‘They went out far. Maybe as far as the continental shelf edge, even though it was late in the season and the storms were coming,’ I tell Charlie. ‘His crews always trusted him to keep the gear square and hauling speeds tight. He knew the sea depths and fishing grounds, the local tidal streams. No one was a better fisherman than him.’

I look down at the table. At my fingers.

‘But the weather turned. Sky went dark like night. The sun was winter-low. Its reflection in the sea made your eyes water.’

It’s easy to remember the rain like cold pinpricks, turning the sand black. The wind, high and wild. Fifty and then sixty knots. The sea white with the crests of heavy rolling waves. And that sunlight: a line of bright silver below the black-dark moving sky; above the black-dark rising sea.

‘When they came back it was evening. Because of low tide and the heavy following sea, they couldn’t put in at Na Bàigh, so they rounded the headland and made for the inlet below the village.’

I stop. My hands have begun to shake. The air, I remember, had smelled like smoke: sweet and sharp. And then it brought lightning: throwing distant spikes into the horizon. I hadn’t been scared then, standing alone on the beach. And I was no longer angry. Not like I’d been that morning, tracing their shapes against the window as they left, my father’s hunched shape just visible inside the wheelhouse of the Acair. But there was something in my heart, too big and strange even for awe when I saw that first boat trying to come round Àird Èinis.

‘The light on the headland wasn’t there. Didn’t warn them. And so they came too close. The forward boat smashed against the rocks before they even got around it. The other two didn’t ground, but their keels were ripped open and they started taking on water. By the time they reached the inlet, they were already sinking.’

I wasn’t alone for long after that. Àrd Shiadair and Èinis would come alive in storms when boats were still out. As if the lightning were touch paper and the thunder a siren. Above the bluffs alarm built and grew to a golden glow, and then was filled with people and torches searching the horizon, the sea, the disappeared light that had become a black tower – a shadow like something burned against a wall. There was a scream, I remember – just one and not loud at all: thin and high and short – when the two remaining boats were spotted close to shore. One was the Acair; even in the gloom, I recognised the shape and colour of my father’s bloody-minded fury, his determination.

The men came down to the beach then to help bring them in; the women stayed high to watch and shine their lanterns and torches. It would have been different probably, if those boats hadn’t almost grounded, if their hulls weren’t already stripped raw. Perhaps the fishermen would have made it through the foaming surf and storm unscathed. Instead, as both boats sank by their sterns, the sea rolled in and swamped them a few hundred yards from shore, sweeping every man overboard and taking them back into deep water. None of the shelter-aft life rafts deployed. The canisters had been lashed to their cradles to stop them falling overboard in heavy seas, and they went down with the boats.