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Heywood on the family boat Wavewalker, near Vanuatu in the South Pacific, 1987. Photograph: Courtesy of Suzanne Heywood

‘Dad said: We’re going to follow Captain Cook’: how an endless round-the-world voyage stole my childhood

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Heywood on the family boat Wavewalker, near Vanuatu in the South Pacific, 1987. Photograph: Courtesy of Suzanne Heywood

In 1976, Suzanne Heywood’s father decided to take the family on a three-year sailing ‘adventure’ – and then just kept going. It was a journey into fear, isolation and danger …

by Suzanne Heywood

When we lived in England my days had a familiar rhythm. Each morning, my mother flung open the curtains in my room, and I tugged my school jumper over my head and pulled on my skirt before tumbling downstairs to eat cereal with my younger brother Jon. After school, we’d play on the swing in our garden, or crouch at the far end of the stream to watch dragonflies hovering above the gold-green surface.

I was used to this rhythm; I liked it and thought it would never change. Until one morning over breakfast, my father announced that we were going to sail around the world.

I paused, a spoonful of cornflakes halfway to my mouth.

“We’re going to follow Captain Cook,” Dad said. “After all, we share the captain’s surname, so who better to do it?” He picked up his cigarette and leaned back in his seat.

“Are you joking?” I asked.

Next to me, Jon watched Dad, his lips parted.

“Not at all,” said my father, puffing out a cloud of smoke. “I’m deadly serious.”

“But why?”

“Well, someone needs to mark the 200th anniversary of Cook’s third voyage, don’t they?” he said, raising his eyebrows at my mother.

“Of course they do, Gordon,” said Mum, returning his smile.

“I’ve told you kids about the captain,” said Dad, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray. “He was an incredible man. The people who were going to recreate his first and second voyages didn’t get their act together in time, so this is the last opportunity.”

“How long will we be gone?” I asked.

“Three years. By the time we get back, you’ll have seen more places than most people will visit in a lifetime. We’ll sail down to South America, then cross the Atlantic Ocean to South Africa and Australia. From there, it’s on to Hawaii and Russia.”

The clock was ticking on the wall. I looked out of the window at the empty swing. Dad had taken us sailing before, but this was different.

One evening later that summer, Dad announced that he’d found a boat. A few weeks afterwards, we went down to the Isle of Wight to inspect his find. He marched ahead at the boatyard. “You’re going to love her, I know you will,” he said, and I looked up to see an enormous boat with a long, curved bow, two masts and a raised deck at the stern.

The interior was unfinished, but bunks and cupboards were already taking shape, half-formed in the gloom.

After a while, I went up on to the aft deck to sit next to my father in the cockpit, watching him attach a compass to the binnacle, the wooden instrument stand in front of the ship’s wheel. “She’s called Wavewalker,” he said. “We were lucky – I was able to buy her because the man who was building her ran out of money.”

“Wavewalker,” I said, exploring the edges of the word. This boat would walk us over the waves, carrying us around the world and back again.


“But you’re so normal,” people often say when they find out about my childhood. And in some ways, I am. But, even if it’s not visible, my experience of spending a decade sailing 47,000 nautical miles on Wavewalker, equivalent to circumnavigating the globe twice, shaped who I am today.

The family waving goodbye, Plymouth, 1976. Photograph: Courtesy of Suzanne Heywood

I started thinking again about my past when my children were old enough to ask me about it. Did Dad really sail around the world because he wanted to honour Captain Cook? Why didn’t my parents, middle class and well educated themselves, worry about their children’s education or social isolation? Why was my relationship with my mother so difficult, particularly during my teenage years, and why didn’t my father try to help, when he must have seen how miserable I was?

My parents always claimed our time on Wavewalker was wonderful and told me I’d had a privileged upbringing. But this oft-repeated mantra conceals a much darker story. What I found, when I mustered enough courage to look back, was that many parts of my childhood were worse than I’d been willing to admit.


When I set sail from England with my parents, brother and three crew members in the summer of 1976, I was seven and thought the trip was going to be like an extended, exciting summer holiday. Once we’d settled into our ocean routines, Mum began giving Jon and me some schoolwork to do in the mornings, usually a maths or English worksheet. It was convenient that we were only a year apart in age, she said, since it meant she could teach us together. When I asked about other subjects, such as history, art or science, she said she wasn’t going to bother with those – if we were good at maths and English, everything else would sort itself out. Anyway, our voyage was like a massive geography field trip.

