'I was 6 when my dad took me on a boat trip. It was 10 years before I made it back home.'

Suzanne Heywood was just six years old when her father gave her the news. As casually as he ate his breakfast, Gordon Cook told his family that they would be leaving their life in England behind to sail around the world.

Despite being fascinated by explorer Captain Cook, Suzane's father had limited sailing experience, and her mother Mary hated boats. At five years old, her brother Jonathan had not long learned the sea even existed.

Just one year older, Suzanne was not much the wiser. But she did know that her dad was her hero. So they all got on the Wavewalker – a small and old-fashioned wooden boat– ready for what was supposed to be a three-year voyage.

As soon as they boarded, Suzanne and Jonathan's respective roles became clear. While her younger brother was the "golden child" who would help out on deck, she became the "Cinderella" who had to cook and clean below. With not much more than corned beef and spam on the menu, it was an incredibly dull experience for a young girl. And she was desperate for an escape.

Suzanne boarded the boat when she was seven. Image: Instagram/@suzanneheywood1

"I was a complete prisoner in this environment," Suzanne, now 55, told Mia Freedman on Mamamia's No Filter podcast. "I had no choice on where we would go, and often my father wouldn't even tell me where we were going to sail to next. So you're completely imprisoned in this world."

Trapped and desperate, things were about to get a whole lot worse for Suzanne.

"In the southern Indian Ocean, we hit a terrible, terrible storm," she recalls. "The waves became bigger and bigger, and eventually, we're very badly shipwrecked."

Suzanne remembers the boat almost sinking, and her body flying against the cabin walls and ceiling.

"I fracture my skull and break my nose, and we end up on a tiny, little atoll island in the middle of the Indian Ocean called Isle, Amsterdam, where I have seven head operations without anaesthetic."

Physical wounds were just one of the side effects of the shipwreck; it delayed the family's voyage by a whole year. When the Wavewalker reached Hawaii, where Captain Cook was killed, it was supposed to turn around and travel back through the Panama Canal to the UK. But it didn't.

Suzanne begged her father for an end date; to send her to school; to let her off the boat. But she was denied.

"My father is somebody who will not accept somebody challenging his authority," she told Mia. "I worshipped him as a child, but I was also quite frightened of him. And on the occasions where I did challenge him, he became very aggressive and would swear at me. 

"He once put me on shore and refused to let me come back on the boat for a day. I remember sitting at the end of the jetty because it felt like the safest place to be. He was not a man that you could force."

Not yet 16, Suzanne had no passport, no money, and no contact with her relatives back in the UK. Accepting she was physically "trapped," she turned to mental escapism through education.

While her mother attempted to teach her children, her seasickness made lessons sporadic - before they eventually stopped altogether. So the young girl took matters into her own hands, reading every book she could get her hands on. At 13, Suzanne enrolled in an Australian correspondence school, where learning happened via mail. 

"I'm desperately trying to study and teach myself as a way of escaping, because it becomes very clear that the reason why my parents want me to be on board is because they're using me to work on the boat, to cook and clean," she said.

"They don't want me to leave to go to school, because I'm actually useful on the boat. So I know I've got to escape, because otherwise this voyage could go on forever."

Meanwhile, her younger brother John had given up on school entirely. And while they hadn't taken much of an interest in Suzanne's education, her parents started to worry about their little boy.

"At one point, my father actually said to me, you know, when your brother grows up, he needs to support a family, and you don't, so we need to make sure that he gets an education," Suzanne recalled.

Then she turned 16, and a glimmer of hope appeared. Suzanne was to get off the boat with her brother. Her parents had decided to enroll John, 15, in a school in New Zealand. Here, Suzanne could finish her correspondence.

Gordon was to stay with them, and Mary was to return to the boat to make money. But she refused to go back to sea without her husband. So both Mary and Gordon boarded the Wavewalker and waved goodbye to their children, leaving them in a hut near Lake Rotoiti.

"We don't know anybody apart from one person up in Auckland," Suzanne said. "[Our parents] don't come back apart from a couple of very fleeting visits for about nine months."

Despite the hardships of the boat, the now-55-year-old described this time on shore as the "bleakest" part of her childhood. It did, however, make her determined for a better life.

"I wrote to Harvard University, Harvard America, Sydney University, Sydney Australia, Brisbane University, Auckland University, and London University," she said on No Filter.

"By the way, there is no London, or rather, there are several. So I don't know where that letter went, and Oxford and Cambridge," she continued.

After many, many rejections, Suzanne received a life-changing letter.

"Oxford wrote back and said, 'write us a couple of essays,' which I did. And then they wrote back and said, 'If you can get yourself here, we'll interview you'.

"So I went picking kiwi fruit in New Zealand, and I earned enough to pay for an air ticket with a small contribution from my father, and at the end of that year, I got on a plane on a one-way ticket and came back to the UK. I basically bet everything on somehow I'm going to convince them to let me in."

Suzanne went on to marry late British civil servant Jeremy Heywood. Image: Instagram/@suzanneheywood1

And she did. But paying for her education wasn't easy. And in her second term at Oxford, her parents cut off all financial ties, disowning her completely.

Seeking help from the university, Suzanne was given a hardship grant. With this, she threw all she had into her studies and eventually earned a PhD from Cambridge. She met and married civil servant Jeremy Heywood and had three children wit him. Sadly, Jeremy died of lung cancer in 2018.

Looking back now, Suzanne sees even more clearly how "deprived" her world was on the boat.

"If my parents have kind of locked me in a flat for a decade, we would all say that's terrible. But actually being stuck at sea as a child, you're, particularly a small child, you're down below in a very limited space with very few things to do," she told No Filter.

"It's also very difficult as a child to challenge your own world. If you accept that your parents are not good parents to you, where do you go from there? Particularly when you live on a boat and there's nothing else in your world."

Listen to the full No Filter episode below.