Wavewalker by Suzanne Heywood (2023)

This was just splendid, one of the most enjoyable and memorable books I have read so far this year.

When she was six in 1975 Suzanne's parents decided to sell up, resign their jobs and buy a sailing boat. The plan was to spend three years following Captain James Cook's final voyage exactly two hundred years after his trip.

They set out with some volunteer crew on a boat called Wavewalker, and with extraordinary recklessness headed across to Rio, before navigating the South Atlantic to Cape Town, on to Australia and then via the South Pacific Islands to Hawaii.

Not only was this dangerous, but it also meant effectively denying Suzanne and her brother any meaningful education. In the event they continued sailing for more than ten years, latterly running a business taking 'paying crew' on voyages from Australia and New Zealand around the South Pacific.

What makes this so much better than a conventional childhood memoir, or a travel book, is the description of the way that family relationships deteriorated. It is, of course, only one side of the story, but the parents are portrayed as rather uncaring and selfish, having no respect at all for Suzanne's desperate wish to gain an education. She was, as she shows 'trapped in somebody else's dream'. She manages to grab some months at school in Australia in between trips, but otherwise she teaches herself via workbooks and correspondence with teachers. She is clearly very bright and very driven, ultimately succeeding in getting admitted to Oxford to study zoology.

It is a fantastic account and very well-written. Literary non-fiction at its best. For me though there was the additional attraction of knowing quite a few of the places she visits. Wavewalker docks for extensive periods in Mooloolaba, a lovely seaside town about an hour's drive north of Brisbane where I stayed with my brother for several very happy nights in 1989 and rather fell for. Later she lands scarily at the old Hong Kong airport and moves into the grey block at the rear of Somerville College that I used to visit to see a good friend when I was a student. I would have been visiting her at the same time that Suzanne was living there. Right at the end she visits Lautoka in Fiji and stays at the Waterfront Hotel where our wedding reception took place.

Writing this memoir appears to have meant that she fell out somewhat with her parents, but I am so glad she decided on honesty rather than sugar coating. Such an impressive woman.