One day, about a week after leaving Gran Canaria, and a month after leaving England, a shadow appeared above the ocean’s southern rim. “I think it’s Ilha de Santo Antão in the Cape Verde islands,” said Dad, “which means we’re about 400 miles off the most westerly tip of Africa and halfway to Rio.”

Heywood with her parents Mary and Gordon and brother Jon. Photograph: Courtesy of Suzanne Heywood

The shadow darkened and gained substance, becoming a craggy rock lurking under a cloud, while the ocean filled with writhing jellyfish. The heat built until, one day, the breeze rotated through every direction and disappeared. “We’ve hit the doldrums,” said Dad when I went to stand beside him on the deck, gazing out at an ocean of thick honey. “They happen where the north and south trade winds meet. But that’s supposed to be a hundred miles south of here.”

We sat sweating under a blue bowl of sky for several days after that, each breath a gasp of heat that scorched the lungs. When the sun was up, I danced across the parched deck, searching for patches of shade, while Dad made a saltwater shower from a bucket punctured with holes that he hung in the rigging. At night, I slept on deck to escape the stifling air below, lying on my sleeping bag, and reaching up to grasp handfuls of the stars peppering the Milky Way.

After the wind returned, we saw a passenger ship ploughing its way towards us from South America. It came so close that I could see the people crowding its balconies and rails to wave, and when it swept past I saw its name etched on the stern: Brazilla.

“I wish we’d asked them for food,” I said, watching it go.

Dad laughed. “Don’t be silly.”

“There’s no fresh fruit left,” I said, giving him my sad look. “And I hate salt tablets.”

Salt was taking over my life. White tidemarks of it bloomed on my skin; my clothes and sleeping bag were sticky with it; and now I had to eat it as well, to stave off dehydration.

An artist’s impression of the interior of Wavewalker. Illustration: Camilla Ashforth

“Do you want to try some ship’s biscuits?” asked Dad, and when I nodded, he showed me where he’d hidden the tins under the step outside the main head, the name for the ship’s toilet.

“Do they have raisins in them?” I asked.

He shook his head and peered at my biscuit. “Oh, don’t worry about those: they’re only weevils. Tap it sharply on the table, and most of them will fall out and crawl away. The rest will give you useful protein.”


From South America, we sailed on to apartheid South Africa. We then set off across the notorious southern Indian Ocean towards Australia, this time with two inexperienced crew members on board, as my father had by then decided that he preferred to teach people how to sail himself. My father was a hero to me and, it seemed, to everyone else; and my mother was his glamorous, if somewhat unwilling, and unmaternal, accomplice.

On the first day of the new year, when we were partway across the Indian Ocean, I opened my eyes to a world I wanted to leave. I wanted to go home. I dragged myself from my bunk, taking care to avoid being hurled back against it when the boat veered the other way. The main cabin was deserted, so I huddled by the table, holding Teddy, my small brown bear, and wondered if anyone else was hungry. When my father came down, I wedged Teddy into the bookcase and followed him into the chartroom.

“How is it up there, Dad?” I asked. “Are the waves getting any better?”

He looked at me, his face expressionless. “No. They’re worse. They’re now over 50ft high. And the wind has changed direction to blow at storm force straight from the south pole.”

“Oh.” The hairs prickled on my neck.

He turned to lean over his chart. “It’s not good,” he said. He spoke the words quietly, as if to himself. Wavewalker’s quivering moments at the summit of each wave had become longer, and her plunges forward more extreme. Everything felt wet: my skin, my clothes, my hair, the floor and every surface I touched.

My fear felt physical – a cold lump I carried in my stomach. Every so often, if the wind wailed or our movement down a wave was particularly steep, my heart pounded and my legs felt weak.

Jon had joined me at the table by the time Mum struggled down the ladder in her oilskins several hours later. “Put on your lifejackets,” she said. “We’re going too fast. We must be prepared.”

I didn’t ask how a lifejacket would help us survive in an ocean full of gigantic, icy waves, and neither did Jon. There was little point in arguing, and, anyway, Mum was already halfway back up into the cockpit. When she returned later, Jon and I were sitting trussed up in our jackets by the table.

