How an endless voyage round the world stole my childhood

March 25, 2023 6:44 AM

Suzanne Heywood tells of how her parents took her and her brother on and endless round the world yacht trip starting in 1976. CW: child abduction.
posted by rongorongo (53 comments total)

oh man. I'm crying.
What was wrong with those people? My people didn't almost kill us on a boat, but they had the same mentality.
posted by mumimor at 7:32 AM on March 25, 2023 [12 favorites]

This story starts with her mentioning three crew members. After that big storm and near-sinking, she talks about two crew members.

We never learn any of their names.

This is a horrible story but I feel like that is a detail that shouldn’t be glossed over.
posted by mhoye at 7:41 AM on March 25, 2023 [9 favorites]

To clarify, it's two different crew members:

We then set off across the notorious southern Indian Ocean towards Australia, this time with two inexperienced crew members on board
posted by AlSweigart at 7:49 AM on March 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

I looked up her father's name and discovered that he was planning to sail around the world again at 73.

> "They haven't done too badly without formal education," said Gordon.

> "Jon is on his fourth Masters degree at the moment. Sue did a PHD in zoology before being head-hunted by McKinsey's. I like to think I saved them from the British education system!"

What a horrible, horrible narcissist.
posted by Pitachu at 7:57 AM on March 25, 2023 [45 favorites]

Also, wait-- it looks like a short account of the trip, "We're not afraid to die if we can all be together" was written by the father and is used in some English curriculums in India? Bizarre. Was anybody here made to read that?
posted by Pitachu at 8:12 AM on March 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Imagine if people could sue their parents for the abuse they suffered as children - and get a cash amount for the cost of therapy and lost earnings that resulted from the abuse.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:14 AM on March 25, 2023 [24 favorites]

Any idea what happened to Jon when she went back to England? It seems like he wasn't with her.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:15 AM on March 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

It reminds me of All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in India by Rachel Manija Brown:

When she was seven, Rachel Manija Brown's parents, post-60s hippies, uprooted her from her native California and moved to an ashram in a cobra-ridden, drought-stricken spot in India.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:16 AM on March 25, 2023 [9 favorites]

This situation and millions like it are why I’ve come to think all children should be required to attend schools with accreditation and government oversight. Every single child should have regular access to a school nurse and a school psychologist who are public employees.
posted by pickles_have_souls at 8:39 AM on March 25, 2023 [58 favorites]

> "They haven't done too badly without formal education," said Gordon.

That's the sort of thing you say when you believe that class membership will overcome every other consideration. What's disturbing is how often it comes true.
posted by AlSweigart at 8:40 AM on March 25, 2023 [31 favorites]

If it helps, she did go on to have a very successful career in the British Civil Service and then outside it. She married Jeremy Heywood who became head of the Home Civil Service. Sadly he died of cancer in 2018 and got the blame for a scandal (by the time of the enquiry he was already dead, and no-one was allowed to represent him). However, he did get a peerage, so she is now the Right Honourable Lady Heywood of Whitehall, and I imagine monetary compensation is not a high priority.
posted by Phanx at 8:45 AM on March 25, 2023 [10 favorites]

This situation and millions like it are why I’ve come to think all children should be required to attend schools with accreditation and government oversight. Every single child should have regular access to a school nurse and a school psychologist who are public employees

There should be exceptions for children who can't safely do this due to:

a) physical health problems; and/or

b) mental health problems; and/or

c) being bullied.

There is a role for home schooling but it needs oversight and monitoring by an independent and accredited third party.

A friend of mine at high school missed a lot of school due to chronic migraines, and she really suffered from not being able to access remote schooling. (The Education Department told her if her parents house was further away from the school she would be eligible, but that no one whose house was within 5 kilometres of the school could have remote schooling, no matter how sick they were.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:47 AM on March 25, 2023 [15 favorites]

(For context on the editing - this is an extract from her forthcoming book)
posted by rongorongo at 8:50 AM on March 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

Yes, with regard to the storm this article (BBC.co.uk) confirms that all the crew survived:

Fortunately, Gordon was the only person on deck steering the schooner, he was thrown overboard and only his lifeline saved him. The crew below deck escaped with a variety of minor injuries apart from Suzanne who suffered a serious head injury.

