We had left early that morning. And by now, late afternoon, it was starting to get dark. Mercifully the sea had calmed a little, and the approach of night offered the promise of smoother passage. Which was when I heard someone shouting, in English this time, that they could see Ben Kenneth, and everyone rushed on to the deck amid great excitement.

We went too, expecting to see someone called Kenneth, but if he was there among the crowd it was impossible to tell. It was only much later that I learned that Kenneth, or Coinneach in the Gaelic, was the name of the mountain that sheltered the harbour whose twinkling lights we saw for the first time emerging from the dusk.

The land rose darkly all around the town, and along the horizon lay a single line of bright silver light. The last of the day. Wherever we were, it was where we were going, and there was a great sense of anticipation among the other passengers.

A voice came over the Tannoy. “Will those passengers who are disembarking and have not yet purchased a ticket please make their way to the purser’s office.” There was a clanging of bells, and the deep, sonorous moan of the ship’s horn, as she came in to dock at the pier. Deckhands with mops and buckets were sloshing water over salt-caked planking as families gathered with suitcases to watch as a gangplank was manoeuvred into place.

It was a mix of hunger, relief and trepidation that made my legs tremble as I made my way down the steep incline, Peter ahead of me, Catherine at my back, to find unaccustomed solid ground beneath my feet. My body was still moving to the rhythm of the boat.

As the crowd thinned, heading for buses and cars, and darkness fell across the hills, we took out our little rectangles of cardboard and hung them around our necks, just as the nuns had instructed. And we waited. And waited. The lights started to go out on the ferry behind us, and the long shadows we had cast across the pier vanished. One or two people threw curious glances in our direction but hurried on. Now there was almost no one left on the pier, and all we could hear were the voices of the sailors on the ferry as they prepared her to spend the night at dock.

A feeling of such despondency fell over me as we stood there alone in the dark, the black waters inside the protective arms of the harbour slopping against the stanchions of the pier. The lights of a hotel beyond the harbour wall looked warm and welcoming, but not for us.

I could see Catherine’s pale face peering up at me out of the darkness. “What do you think we should do?”

“Wait,” I said. “Like the nuns said. Someone will come.”