“Sue, come and help me make some food,” said Mum. “I need a can of corned beef.”

I nodded, gripping the countertop rail with one hand while unlatching a cupboard door with the other. The cabin tipped backwards. Wavewalker was climbing another watery mountain. This time the pause was endless. It felt as if time had been suspended, leaving us balanced on the head of a monstrous wave.

There was an explosion, and chunks of decking collapsed inwards above my head, followed by an avalanche of cold, grey water. As the boat lurched on to its side, my fingers let go and I was flung against the ceiling and back on to the galley wall. The air filled with screams, some of them mine.

Some time passed, though I don’t know how much. When I opened my eyes, I was lying on the floor of the main cabin, half-covered in water and surrounded by pieces of crockery, sodden books and hunks of decking. Icy water, black, grey and foaming white, flooded in through a hole above me. Jagged beams hung down from the ceiling, and one side of the cabin bulged inwards.

Mum was near the ladder. She tilted her head back to shriek through the hatch: “We’re sinking, Gordon! There’s a hole in the deck, and she’s full of water.”

I couldn’t get up – my legs didn’t want to move, and all I wanted to do was sleep. Maybe I could rest here, I thought, the water a blanket around me.

When I opened my eyes again I was lying in one of the top bunks in the four-berth cabin. Below me, the floor was covered with water and bits of debris – books, cushions, pieces of wood. Wavewalker felt full and drunk, and each time she tilted, water poured in through the hatch in the ceiling.

“Stop crying,” said Jon. “You’ve been crying for ages.”

I saw him lying on the bottom bunk on the other side of the cabin. He was right. I was crying.

He was clutching a square biscuit tin.

“Want one?” he asked, holding it up.

“No.” I tried to shake my head, but the pain made me stop.

I was wet, everything around me was wet, and some of the wetness was red. I closed my eyes, exhausted by the pain in my head. Dad appeared. He leaned over my bunk, his eyes underlined with curved shadows, his cheeks and nose red and inflamed.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.” My voice was a whimper.

He touched my right forearm, and I glanced down to see that his forefinger was dyed crimson.

“Why didn’t you tell me how bad this was?”

“I didn’t want to worry you,” I said, but really he hadn’t been there to tell.

“Do you think we’re going to die?” Jon asked after our parents had left.

“Probably,” I said, trying to put the lifejacket on without moving my head or touching the swelling above my eye. The lump seemed to be growing. It was taking me over, a foreign thing embedded in my head.


Somehow – miraculously – Dad managed to navigate us over the next few days to a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean: Île Amsterdam. Even more miraculously, we were still afloat when we reached it, due largely to the continuous pumping done by our two crew members, and the tarpaulin and quick-setting cement Dad had spread across the huge hole in our deck.

We were greeted on Île Amsterdam by Commandant Ghozi, who told us he was leading a French scientific mission of 30 people there. He took me to be examined by a thin man in a white coat named Dr Senellart. “She has a broken nose, a fractured skull and there is blood trapped inside the swelling on her head,” he told my parents when we rejoined them in the waiting room.

I slipped my hand inside Dad’s. “What if we do nothing?” he asked.

The family having tea at the helm. Photograph: Courtesy of Suzanne Heywood

“The swelling is pressing down on the fracture. If we do nothing, Monsieur Capitaine, your daughter could end up with brain damage. We must cut into the wound.”

For weeks, my mother kept taking me back to the tiny medical building where I underwent multiple operations on my head without anaesthetic, lying alone on the hospital bed. After my seventh operation, I went to find Mum in the waiting room.

“It is finished, Madame,” said Dr Senellart, following me in. “These,” he said, pointing to the shadows under my eyes, “will go in time. Your daughter is very brave.”

Mum, Jon and I were eventually rescued from Île Amsterdam by a passing container ship, while Dad sailed on with our two crew members to Fremantle in Australia in the dangerously damaged Wavewalker.

After repairing Wavewalker, we sailed from Fremantle to Sydney, and then across to New Zealand before turning north-east to make our way up to Hawaii. By the time we arrived in Honolulu, I was nine and we had been travelling for two years and 223 days. This was the point at which our trip was supposed to finish. Captain Cook had been killed in Hawaii, and we’d arrived there just over 200 years after his death.

But, of course, Dad had other ideas.


