Trapped in a dream

After a less-than-idyllic childhood on the oceans, Suzanne Heywood and her younger brother were put ashore in New Zealand to fend for themselves. She was 16.

- LOUISE CHUNN

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