Malcolm was the oldest son, and had always known the croft would fall to him when his father died, but he hadn’t expected it to be so soon, when he was only twenty-two. They had sixty Hebridean sheep then, fifty-six breeding ewes and four rams when Malcolm took over the tenancy, though he would later manage to increase the flock size a little.

It had been a hard life for Malcolm’s father, especially in winter. He was out before light, seven days a week, and not back until after dark. There was never enough money. You couldn’t really live off a croft, even back then. Malcolm’s father did some part-time work as the harbour master to make ends meet. Malcolm sometimes wondered if his father might have been a different kind of man if he hadn’t been a crofter, if he hadn’t lived on the island. In the evenings, like so many of the island’s men, its crofters and its farmers and its ferrymen, Malcolm’s father would drink, and then, from time to time, he would take out his exhaustion and rage on his wife and children. What a cliché that was, Malcolm thought. The drunk, disappointed man coming home to beat his family.

But in truth, the beatings were hardly worthy of their name: a sudden cuff round the head that sent you flying and left your ears ringing, or a backhand to the face that smarted horribly but rarely left a bruise. It was their unpredictability that frightened Malcolm. His father could be in a rage and never so much as lift a hand to you, or he could be smiling one moment and grabbing you roughly by the shoulder the next. His shouting, too. It was mostly directed at Malcolm’s mother, who his father said was the most useless woman alive, but sometimes it encompassed the boys as well. Malcolm had only seen his father hit his mother once, but it had always been clear who was the chief object of his hatred.

Malcolm had believed for a long time as a child that he and John were united in their loathing of their father. He was shocked to learn later that this was not the case. When they were teenagers, even during one of their father’s black moods, John would defend him, until Malcolm gave up saying anything in case his comments were reported back to their father. As an adult, John would not go so far as to say it had done them good, the way their father had laid down the law, but he would shrug if the subject came up and say, “He was tough on us, just like his dad was on him. Didn’t do us any harm, did it?”