The worst part for me was when they voted on whether to return home or sail the Pacific and the tie was broken by fiat of the "captain". Even if it had been 3-1 it seems likely that Pacific would have prevailed.
posted by What is E. T. short for? at 8:51 AM on March 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

There should be exceptions for children who can't safely do this due to:

a) physical health problems; and/or

b) mental health problems; and/or

c) being bullied.

There is a role for home schooling but it needs oversight and monitoring by an independent and accredited third party.


I met all of the above, and unfortunately homeschooling was probably still worse for me than public school exactly because of that lack of oversight. No one to see I was malnourished and that my home economics “class” was: my mom took me grocery shopping one day, and told me how to use a measuring cup, then did nothing else the rest of the semester. One of my brothers science “classes” was “taking care of the bees.” Which was just a chore my mom decided counted as a class. The "it's just one big geography class" comment made me shudder.

I could only skim this article from how hard it resonated, even though she obviously has some unique experiences and trauma I don't. I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s still completely possible for parents to do this shit, decades later. And the damage is incalculable.
posted by brook horse at 9:04 AM on March 25, 2023 [36 favorites]

I can't really blame sailing for this, it's the narcissism.

I have friends who had super non-traditional traveling lifestyles as kids, but their parents were deeply aware they were humans with needs (and, in a time when "just homeschool!" wasn't really done, I wonder now if this was a way to solve the problem of 70s/80s schools not being a good fit for some kids) and did what needed to be done to get them met, along with the more unique School of the World stuff that can be facilitated by that lifestyle.

It's definitely a double-edged sword - not having a permanent address means schools can't call in truancy reports on kids who just cannot or should not be forced to go, and on the other hand not having a permanent address means that a family who desires that their children fall through the cracks can make it so.

I am very sorry these kinds of things were done to some of you. I know some people come out of that kind of adversity super-high-functioning on paper but it's still a situation that leaves lasting trauma.
posted by Lyn Never at 9:12 AM on March 25, 2023 [16 favorites]

So today we are pretending that government schools aren't a nightmarish hellscape? I'm not saying she didn't have an awful childhood, but there's a version of her story where it turns out to have been a great childhood, and there's also a far more common version of the story where the terrible childhood happens in England, with the schools and the bureaucratic oversight.

The thing that makes the difference is the parents, maybe. I'm reasonably confident her parents could have screwed up her childhood no matter where they were.
posted by surlyben at 9:12 AM on March 25, 2023 [33 favorites]

Definitely some scores being settled here; how dare her dad try to take credit for his kids' ability to overcome his shitty parenting!
posted by emjaybee at 9:13 AM on March 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

Ah yes, the classic "of COURSE your opinion matters - as long as it agrees with mine!" parent move. I wonder what the author's take is on the people vlogging their family living out of an RV.
posted by threementholsandafuneral at 9:19 AM on March 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

This reminds me of The Mosquito Coast, by Paul Theroux
posted by Brian B. at 9:20 AM on March 25, 2023 [21 favorites]

I'm reasonably confident her parents could have screwed up her childhood no matter where they were.

I'm sure that's true, but I think her situation was worse, because she was cut off from any possible support system. If you live in one place and go to school, you're going to have some contact with people outside your family unit, even if your parents do their best to control it. She was unusually isolated and vulnerable, because her living situation cut her off from other people to a really extreme degree.

Having said that, I have noticed that some survivors of educational neglect really thrive academically after they manage to enroll in school. It doesn't justify the abuse, but it's an interesting phenomenon.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:36 AM on March 25, 2023 [17 favorites]

Her Dad being wildly narcissistic is terrible. Her Mom not speaking to her for weeks at a time is also terrible. She experienced puberty on a boat in the ocean with almost so support. Then she's stuck in NZ alone, and Child Services does nothing significant. She has her parents' competence and she certainly learned amazing skills.

The solution to schools is that they should be safe and offer quality education, at a minimum.
posted by theora55 at 9:40 AM on March 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

When I was six I was asked to vote on whether my family should flee the US and move to Spain or flee the US and move to Mexico.

Votes like that and the one in the article are a means to facilitate abuse. Giving a child an apparent voice in these major life decisions means that the child has to take responsibility for that decision; you can't complain, you chose this. It's a way for abusive parents to spread out the responsibility for their awful life choices.

The rest of my childhood was spent moving, never staying in one place more than a few months, as my alcoholic narcissistic mother wreaked havoc wherever she went and left as soon as the consequences of her actions caught up with her. All framed as 'an adventure!'

