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Posted 20 hours ago

Wavewalker: THE INTERNATIONAL BESTELLING TRUE-STORY OF A YOUNG GIRL’S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM AND EDUCATION

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It's an inspirational story of life at sea from the perspective of a young girl entirely at the mercy of other people's obsessions. I only need a month’s extension to my visa this time,” I told the officer, while he thumbed through my passport.

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. Maybe you hear "grew up on a boat" and think that it might have been a bit of a fun adventurous way to grow up like someone who grows up at a tourist resort. I also found accounts online of her brother and father discrediting Suzanne’s account (ie this book). 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.

But I decided long ago that writing a version that didn’t upset them would be so neutered that it would almost not be worth writing. Join Suzanne, a plucky young child, as Wavewalker, their 70 foot wooden schooner, sails from the UK through cold Southern Ocean to Hawaii and the remote Solomon Islands in the Coral Sea and beyond. It all ended in Aotearoa, with a teenage Heywood looking after her younger brother and her Dad’s business. 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.

It was that the choice of voyage was incredibly dangerous and the way in which it was done, with a certain foolhardiness around the details: taking a novice crew on board, never seeming to have any backup, the length of distances travelled involving such small children with no real provision to look after us. It requires true courage to take ownership of one’s own story when others involved in the story have such a different version, especially when those others are one’s ageing parents. 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. In desperation she had telephoned Childline, and finally boarded a flight back to England funded by her father.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. She now works with charities involved in getting children, and particularly girls, access to education in Africa and Afghanistan.

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