A BRITISH woman spent her entire childhood stranded at sea after her parents dragged her on their perilous journey sailing around the world for a decade.
Suzanne Heywood, 55, lived a normal life in Southampton before being taken by her Captain Cook-obsessed mother and father on a trip that left her with a fractured skull and a broken nose.
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The family, whose surname was Cook, were inspired by the infamous explorer with the same surname to undertake a three-year journey.
Captain Cook’s 18th century voyage took him through Plymouth, Tenerife, Cape Town, New Zealand, Hawaiiand the Bering Strait across the North American coast.
But Suzanne’s wild “family vacation” would last a decade after her father decided to continue sailing, taking her and her brother through dangerous storms and icy waves at just seven years old.
She states that living without friends or formal education was like living in a “prison” before being forced to “escape”.
Suzanne finally convinced her father to grant her money for a flight from New Zealand to England.
When they left in 1976, her father explained, “We are going to follow Captain Cook. After all, we share the captain’s surname, so who better to do this?”
His favorite ship was a “huge boat with a long, curved bow, two masts and a raised deck” called the Wavewalker, after which his 2023 memoir is named.
They traveled to places like Santo Antão Island in the Cape Verde Islands, South America, South Africa and then Australia.
Suzanne was ready to abandon life at sea when their cabin tipped backwards across the Indian Ocean.
The waves became more violent, more than 15 meters high and strong gusts were blowing from the direction of the South Pole.
She was alarmed every time the waves reached their peak and her entire body was drenched every time.
The Cookes donned their life jackets and she held on to the railing of the counter while holding the closet door at the same time.
Wavewalker tipped backwards and the waves were so fierce that parts of the deck collapsed inward.
Suzanne was thrown against the roof and everyone screamed in panic as freezing water flooded the vessel.
They survived the dangerous and terrible moment, and their father managed to take them to Île Amsterdam, in the south of the Indian Ocean.
The turbulence was so strong that Suzanne was left with massive swelling and a fractured skull, and doctors said she might have brain damage.
She underwent a staggering total of seven surgeries, all done without anesthesia.
Suzanne finally returned from “prison” at the age of 17, after traveling 47 thousand nautical miles after hunting for tickets at a travel agency.
The cheapest route from New Zealand still cost $600, but his father gave in to desperation and reluctantly transferred the funds.
Frightened by what her parents called an “adventure” after struggling with years of family tension on the boat and a “strange, difficult childhood.”
She wrote in The Guardian: “My parents have always stated that our time at Wavewalker was wonderful and told me that I had a privileged upbringing.
“But many parts of my childhood were worse than I was willing to admit.
However, the emotional strain only fueled Suzanne’s determination to study.
Suzanne told the Canadian talk show The morning show: “I couldn’t have friends, go to school, do all the things you normally did as a kid.”
“You can educate yourself in the most extreme circumstances.”
“When it became clear that my parents had no intention of going back and putting me back in school, I decided I needed to educate myself.
“It was the only lifeline I had, the only way out of this boat.”
She wrote in The Huffington Post: “I continued working on my correspondence classes, publishing them every week.
“I also wrote to every university I’d ever heard of, asking if they would let me apply to be a student. Most responded saying they wouldn’t consider me.”
Suzanne attributes her continued success, later becoming a prominent civil servant and novelist, to her “extreme upbringing”.
The ambitious novelist revealed that she was forced to take on all the household chores, such as cooking and cleaning, while his brother studied.
But at 13 she used a small cabin in Wavemaker to study and at 16 her parents enrolled the experienced teenager in a distance learning school in Queensland, Australia.
Suzanne won an interview in Oxford University, as long as she could England that’s why.
The ambitious teenager used the savings she accumulated from picking kiwi and a measly contribution from her father on a one-way flight.
Her hard work paid off, but she struggled with friendship after years of social isolation and reliance on canned food.
She began to thrive socially and academically after her freshman year at Oxford and even completed a doctorate at Cambridge.
Suzanne later underwent therapy to reverse years of damage to her mental health. health and is now a successful businesswoman with a CBE.
She was married to David CameronCabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood before he died and had three children with him.
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This story originally appeared on The-sun.com read the full story
