are these things I learnt? And anyway, I wanted to learn science, I wanted to read literature, I wanted to do all the things that you would be able to do at a school. Being on a boat for a child is quite boring. Not a lot happened.”
Once Heywood reached adolescence, her relationship with her mother, which was never close, deteriorated badly. Heywood’s correspondence school required coursework, but the boat had only one surface on which she could work, a table used communally by the crew. She was constantly being shooed off by her mother, and when she wouldn’t immediately obey, she was not spoken to for weeks at a time.
Cast ashore
It is also pretty extraordinary that parents would leave young teenagers alone for almost a year, with scant adult supervision. At the time, Heywood was told it was because her parents needed to earn money using Wavewalker for tourism trips in the Pacific. “I thought they had no choice and that I had rather let them down by not being able to cope [she rang Childline at one point]. So people did hear about us, and Dad had to come back for a bit.”
But in researching her book, Heywood discovered that her mother had given her husband an ultimatum – “either she goes or I do”.
“She just wanted me off the boat, so we were dumped in New Zealand.”
A bach was found in the bush around Lake Rotoiti, near Rotorua. Heywood was given the keys to a car and illegal access to her father’s bank account. She had to drive her brother to school in Rotorua each day and keep herself and Jon alive on limited resources. And, as any Kiwi would know, it was freezing cold in an unlined bach in winter. She once bought a delivery of firewood but didn’t have the strength to split it.
You might think that memories of this time would have curdled Heywood’s attitude to this country, but not at all.
“I love New Zealand, and I love New Zealanders. I don’t blame them for what happened to me in New Zealand.” In fact, following the death of her husband in 2018, she brought her then-teenagers for a holiday around the country, driving all over the shores of Lake Rotoiti until she found the bach, which had been refurbished since she and her brother occupied it.
When she finally got back to England at the end of 1986, Heywood won a place at Oxford to study zoology. There were many other hurdles to adult life, but she cleared them all. She completed a PhD at Cambridge and she was fast-tracked into the UK civil service. There she met and married Jeremy Heywood, who went on to be principal private secretary to two British prime ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and then cabinet secretary to both David Cameron and Theresa May. All four spoke at his funeral, and you don’t get any more “establishment” than that.
Before the couple had children, and once he knew about her childhood, Heywood talked to her husband about what she wanted to give their future children: “Unconditional love – they have to know that whatever they do, we will love them. I didn’t know that – my parents disowned me multiple times, actually dumped me on an island once, as well as in New Zealand, refused to support me at university. I knew, even as quite a small child, that if I pushed my parents more than an inch beyond what they would accept, anything was possible. There was no safety net. And that’s a hard thing to live with.
“They don’t have to be the centre of your universe, but your children have to know that they’re pretty close to the centre,” she says, sitting in a house filled with framed, panoramic school photos of her children, and a beautiful child-friendly garden outside the glass doors.
There’s no doubt that Heywood is remarkably resilient. Her husband, by then Baron Heywood of Whitehall, was diagnosed with lung cancer and died at the end of 2018. She wrote a well-reviewed biography of him, What Does Jeremy Think?: Jeremy Heywood and the Making of Modern Britain. Even more impressively, when Boris Johnson’s government appeared to use the late civil servant as a scapegoat in a lobbying scandal surrounding Cameron and businessman Lex Greensill, Heywood threatened court action, and it backed down.
Inevitable ructions
Her husband had encouraged Heywood in writing Wavewalker, but they both knew it would cause terrible ructions in the family. At first, her parents imagined that Heywood’s book would follow the family line in which it was all a great adventure, but once they realised that her story was “feeling trapped in someone else’s dream … my needs irrelevant or ignored”, they grew angry. Her mother died suddenly and in clearing out her effects, Heywood came upon a half-written letter in which she expressed damning opinions about her daughter and threatened to damage Heywood’s husband’s career if the book was published.
For some time after that she continued to see her father, but since publication, they have become estranged. He had published an earlier account of the journey, Schooner to the South Seas, which sank without trace. Wavewalker was Book of the Week in the Daily Mail and has been reviewed everywhere from the London Review of Books to the Sunday Times. Doubtless he doesn’t like the child’s-eye-view of his often alcohol-fuelled recklessness and lack of parental compassion.
Getting this off her chest has taken Heywood enormous effort. It’s not a book of crafted writing, but an impassioned recall of childhood. Some of it is filled with the wonder of adventure – seeing whales up close, beachcombing in New Caledonia, grape-picking in New South Wales’ Hunter Valley. But there is also fear and trepidation and never knowing what might happen next.
The one thing she does not do is blame Wavewalker. She loved the boat and delighted in its quirks and limitations even though it meant she literally had only a bed and drawer for 10 years. After her parents left it, damaged by a storm, in Fiji, nobody was quite sure what happened to the vessel, so Heywood travelled there to try to find it. She failed to, but along the way, in the writing and now publishing of this book, she found something else. Freedom from a time when she had none.