I bought into the 'adventure!' framing for a long, long time, and my life only started to make sense when I realized how astonishingly bleak my childhood had been. And I've been dealing with the fallout from it ever since.

Cutting kids off from any possible support system is part of the narcissists' pattern, they can do that by sabotaging your relationships or just forbidding access to the outside world, or by creating fear of any support system that might help. Moving the kids around a lot makes it easier to cut them off, but narcissists find a way, every single time.

I'd say that we need better education about abuse, we need to keep track of kids and not let them fall through the cracks in the system, but frankly, there are kids being abused by narcissists like these who've lived in the same house all their lives. Their parents are pillars of the community. There are well-off kids in good schools who get good grades and whose lives are absolute hell the moment they come home. The problem here isn't the travel, or the sailing, it's the absolute lack of empathy and humanity of narcissistic parents. If your parents don't care about your needs, you life is going to be awful no matter where you are.
posted by MrVisible at 9:49 AM on March 25, 2023 [71 favorites]

I have friends who had super non-traditional traveling lifestyles as kids, but their parents were deeply aware they were humans with needs (and, in a time when "just homeschool!" wasn't really done, I wonder now if this was a way to solve the problem of 70s/80s schools not being a good fit for some kids) and did what needed to be done to get them met, along with the more unique School of the World stuff that can be facilitated by that lifestyle.

Yes, a friend of mine was badly bullied at school, and her parents (who were both professional schoolteachers with teaching degrees) decided to take her out of school and spend 6 months driving around Australia to give her a break from the bullying.

She was glad to get a break from the bullying (and her parents are lovely and not at all abusive) - the only downside she remembers is the extreme monotony of the meals, lots of avocados and bananas and peanut butter as money was very very tight.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:00 AM on March 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

Many schools are also places of institutional neglect - the answer isn’t ‘more schooling and better’, the answer is always educating humans on how to be emotionally healthy. Sadly we are a long way from this being accepted, especially in english speaking countries.
posted by The River Ivel at 10:08 AM on March 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

The most shocking thing to me was when she called "Childline" all they could offer was sympathy. Was there no government agency in NZ to report child neglect to?
posted by rikschell at 10:13 AM on March 25, 2023 [13 favorites]

The most shocking thing to me was when she called "Childline" all they could offer was sympathy. Was there no government agency in NZ to report child neglect to?

She was there on a temporary visa and if the authorities knew how absent her parents were, her visa would not have been renewed.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:17 AM on March 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

Having said that, I have noticed that some survivors of educational neglect really thrive academically after they manage to enroll in school. It doesn't justify the abuse, but it's an interesting phenomenon.

My theory is that because educational neglect rarely occurs in isolation, these kids develop extreme independence and competence because they had to in order to survive. The time management, planning, and self-motivation skills required to manage your own health and well-being (because your parents won't) translate easily to those required to excel academically.

This served me incredibly well in college and grad school. I mean, I had the most structure of my life in undergrad. I had assigned readings, rather than being given a textbook and a workbook and being told to finish it sometime before grades were due in the summer? There was food made for me every day and I just had to scan a card, walk in, and take what I wanted? If I didn't understand something in class, I could ask a classmate or even the professor to explain it? College was a breeze. Grad school a little less, but the idea of someone checking in once a week to see how I was progressing and help me troubleshoot problems felt like an enormous luxury. I mean, it still does--I've only recently realized most people reach out to their advisors between meetings if they need help, rather than struggling on their own until the designated Problem-Solving Hour arrives.

Of course, I'm now on my last year of my PhD and have entirely crashed and burned because it turns out that I've been dissociating my entire life and as soon as I felt safe enough to fail all those emotions I never had time or space in my childhood to feel came slamming back. And even with an amazing support network, the drive to be handling everything on your own is palpable. I'm still working on not going full "spooked horse" when people offer to help me. I really hope Heywood had/has a good therapist and support network, because it hit harder than I ever expected it to.
posted by brook horse at 10:25 AM on March 25, 2023 [50 favorites]

I have noticed that some survivors of educational neglect really thrive academically after they manage to enroll in school. It doesn't justify the abuse, but it's an interesting phenomenon.

