When she was seven years old, Suzanne Heywood and her younger brother Jon were taken on a voyage around the world with their parents. The trip was supposed to last three years, but she lived on the boat for ten, facing loneliness and dangerous seas, and missing the opportunity to go to school. She wrote about it in her book “Wavewalker”. In this Q&A with Helena Vieira, she discusses how her early experience equipped her with qualities she uses today as chief operating officer of investment company Exor and chair of CNH and Iveco Group.
Suzanne Heywood will be speaking at this event:
One of the characters in the book is “The Wave”. Can you describe what it is?
We left England on Wavewalker when I was 7 years old and sailed down to South America and then on to South Africa. From there we set sail across one of the most dangerous oceans in the world – the Southern Indian Ocean. My father wanted to follow Captain Cook’s third voyage around the world and that meant following this extremely hazardous route through the southern oceans.
We left Cape Town with two crew on board who had no sailing experience, my father, my mother (who hated sailing and was often seasick), my brother who was 6 and me (I was still 7). Part way across the Indian Ocean, we encountered an enormous storm. After several days of high winds, the waves grew to be 30 to 40ft high. Then several waves combined to form a wall of water. My father, who was on the wheel at the time, turned around and saw a wave rearing over us that was twice as high as our main mast, which was 60ft tall. This huge wave crashed over the stern of our boat, landing 35 feet along our deck. It smashed through the wooden planking, creating a large hole, and went out through the side of our hull. With every subsequent wave the boat started filling up with water.
And that’s when you were injured…
When the wave hit, I was down below in the main cabin helping my mother make some food as we had not eaten for a long time. I was thrown against the ceiling of the cabin and against the wall, fracturing my skull and breaking my nose. I passed out underneath the hole in the deck.
After The Wave we faced a new challenge. We were on a badly damaged boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean, where there’s very little land. My father said our only chance of survival was to find a tiny atoll called Île Amsterdam. If we were swept past that, we would not stay afloat long enough to get to Australia, and the boat was too weak to sail back to the island against the wind. Three days later we were incredibly lucky to find Île Amsterdam.
On the island there was a small French scientific base which had a doctor. He said he had to operate on my head because the huge swelling that had developed on top of my fractured skull during the days we’d spent trying to find the atoll threatened to give me brain damage. So, he performed seven operations on me without anaesthetic, as that was not available. And I had to go through all of those alone, screaming at the doctor, as my father was too busy repairing the boat to be with me and my mother said she couldn’t stand the sight of blood.
Was that the worst part of your experience those ten years?
That was physically the most frightening bit of our voyage, and it left me with a profound fear of the sea. I also became very withdrawn as a child, creating imaginary worlds into which I could escape.
But what became a much more difficult part of my childhood was the realisation, as I became older, that I was trapped on the boat. My father had said the voyage would take three years. After four years (having been delayed by the shipwreck), we reached Hawaii, which should have been our end point, since Captain Cook was killed there on his third voyage.
While we were in Hawaii we had a family vote. My father had also always said that we would agree things as a family, so this vote would be binding. If we chose to go home, we would.
I wanted to come back to England. I was desperately lonely and bored. I wanted an education, I wanted friends. I wanted to do all the things a child would normally be able to do. In addition, my relationship with my mother was deteriorating. I still don’t understand the reason for this, but I realise looking back that she was probably narcissistic. Whatever the reason, when I reached puberty, she started not speaking to me for days at a time and calling me names. She refused to buy me a bra when I grew old enough to need one. On the boat there was no way for me to escape from her – I often couldn’t even go ashore.
When the night came for us to vote, I voted to go home and so did my younger brother. My parents voted to keep sailing. My father then announced a new rule: he had the casting vote. He was the captain, so he would decide. In that moment I realised I was a prisoner, and everything I had been told about our adventure, and my ability to make choices within it, was a lie.
