Inga became a councillor but it wasn’t until the election four years later that she was elected leader by her colleagues. By this stage the shy young feminist with her lilting archipelago accent had metamorphosed into a power-suited harridan, as somebody recently tweeted. Jen’s self-confidence, Eva’s optimism, rubbed off on her; but it took a social campaign of its own to persuade a majority of the twenty other councillors to vote for an island girl with only four years’ experience. By then Jen and Eva, armed with bottles from Harry’s cellar, were experts in this kind of action.

Once in power, the first thing Inga did was to change the rules of the council’s constitution, so that it stipulated:

(1) Fifty per cent of the councillors on the council’s board must be women;

(2) Over any ten-year period the convenor should be a woman fifty per cent of the time.

Of all the changes introduced by the troika (as the press termed Eva, Jen and Inga), it was this – the council’s quota system – which caused most outrage later.

JUDGE: Meanwhile, you went into politics. You have written that it was ‘an unhappy time’?

JEN: It was a big mistake. I thought it would change things. We wasted five years that way, Eva and I.

Eva had supported Jen when she stood as the SNP’s candidate in Dounsay. She’d won easily, after the incumbent, an island man who had once been in Lucette and Eva’s book group, was arrested for sleeping with two of his pupils. The girls, in his English class for their Highers, reported the crime only after the Edinburgh pop group V’s song, ‘Tarn’, became a hit. The lead singer, Verity, had grown up on Tarn and more or less rewrote a council leaflet on child sexual exploitation that Inga had been distributing to schools throughout the islands. Jen, who had to move her family to Dounsay after being elected, gave interviews standing on the pier, the wind whipping one of the colourful scarves she always wore around her face, as she asked for ‘peace for our island community at this difficult time’. She hated the ensuing five years; the sense of treading on some other person’s political territory, even if he was a criminal; the closed-in nature of island life, the exclusion; the unhappiness of her children and husband; but worst of all was the interaction with Westminster. ‘Nothing’s ever going to change there, in a hundred years,’ she told Eva. It was a setback, being in politics; achieved nothing, other than frustration.

JUDGE: It has been suggested that Eva decided to take control of the local paper, almost in reaction to that era?

JEN: To me it would have been the obvious next step but I can’t say what Eva’s views on the subject were.

JUDGE: How did she go about taking control of the paper?