In Hawaii, the months turned into years while Dad tried various schemes to raise money, including working in a boatyard, setting up an exhibition on our trip and asking for donations. My 12th birthday came around and I gave up counting the days in my diary. I was learning nothing and was going crazy with boredom, since my parents – for reasons I never understood – had decided not to send us to school.

One night my father came home and said that we needed a family conference. The discussion took place over a dinner of corned beef and cabbage, spiced up with Tabasco sauce.

“Well, we can’t stay in Hawaii for ever,” he said. “I think we have two options. We’ve finished our voyage, so we could go home through the Panama Canal.”

We all nodded.

“Or we could sail back down the Pacific.”

I felt sick. It was the first time that Dad had suggested we might not go back to England

“But if we did that,” I asked, “when would we go home?”

“What’s the hurry? Think of all the places we haven’t seen. We haven’t even been to Tahiti yet.”

I put my hand on the sofa’s red plastic cover. He was listing more destinations – Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea. Mum was nodding and smiling.

He glanced at me. “That’s enough discussion, Sue. It’s time to vote.”

I slumped against the seat. Mum folded a sheet of paper into quarters, ripping it along the creases. She pushed the pieces across the table towards us.

Everyone scribbled on the slips, which went into Dad’s blue felt captain’s hat, a blue boat on a wooden ocean that held our future.

Dad unfolded the first vote.

Pacific

He smiled, and his hand dived back in. He spread out the second vote.

Home

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I stared at the slips of paper, avoiding his eyes. No one said anything.

The third vote came out.

Pacific

I wanted to look at Jon, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the final slip of paper, which would determine everything. Dad smoothed it out.

Home

“Ah,” he said, “we have a draw.” He looked at Jon and me, and I sat up straight, ready to explain my choice.

My father glanced at Mum and knocked another cigarette out of the packet on the table. “What you kids must realise,” he said, leaning back and blowing out a mouthful of smoke, “is this isn’t a democracy, it’s a benevolent dictatorship. The captain always gets the casting vote.” He picked up his glass of rum and Coke and raised it towards us. “And I think we should go back down the Pacific.”


We set off again. After a brief classroom experience in Queensland, Australia, some months later, I registered with a correspondence school, but finding the space and time I needed to study on board Wavewalker became a huge battle. My parents had by then started bringing paying crew on to the boat – advertising our voyages as “whale and dolphin sighting expeditions”. This turned our boat into a floating hotel in which I was expected to cook and clean for several hours a day. In addition, after I reached puberty, my relationship with my mother had deteriorated and she often didn’t talk to me for weeks on end, instead only referring to me in the third person, as if I was not there.

For the next three years we circled the Pacific. We were hit by another cyclone, and saw places like Tanna Island in Vanuatu, with its live volcano, remote Tikopia Island in the Solomons, and Marovo Lagoon in the New Georgia Islands, with its swamps and wood carvings. Meanwhile, I kept trying to study, hiding inside a sail to work so no one could find me to ask me to do more chores, and sending lessons back to the school whenever we reached a port that had a post office. I was trapped on Wavewalker against my will, with parents who didn’t seem to care how isolated or unhappy I was. I had no obvious way to get away – I had no money and no longer remembered any of my relatives or friends back in England. But, somehow, I trusted that if I educated myself enough it would help me escape.


I was 16 – and had been on Wavewalker for almost nine years – when Dad announced we were going to New Zealand. A few days after arriving in Auckland, Dad told us that he’d applied for the role of marketing manager at Hamurana Park, a tourist attraction several hours’ drive away, near Rotorua in the centre of New Zealand’s North Island. I had a thousand questions. Why was he applying for it? Would we stop sailing if he got it? What would then happen to Wavewalker? To name just a few. But when I tried to ask them, Dad shook his head. “Stop badgering me, Sue – if I get offered the job, then I’ll decide what we do.”

He set off in a hire car early one morning for his interview, squashed into his only suit. Later that day, we went to the yacht club to await his call. Mum took it when it came. “He got the job,” she told Jon and me afterwards. “We’re going to apply for New Zealand residency. The park’s owners want your dad to live in Rotorua, so we’ll find a school for Jon there.”

“But what about me?”

