Heywood describes times of enjoyment, dangers and life threatening injuries but the mood alters as she grows older and the selfishness of her parents deprived her of the more normal upbringing she craved. That said she eschews self pity and the determination she displayed to break free and live her own life is evident although not without lasting emotional damage. Eventually the journey stretched to 17 years, with the children getting their education from a correspondence course based in Brisbane. He set off in a hire car early one morning for his interview, squashed into his only suit. Later that day, we went to the yacht club to await his call. Mum took it when it came. “He got the job,” she told Jon and me afterwards. “We’re going to apply for New Zealand residency. The park’s owners want your dad to live in Rotorua, so we’ll find a school for Jon there.”

An annual award for heroism at sea was presented earlier this month for a feat of seamanship performed more than 30 years ago.

The Lady Swathling Award, for an outstanding feat of seamanship and navigation, was presented to Gordon Cook from Gloucestershire in recognition of his outstanding seamanship and navigation when he successfully sailed and navigated a severely damaged 30 ton yacht to safety saving the lives of all six people onboard. I wanted to look at Jon, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the final slip of paper, which would determine everything. Dad smoothed it out. Dad returned to Tauranga, and I settled into a routine. Each morning, Jon came into the main bach for breakfast and I asked about his plans for the day, though he rarely said much. After he left to catch the school bus, I tidied up and took my books out to study on the veranda overlooking the lake.

Children are humans. They have a right to an education and a right to a social life. There is a UN mandate for children that was clearly breached in multiple ways by my parents. My fear felt physical – a cold lump I carried in my stomach. Every so often, if the wind wailed or our movement down a wave was particularly steep, my heart pounded and my legs felt weak. It has been great to see the interest of the local community in our project – particularly the presence of the Wavewalker – which has ensured we’ve managed to continue with the piling at the sea wall despite some of the stormy weather we’ve recently experienced.” As part of the designs, the new sea wall will also improve passengers’ experience and access at Dawlish station through a new footbridge with lifts, whilst providing local residents and visitors to Dawlish with a high-level, wider and safer promenade and pedestrian access to the beach. Chris Pearce, Network Rail’s interim Western route director, said: “We are really pleased with the progress we have made in Dawlish. Many will remember the significant damage to the railway in 2014 and the impact it had on Dawlish and the wider south west, and the work we are continuing to do in Dawlish will protect the town and region for at least the next 100 years.Sue had suffered a fractured skull but Gordon was able to patch up the boat well enough to get to Isle Amsterdam where a French military doctor operated on his daughter. We set off again. After a brief classroom experience in Queensland, Australia, some months later, I registered with a correspondence school, but finding the space and time I needed to study on board Wavewalker became a huge battle. My parents had by then started bringing paying crew on to the boat – advertising our voyages as “whale and dolphin sighting expeditions”. This turned our boat into a floating hotel in which I was expected to cook and clean for several hours a day. In addition, after I reached puberty, my relationship with my mother had deteriorated and she often didn’t talk to me for weeks on end, instead only referring to me in the third person, as if I was not there. I was trapped on Wavewalker against my will, with parents who didn’t seem to care how unhappy I was Like Tara Westover’s seminal memoir Education, Heywood makes fierce and heroic efforts over the years to educate herself, seeing it as a way of escape from family entrapment. (Unlike Westover, however, the writing itself is not as memorably compelling, although the narrative is, if overlong.) At one point, aged 16, Heywood is left alone for months with her brother in New Zealand, while their parents try to make some money by voyaging with more paying crew. Against truly remarkable odds she is granted an interview to Oxford, and then a university place. From there he plans to take the Panama Canal to get to the Galapgos islands followed by Tahiti, the Cook Islands, Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand and Australia.