I had made sure, when it arrived, that Mum framed and mounted my curlicued certificate of qualification prominently in the living room.

In this instance, Mr Crane had placed an advertisement in a mainland newspaper, generating interest beyond the recruitment pages, as our sporadic call-outs always did. Miriam had pinned a resulting press article to our staff noticeboard:

A 1,500-mile commute, a class of four students, one pub and a single shop – could this be the remotest teaching job on the planet? Lying so far adrift in the North Atlantic, the island of Lark is unreachable by air or sea for five months of the year. Its temperamental climate is one of warm winds followed by dense, persistent fog, making it truly the ostracised cousin of the British Isles…

Miriam had crossed out ‘five months’ and corrected it to ‘seven months’ in the margin of the press clipping. A strange point of pride. There followed several paragraphs of inaccurate history and patronising anecdotes collected from tourists and expatriates – traitors – alongside some anodyne words from the teacher we’d recruited last summer – Amy Sparks. She didn’t manage a year, exiting on the same April ship as my brother, staying just long enough to get over the failed relationship she’d crossed hundreds of miles of sea to escape. Long enough to think better of their split in light of the romantic prospects on Lark. Long enough for me to consider her a friend.

‘But don’t you miss all the shops, Leah?’ That was her parting excuse. No mention of Lark’s awe-inspiring landscape, the closeness of its community, the sunrises, only its lack of a high street.

‘You can’t miss something you’ve never experienced,’ I said, the statement feeling immediately flawed, as wrong as a stone in the mouth.

A wedding invitation from her arrived on the August ship, which seemed like the cruellest of jokes.

‘You’re scared of the mainland!’ she had said to me once, teasingly, thinking she had uncovered my naughtiest secret. ‘You only talk about loving Lark so much because you’re such a chicken!’ Miles of sea between us and still she was taunting me.

The article in the mainland press was illustrated by our most recent end-of-year photo. Caption: The entire pupil population – all 38 of them! I look it up sometimes, that article, study the expressions of the three Eldest Girls on the back row – Britta, Anna, Jade-Marie. I search their faces for hints. Was it happening already? Was the idea in them then? But they seem as upright and guileless as the very small ones sitting cross-legged on the front row.

‘Oh, yes, he’s most definitely a man,’ Miriam went on. ‘Quite a dishy one at that.’

Ruth grunted at this turn in the conversation. ‘Wow,’ she muttered. ‘A man. I never saw that coming, did you, Miss Cedars?’