We only hear the stories of those that survived educational neglect and thrived well enough to tell their story (with a legitimate axe to grind about their upbringing). I would venture to guess that there are multitudes more that don't thrive, and we don't hear their stories.
posted by ShooBoo at 10:27 AM on March 25, 2023 [60 favorites]

She and her brother should have been put up for adoption and her father deserves to die alone.
posted by Beholder at 10:34 AM on March 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Madness. This is the story of Donald Crowhurst plus The Glass Castle, although Jeannette Walls' father at least seemed fond of her -- and he didn't have a comfortable life to throw up out of boredom. All he had were dreams.

At least it makes for a book that she must have been planning for years. And if she's settling scores, good for her. The expression comes from "scores" made on a chalkboard by merchants for what they were owed.

(Speaking of The Mosquito Coast, they remade it recently in a way that irritated me profoundly. Instead of a paranoid charismatic moving the family to Central America to chase ghosts, they made him right to be paranoid. Chased by agents of something or other, making him one of those dad-thriller heroes.)
posted by Countess Elena at 10:35 AM on March 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

This also reminds me of paddle to the Amazon, a tale of a father who didn't believe in asthma taking his kids from Manitoba to Brazil, and nearly killing them a bunch of times.
The book is short, and written by the father, but you can still tell how bad it must have been for the kids.
posted by Acari at 11:10 AM on March 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

(I should note that they went by canoe, and that one of his sons had asthma but I don't think he brought any medicine for him because 'fresh air'.)
posted by Acari at 11:22 AM on March 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

My theory is that because educational neglect rarely occurs in isolation, these kids develop extreme independence and competence because they had to in order to survive. The time management, planning, and self-motivation skills required to manage your own health and well-being (because your parents won't) translate easily to those required to excel academically.

Technically this is called parentification; you're treated as an adult by your parents and expected to take up adult burdens too early. It leads, in my experience, to brilliant, gifted young people burning out hard. Because you've built yourself up as a simulacrum of an adult, but you don't have any of the experiences from childhood that make up an actual mature human being. It's like building a high rise without a foundation.

By adopting the role of parental caregiver, the child loses their real place in the family unit and is left lonely and unsure.[12] In extreme instances, there may be what has been called a kind of disembodiment, a narcissistic wound that threatens one's basic self-identity.[28] In later life, parentified children often experience anxiety over abandonment and loss, and demonstrate difficulty handling rejection and disappointment within interpersonal relationships.[29]

posted by MrVisible at 11:55 AM on March 25, 2023 [20 favorites]

There's no service called Childline in NZ now and I don't think there ever was. There is a Youthline. Youthline (and equivalent Childline in the UK) are not govt child services. They are charities that provide phone counselling. Which is generally good, sometimes kids in trouble do not want to and should not talk to the govt.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:08 PM on March 25, 2023 [11 favorites]

I have a very similar upbringing story.

My parents drove us from Toronto to Florida in a 1972 Chevy Impala during March Break.
posted by srboisvert at 12:59 PM on March 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

Margaret Atwood travelled as a child with her academic parent across Canada for field research, but that may have been summers IIRC so sometimes itinerant parenting/family life is less terrible.

To add to the Jeanette Walls mention upthread, Tara Westover’s harrowing _Educated_ is similar on flipping educational neglect to success.
posted by childofTethys at 1:27 PM on March 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Damn. I lived on a boat with my parents for a year when I was 10, and did correspondence school the whole time. We hit one very nasty storm while traveling from Nassau, Bahamas to the Virgin Islands - 70 mph winds, 30 foot waves, real Perfect Storm kind of stuff - but made it through without injury. It was definitely a very interesting trip - we hit the entire Eastern seaboard, the Abacos, the Virgin Islands and the West Indies down to just north of Grenada. Lots of snorkeling, dolphin, blue water, waves, some seasickness, etc. And some financial issues in the middle that thankfully got resolved. But at no point was I ever without education or two adults looking out for my wellbeing. That story is hells of fucked up and the dad and mom both are horrible, Flowers In The Attic style people.
posted by grumpybear69 at 4:29 PM on March 25, 2023 [15 favorites]

See also: The Boy Who Fell to Shore.
posted by popcassady at 5:26 PM on March 25, 2023

I think I read some stuff in the news papers about this family. Whole thing sounds dreadful. It was painted as this cool adventure in the papers.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 9:38 AM on March 26, 2023

“ So today we are pretending that government schools aren't a nightmarish hellscape?”

