While one of them stood aloof and silent, the other lined us up in the terminal and knelt down in front of us. Her face seemed softer, somehow, than at any time since they had picked us up from The Dean. She almost smiled, and I saw something that looked close to sympathy in her eyes. From somewhere beneath her skirts she drew out three pieces of card, about nine inches by six. They each had a loop of string hanging from the top edge, just like the notice we’d fashioned to hang around Peter’s neck when we were pretending he was blind. The ones she gave to me and Peter had the name GILLIES scrawled on them in bold black letters. Catherine’s read O’HENLEY.

“When you get off the boat,” she said, “put these around your necks and wait on the quayside. Someone will be there to meet you.”

Finally I summoned the courage to ask the question that Peter had been demanding of me for the last two days. “Where are we going?”

Her face darkened, as if a cloud had passed overhead and cast a shadow on it. “It doesn’t matter. Just stay off the deck. The sea can get rough out there.”

She gave us our tickets then, and stood up, and we were shepherded through crowds of people on to the pier and up a steep gangplank to the deck. The Claymore had one big red funnel with a strip of black around the top, and lifeboats mounted on winches on either side of the stern. Folk gathered at the rail, pressing and pushing, to wave goodbye to friends and relatives as the ship’s horn sounded and the thump of her motors came up through the deck, vibrating through our bodies. But the nuns didn’t wait to wave us off. I saw their black skirts and white headgear as they walked back towards the terminal building. I’ve often wondered if they turned their backs to us because they couldn’t bear to face us, afraid that somewhere deep inside of them, some long-buried spark of humanity might have pricked their conscience.

Desolate is how I felt in that first hour as the boat slid out across the grey waters of the bay, leaving a pale emerald trail in its wake, seagulls wheeling and cawing all around the masts like so many scraps of white paper flung into the wind. We became aware for the first time of the swell of the ocean, and watched the mainland retreating behind us. Until, in time, the green of the hills became smudged and distant, before vanishing altogether. And all that we saw around us was the sea rising and falling, with no idea of where we were going or when we would get there. Or what might be waiting for us when we arrived.