She hesitated. “Well, if your dad gets residency, you’ll get it, too. So you’ll be able to go to university in Auckland. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

When my father returned, he declared that we would stay in Auckland for Christmas before moving the boat down to the coastal city of Tauranga to start our annual repairs. Wavewalker would then be put into storage when he started his job. I nodded at this news. I didn’t want to stay in a country where I had no friends, but staying in one place was better than sailing, and, in any case, I’d learned not to argue with Dad’s decisions.

A couple of months later, Dad announced another decision – Jon and I were going to live in Rotorua on our own, so that Jon could start going to a school there. I would continue to learn by post, Dad told me, and would be responsible for looking after Jon, who was by then 15. When Wavewalker was repaired, he would start his job and come to live with us, while Mum kept sailing Wavewalker with another skipper, to make more money from paying crew.

“So what do you think?” asked Dad, after we had accelerated up a final short, steep track near Lake Rotoiti, and parked alongside two wooden holiday huts, known locally as “baches”.

“Is this where we’re going to live?”

“Yes.”

“But where is Rotorua?”

“It’s about 40 minutes’ drive away. But it’s nice here – you’ll see.”

I followed Dad through the sliding door of the slightly larger bach. Inside was a small sitting room furnished with a sofa covered in a worn, mud-brown blanket. A pot-bellied stove faced it, its black paint fighting the rust creeping up its curved legs. A door led to a galley kitchen and, next to that, a small bathroom contained a twin-cylinder, top-loading washing machine that looked like it should be in a museum. The bach had one bedroom that I could use, and Jon was going to sleep in the second, smaller bach.

Heywood attempting to study while en route to Fiji, 1985. Photograph: Courtesy of Suzanne Heywood

Dad returned to Tauranga, and I settled into a routine. Each morning, Jon came into the main bach for breakfast and I asked about his plans for the day, though he rarely said much. After he left to catch the school bus, I tidied up and took my books out to study on the veranda overlooking the lake.

When I tired of working, I’d row the house’s small dinghy out on to the water, pull in the oars and let it drift. It was there, lying on my back watching the birds loop and glide, that I allowed my thoughts to unravel. Wavewalker. Her movement backwards and forwards through the ocean. The dampness, the closed wooden cabins. My parents caught up in their own needs. Salt. Waves. Diesel. Dust. Boredom. Loneliness. Fear.

In late April, Dad returned to the bach to declare another change of plan. The skipper he’d hoped would take charge of Wavewalker wasn’t up to the task. Instead, he was going to resign from his job and sail the boat himself.

“You’re leaving again?” I asked, my voice faltering.

“Yes.” He avoided my eyes.

“When will you be back?”

“Well, we’re only partway through the first of three charters, so not until November.”

That was seven months away.

“How am I going to pay for things, Dad?” I said, my voice catching.

He hesitated. “Don’t worry. I’ll set up a separate account for you to use. I won’t be able to put much in it, so you’ll need to be very frugal.” He sipped his tea. “There’s one other thing. I need you to manage the bookings for the boat. There are spaces left on the trips for this year, so you’ll have to run some more advertisements.”

“Don’t worry, Sue,” he said. “I’ll ring whenever we get to a major port. And our friend Pam will help you if you need it.”

“But Pam lives three hours away in Auckland, Dad,” I said, still trying not to cry.

He got up. “I think we’d better call it a night, don’t you? I need to pack in the morning – your mum’s anxious for me to get back.”


One afternoon a few weeks later, I sat watching a stain on the sofa morph through a succession of shapes – a dolphin, a sail flapping, a man with a crooked nose, a laughing witch. Jon had left for school hours before, and I didn’t know how long I’d been sitting there. The Yellow Pages lay next to the phone. Almost without thinking, I picked it up, flicked through its pages and dialled the number for Childline.

“I don’t understand,” said the counsellor. “Where are your parents?”

“They’ve gone sailing.”

“When are they coming back?”

“November, I think,” I said, and the tears started.

I took a breath.

Then, in a rush: “I don’t know where they are. I don’t know when they’ll call again.”

“Are there any adults who can help you?”

“My parents have a friend called Pam, but she lives several hours away.

I caught my breath and kept answering the counsellor’s questions: “No, I’m not going to school. I sit here on my own all day, trying to teach myself.” My voice quavered.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

Wavewalker. Photograph: Courtesy of Suzanne Heywood

“Not very well. I’m finding it hard to eat and I have a permanent headache.” I paused, trying to keep control. “As well as looking after my brother, I have to run my dad’s business.”

