Resolved to spend a lazy morning on the sofa under a blanket, Anna made herself a mug of tea and settled down with Bren’s recipe book. Even if she couldn’t cook today, she could look at recipes for future lunch services. She flicked gently through the book, searching out more of her predecessor’s neat little annotations. It was almost like time-travel, the way they flitted back and forth through the years with their sometimes cryptic memories of times past. Beside a recipe for hot ginger pudding, for example, Bren had scribbled a mention that in December 1996 she’d had to make it with ground ginger instead of stem ginger from a jar, which was fine but in future if she did so she would add a teaspoon of mixed spice to lift the flavour. In January 1979, Bren wrote an entirely new recipe, a lemon sponge cake with homemade raspberry jam stirred in alongside nibs of marzipan, and noted that this had evolved out of necessity because a snowstorm had left the village cut off for a week and she’d been using up what she had left in the cupboards.

Took a piece to each house, the note added. Even DM, though he would not accept it. Cut his nose off to spite his face, that fool would.

Anna shook her head at Douglas McKean’s stubborn determination. Then she wondered if Bren had mentioned adverse weather anywhere, particularly the event in 1953 that had changed the place forever. She kept reading through notes, all too fascinating to pass over, until she came to one that spoke of the great storm. It was jotted beside a recipe for Dundee cake. Bren’s penmanship had taken on a spiky quality, less neat than usual, and Anna could almost feel the shock, echoing down through the years.

Terrible night, terrible day. I baked in the stove, cake after cake, all through the night, just to drown out the rage of the sea. I heard the crash of the boats being torn from the shore. One hit the side of the bothy before it rolled out to its end beneath the waves. I thought I would be next, that I and this place would be swallowed up whole by the storm. But this morning, here we still are, while so much else has gone from the village. All of Douglas McKean’s boats, including my father’s, gone, gone without a trace. He can’t ever hope to replace them. He’s done for. Yet here, in this place, I was fairly untouched. A tile or two from the roof will need replacing, that’s all. In this place I made my luck, and it has always been lucky for me. In fact I think I should rename her. She’s more than a shed. She is the Fishergirl’s Luck.