‘So, now we are alone,’ said their Council leader, their headmaster, his smile inviting their complicity. The small congregation of St Rita’s pupils, infants to seniors, along with their teaching staff, no more than fifty all told, laughed obligingly.

He was referring to the ships. The August one had been and gone, bringing the islanders the last batch of supplies from the mainland. The days were still bright, the sun making teasing promises to stay a while, but soon the fog would descend, making Lark unreachable. Unleavable. There would be no more ships until April.

‘Closed-months Rationing’ began at the Provisions Store at the weekend to ensure all 253 residents of the island remained well fed until spring. Now it was 1 September, time to knuckle down to a new school year, so Mr Crane’s subsequent homily was on the importance of hard work. Thessalonians was used to strengthen his case. ‘For we hear there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies…’

The Eldest Girls of St Rita’s did not mutter at his speech, nor roll their eyes. Back then, at the start of September, Britta Sayers, Jade-Marie Ahearn and Anna Duchamp were still, for the most part, good girls, not worthy of attention. The teaching staff had given them each a brief up-and-down for uniform compliance. The younger senior girls, who were feeling mature having just risen a year, glanced the elder girls’ way – a reminder that there was yet more growing up to do.

All three of the Eldest Girls had come of age, Jade-Marie being the last to turn sixteen in the middle of the holidays, and there had been a perceptible filling out of their bodies, new angles forming from the sharpening of their features. The boys who were old enough appraised these changes with furtive curiosity, as if peering through the glass of an oven door to judge the rising of a cake.

But none of this was done in chapel. The boys would have seen the girls in July and August, lying on their towels on the small beach offered up by the harbour at low tide, as exposed as they’d ever be, in rolled-up denim and coloured vests. They’d have watched the girls devour the summer’s delivery of magazines from the mainland, sliding sunglasses down their noses to examine the few passing strangers, searching them for hints of what life was like in that distant outside world.