We sailed from Hawaii back down to Australia and started circling around the Pacific Ocean. As the years passed and I became an older teenager, my relationship with my mother continued to deteriorate and my desperation to have friends, to know people outside of the boat and to have an education, became more intense. I was trapped in what looked like an idyllic situation – sailing around the South Pacific. In reality I was expected to work for five or six hours unpaid each day, cooking and cleaning for the paying crew that my father was bringing on board to fund the voyage. There was little space, and most of our crew were men, which made the boat a difficult place to be for a teenage girl.
Eventually I managed to start teaching myself by correspondence, though that was not straightforward. For a start, on a boat you have no address. There was also no physical space in which to work – my mother hated me working at the one small table we had as she said that was reserved for the crew. And of course we were often at sea, with the boat heeled over on its side, and everything damp. In addition, all I had to learn from were books – there was no way to contact my teachers, since this was before the internet or satellite phones. So, I would curl up with a book, hidden from my mother in an unused sail, up in the bowsprit where the motion of the boat was most violent, where she was unlikely to come and find me.
But the worst time was still to come. By the time I was 16 and my brother was 15, we had been sailing for nine years. That year my parents left us behind in New Zealand while they kept sailing. We lived alone in a small cabin, with very little money. My brother was going to school while as the girl, I had been told I had to care for him, cooking and cleaning, while also running my father’s business, booking crew onto the boat. When I wasn’t doing that, I was still trying to teach myself and get into university. I became depressed and ended up ringing the New Zealand version of ChildLine and saying, “you know, I’m really, really, really struggling here”.
You wanted an education from an early age, and you went after it, even fighting with your mother for it. Getting an education was an extraordinary achievement. Where did that strength come from?
It’s a question I have often asked myself. Since writing the book, I’ve worked with several charities that are widening children’s access to education. What I’ve learned is that many young people in difficult circumstances crave education. I think two things drive this, and they both applied to me. One was that, in a world where I could control almost nothing – my father would sometimes not even tell us where we were going next – I could control my education. It was a tiny thing that was mine alone. The second was that I hoped it would enable me to escape. I didn’t know if it would work. No-one in my family had been to university before, let alone tried to get there from a boat. But it was all I had. If education didn’t work, I would be trapped forever in a world where I had no money, few friends, and little hope of a positive future.
How did your 10 years on a sailboat end up leading to your career in business?
The good news in all of this is that there is evidence that if you manage to escape from a difficult childhood, you often take strengths from that experience. This does not mean that I recommend difficult childhoods – quite the opposite. Many people who suffer challenging childhoods never recover from them – relative to their peers, they often struggle to maintain normal relationships and have successful careers.
However, those children who do escape sometimes do so with hidden strengths. For me one of those is that I’m resilient. When things get difficult, I look back at that little girl sitting on that boat in the Indian Ocean, with no control over her life, and that puts the challenges I’m facing into perspective. The second thing is that, because I grew up outside of society, I find it easier to ignore some of its norms, including all the “advice” we are given about what we should – or should not – do. This has enabled me to make some bold choices, some of which have shaped my career.
Can you give me an example?
I can give you various examples. Leaving the civil service early on in my career and going into the private sector was an uncommon thing to do in 1997. A lot of people advised me against leaving my secure job in HM Treasury. However, I knew I was ready for a new challenge.
More recently, during COVID, I was asked if I would step in to lead CNH, a public company I was chairing. CNH is a global manufacturer of agriculture and construction machinery, and at the time also trucks, buses and engines. It is a global company employing tens of thousands of people all over the world. I remember asking various friends and family members for their advice on this move, and they all said not to do it – after all we were going into lockdown, and I’d never been a CEO before.
Why did you do it?
My board supported me in taking on the role – they believed I could do it. And I knew that, though there was a lot I didn’t know, I was able to stay calm in stressful situations. This is a huge strength, because it enables you to listen. And while I certainly didn’t know all the answers, I knew there would be people around me in the company who did.
You thrive on challenge, don’t you?
I do – I love to challenge myself and to learn new things. Perhaps this is also connected to my childhood on Wavewalker – once I escaped from that world I was determined to do as much as I possibly could in my life, and I still feel the same way.
Suzanne Heywood’s book Wavewalker was published by Harper Collins.
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