“Oh dear,” said the counsellor. She was trying to be helpful, but the hint of kindness in her words pushed me over the edge. “And … and … ” I said, tears running down my face, “and worst of all, I don’t want to be spending my time doing any of this. I need to be studying, or I won’t get into university.”

There was another pause. “None of this is your fault,” she said. “You’re coping with far more than is fair. I can’t change that, though I can be here if you need to talk.”

The counsellor did give me one piece of advice before the call ended:

“You can’t deal with this alone. If you try to, things will keep getting worse.”

The quiet engulfed me after I hung up the phone. I brought my legs up on to the sofa and buried my head between my knees.


More weeks passed. My call to Childline hadn’t changed my world, but it had allowed me to accept that it wasn’t my fault that I’d been left to look after my brother alone in New Zealand. It had also spurred me on to find a friend, a girl who lived on a caravan site nearby. But when winter arrived, a new worry started keeping me awake at night: my New Zealand visa was about to expire. I put on my smartest clothes – a T-shirt and denim skirt – and drove to Tauranga, where I was sent to wait in a long line in the immigration building. Some hours later, the man looked at my passport. “Where are your parents?”

“They’re away for a bit,” I said, trying to sound cheery. “But they’ll be back soon.”

The man’s frown deepened. My smile faded, and I felt small.

“Where exactly are your parents?”

“Fiji?”

He shook his head. “If they’re not in New Zealand, I can only extend your visa by two weeks. You’re a minor: you can’t stay here alone.”

Three days later, the phone went. Wavewalker had arrived in Fiji.

“Don’t worry,” said Dad, when I described my crisis, “I’ll come back.”

Suzanne Heywood, photographed earlier this month. Photograph: Amit Lennon/The Guardian

When my father turned up in New Zealand a few days later, we went back to the immigration department in Tauranga. This time, with him promising to stay and look after me in New Zealand, they agreed to extend my visa for four months until early October. It still didn’t get me to my final exams in November, but it at least got me closer.

Once again, Dad was in a hurry to leave, saying that Mum was waiting for him in Fiji and he had work to do on Wavewalker to get it ready to sail again.

More weeks passed. Somehow, I managed my loneliness and focused on the only thing that might help – studying as hard as I possibly could, staring at my books out on the wooden veranda. By doing this, I could make my way through each day without breaking down.

When October came, I went to the police station. “I only need a month’s extension to my visa this time,” I told the officer, while he thumbed through my passport.

He shook his head. “I can’t extend this any further unless you can show me an air ticket back to England.”

I went from the police station to the local travel agency, where another man hunted down flights. The cheapest option was a circuitous journey up to Japan and back down through Hong Kong that would cost $600.

“Are you sure there’s no cheaper ticket?” Dad asked, when at last he rang and I’d explained my predicament. “It’s a ridiculous price.”

I said nothing. I was clenching the phone so tight it hurt my hand.

“Well,” he said, after a long pause. “I guess I have no choice. I’ll move the money into the account.”

“Thanks, Dad,” I said, and, with three hours to go, I got the passport stamp I needed. I could stay in New Zealand until 10 days after my exams, but would then have to return to England after a decade away to face whatever waited for me there.


When my plane reached Tokyo, I stumbled out, carried along in a wave of travellers. I heard laughter and turned to see a girl looking at me. “You have a lot of luggage,” she said. “Let me help.”

By the time we reached the other end of the pristine terminal, we were laughing and almost crying over my absurdly heavy bags, and I’d discovered my new friend was called Hélène and would be sharing my next flight to Hong Kong.

“I’m going back to Paris to find a job and somewhere to live after a year of travelling in Australia,” she said. “What are you doing here on your own?”

It was a long story, but we had time. So I told her about Wavewalker, my childhood at sea, and my determination to escape and go to university. It was odd to talk about these things so far from where it had all happened.

“But what if you don’t get in?” she asked.

I shrugged, trying to ignore the ball of fear inside my stomach.

“I can’t go back.”

“Why not?”

“Because at last I’m free.”

This is an edited extract from Wavewalker: Breaking Free by Suzanne Heywood, published by William Collins on 13 April. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com


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