Yeah but then you get to LEAVE and be somewhere else at the end of the day. And yeah. You have the *chance* of getting help from another adult. It may not be guaranteed, but it’s better than no chance at all. Besides. Public schools don’t have to be hell. We as a society can choose different.
posted by Bottlecap at 12:33 PM on March 26, 2023 [9 favorites]

...there are multitudes more that don't thrive, and we don't hear their stories...

Oh, I don't know. We here about them every day. How they inhabit our prison system, costing taxpayers money. How they commit suicide or shoot somebody. How they have children, feed from the government trough, and continue to perpetuate the abuse. We hear about the ones that just won't pull themselves up by their bootstrings...
posted by BlueHorse at 1:35 PM on March 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

I want to say a very sincere thank you to those of you who shared similar stories in this thread. Thank you for writing them and letting us understand a bit more. I hope you're doing all right now, and I'm sorry about crappy parenting. All love.
posted by lauranesson at 2:33 PM on March 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

This story makes me realize that I haven't thought sufficiently about how closely related the concepts of "adventure" and "trauma" are.
posted by Not A Thing at 2:34 PM on March 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

"The most shocking thing to me was when she called "Childline" all they could offer was sympathy. Was there no government agency in NZ to report child neglect to?"

Part of the premise of phone counselling is absolute confidentiality for the caller, so that people are not dissuaded from calling. So I don't think it's a case of "all they could offer", more "their policy which is generally the right one is a headache in individual cases like this."
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 5:29 PM on March 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

She had seven operations on her head with no anesthesia, lying alone in a hospital bed for days at a time. I can't get over this. And then they just got back on the boat for years and years, after she nearly died. Her parents are truly horrible people. This is going to stay with me for a long time.
posted by ceejaytee at 4:55 AM on March 27, 2023 [11 favorites]

[See also: the execrable Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, another philosophical voyage of a narcissistic deep-thinker (i.e. a verbose asshole with engineer's syndrome and a mythical view of his place in the world) dragging his hapless kid around with him like an accessory to his great and noble mission while bitching in his book that the kid was "whiny" and distracted him from his great and noble mission. Sadly, that awful, stupid book is still revered by countless dreamers and self-important sociopaths and holds its position as the best-selling philosophical book of all time.]
posted by sonascope at 10:03 AM on March 27, 2023 [11 favorites]

This story makes me realize that I haven't thought sufficiently about how closely related the concepts of "adventure" and "trauma" are.

When I was a kid and I had to take the bus with my legally blind, abusive father when my mother was in the hospital with pregnancy complications with my sibling, and we ended up walking along the highway at one point for some reason (the bus line ended, I think?), he called that an adventure. I don't think I was having much fun at the time.

I embrace the idea of adventures now, and I kind of enjoy framing mundane errands as adventures, but heh, yeah...the concept has some rooting in trauma there as well.
posted by limeonaire at 10:05 AM on March 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

See also: that year of homeschool we did when I was in sixth grade, also rife with abuse and incredibly lonely, which separated me from friends I'd made to that point.
posted by limeonaire at 10:08 AM on March 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

We know a few families that pulled their high-school age kids out of school at the beginning of the pandemic and still haven't let them return. Some even moved to a big country house in buttfucknowhere. I know all of the kids that are friends of my kids are absolutely miserable and lonely, because they talk to my kids online.

When I was 9 my family moved from a suburb full of my friends to a big old house in country. I never saw any of those friends again. I hated it there and left as soon as I could and never looked back, but at least I went to school. I can't imagine being that isolated as a teenager.

Since I left home I have always lived in a city or town core where I could walk to everything and am surrounded by people.
posted by fimbulvetr at 1:00 PM on March 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

> “So today we are pretending that government schools aren't a nightmarish hellscape?”

I'm not saying everything about my kids' high schools is perfect, but a nightmarish hellscape it ain't (even for a couple of musical theater nerds)
posted by nickzoic at 6:39 PM on March 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

@sonascope - your review of Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance above makes me feel much better about not being able to finish that book when I tried to read it.
posted by COD at 11:00 AM on March 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

sonascope, thank you. I was thinking the asshole father in the article reminded me of my ex. Then read your comment and remembered that book was his favorite. Of course it was.
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 1:16 PM on March 29, 2023