LUCIJA: I believe I may have said this before but I really think it was her time in my country of Bosnia that gave her such a sharp understanding of how the politics of a place implicates its people, and vice versa. You follow? See, back then, my country wasn’t so sad. Back then, my Yugoslavia was an independent republic wedged between Stalin’s Soviet Union and the capitalist West, a state that was freer than the East European satellite states, whose citizens, Eva told me, were often better informed about the world than those she had encountered in France or England; a polity linked for geo-political-historical-cultural dimension with Nehru’s India and Nasser’s Egypt: a self-declared part of the non-aligned Third World. Yes. In my Yugoslavia, Eva saw clearly that politics is not just about economics but also about culture, and that culture isn’t a vaguely determined thing: it is actually quite precise. It was this that she set out to prove with regard to her work, here in the islands. She posted an advert in the newspaper’s listings column, something like: VOLUNTEERS REQUIRED FOR ARCHIPELAGO LIFE DOCUMENTATION PROJECT.

JUDGE: [Sigh] What was that?

LUCIJA: Sister Geraldine knows about it. She was one of the interviewees.

Eva worked with Jen on the Archipelago Life Documentation Project, or Impact Interviews, as she called them for short, throughout Zoe’s childhood and adolescence. Every six months, one of them would borrow a camera from college, and tour the islands, interviewing their volunteers for around half an hour each. None of the volunteers ever met each other; none of them were ever told what the interviews were for, beyond the brief paragraph contained on the disclosure form that mentioned a sociological study of archipelago life conducted by the college and overseen by the Chair of Archipelago Women’s Studies.

Island people come and go – especially those who move out here from the British mainland – and there are faces in the Impact Interviews which appear once or twice, and then disappear, never to be heard from again. A farmer from Eastray had a heart attack four interviews in; the lady from the delicatessen in Lerston is missing from several of the winter interviews because she liked to visit her sister in Bangalore during December. But there are about twelve regulars over a period of fifteen or so years – Eva’s twelve disciples, Jen liked to call them – and the hours and hours of footage are an illuminating portrait of an archipelago changing under the guiding hand of Eva’s group of women. The main thing they bring home is how quickly humans adapt; how little the majority of us question the way things are done, the things that are done to us. How necessary it therefore is that somebody, anybody, should ring the changes.