Fernando's Logbook
I fly a plane called Saoirse to places most people drive past, and I bring back the thing the view was hiding. Not the postcard. The story underneath it, the one most people walk straight past. Some of it will make you want to go. Some of it will stay with you for reasons you won't expect. You don't need a plane. You just need to wonder what you've been driving past.
Fernando's Logbook
The Ferry Boat Children
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
For the children of the south of the Isle of Mull, secondary school means leaving home at eleven. Their parents' silence was never consent.
This is the story of how three generations have been affected.
Reported and produced by Fernando Pinho.
Music by Chad Lawson.
The chamber recording is from Argyll and Bute Council's webcast.
Thank you to Amy and Sam, to Rob and Owen, to Annemarie, to Duncan, to John, to Siobhan and Gemma, and to the parents who let us into their homes or stopped at the school gates to talk.
Special thanks to Alice Stillman and Laura McVeigh.
This episode is for the children of Mull.
The written version of this story is at fernandoslogbook.com
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We believe the best adventures are shared from one human to another. That’s why everything in Fernando’s Logbook is created entirely by talented people and artists. We do not use Generative AI at any stage.
Message
JoyThis episode is different from the ones we usually make. Fernando did fly Saoirse , but this isn't about the journey, and there's nothing at the end about what to do or where to stay. It's about the Isle of Mull, off the west coast of Scotland, and the families who live there. Some have been there for generations. Some came and stayed. And then, quietly, the island takes some of those families apart. You're about to hear how. From the islands and from the families, in their own voices. Here's Fernando.
Room for more
RosieI just made I pointed my figure this way in the snowy.
FernandoAmy and Sam's morning starts at quarter to seven with their two young daughters landing on the bed.
RosieSnowy loves paper arrow. I found out that Snowy loves paper aeroplanes. It's like porridge.
FernandoDownstairs there is porridge around the big kitchen table in front of the wood burning stove. And each one of them takes a turn to name one thing they are grateful for.
SamI'm thankful for Mrs. Wilson.
ErinAnd I'm thankful. I'm even thankful for Tamil.
FernandoThey do this every morning.
SamFor Mrs. Wilson. I'm thankful for my teacher. Functions.
FernandoThen it's the small, quiet urgency every parent knows. The welly's the coats. Where are the coats? The banana has to go in the bag before anything can happen.
AmyRight girls, welly's on, come on, it's we're gonna be late.
FernandoSam runs the checklist out loud.
SamRosie's caught in the van. Right. Erin's bagged in the van. Rosie's bags here, Erin's caught there. That's Rosie's Erin's banana, and that's Rosie's bag with a banana.
FernandoErin's already in the van, Rosie's here somewhere. And then they are in. The door's closed, Amy's in the driver's seat, and the van pulls away up the single track road. Two children in the back and room for more. Soon after they leave, the road climbs and the open sea falls away behind them. Ten minutes later, the van slows by a house at the side of the road. Two children are already waiting. A boy and a girl. Their mother opens the door. Amy knows them well.
AmyHave a good day.
FernandoIt slides shut and now there are four. The little ones show off how a powered battery Hatchimal works. The older ones are quiet today. By the time the school comes into view, there are eight of them. The youngest is five, the oldest is eleven. Amy knows every one of them and every family on this road. She knows what each of them had for breakfast. She's driven this bus for two years. The school run down the Bunessan road every morning and every afternoon.
The empty chair
FernandoIn a few months, the 11-year-old girl on Amy's bus will be gone. And not for a day trip. She will move to the mainland, across the sea, and live there through the school week. Because the island's only secondary school is in the north, and a school bus from the south, stopping at every road end, would swallow up to three hours of a child's day. She will go every school week until she's an adult. The little ones on Amy's bus will still be here. She will be the one who goes. And then slowly, one by one, the rest will follow. She's eleven. In her house, the breakfast table will still be full of the ordinary morning noise. But her share will be empty for most of the year. And the parents of the little ones still riding the bus, Amy and Sam included, already know their turn is coming. One day it will be them at the bus stop before it's light. They will say goodbye and drive home.
The ferry port
Fernando119 as well 105 bye bye.
FernandoI had flown up two days before, Cambridge to Glasgow in Sertia, my small plane. And there I was, at the ferry port where around 30 children from Mull arrive every Monday morning for the school week. The crossing from Oben to Kragnur takes about an hour. From the pier at Oben, I could see Mull already across the water. I chose to cross the sea, and I could do it anytime I liked. The children can't. For the families of South Mull, it's been like that for generations. Then the horde went and there it was, Mull. I drove off the boat and turned south towards the Ross of Mull, where Amy and her family were waiting for me.
Order restored
FernandoAnne Marie's family has been on the island for generations. Her mother was among the first to be sent away to study. She never really came home again, Anne-Marie would tell me. Home was not home anymore. Now, two generations later, her son is on the ferry every Monday morning. The following day, Amy and Anne-Marie went to their yoga class together. And afterwards, Anne-Marie came over for dinner. Sam had put the girls to bed an hour earlier. Hello.
ErinOkay.
FernandoHey!
AmyOh I can take home by this is Anne-Marie, this is Orlando. Nice to meet you.
FernandoThe four of us sat at the same table where the porridge goes around in the mornings. And at some point the talk turned to the school. Anne Marie started with the weekend routine. Her son arrives on Friday evening. They have Saturday to be a family. And then the cycle starts all over again. Sunday.
AnnemarieYeah, they're quiet. They're kind of sullen. You ever have that Monday morning dread? I don't know. If you ever hate your job so much and you've got that feeling of, oh, I really have to go back there. The day it's Sunday's newly. It's a bit it's a it's like that, but it's a bit more all that you need to do all the ironing, because you know, you've got the weekend to get all the washing done and washed and dried, and then ironed and packed. So that's usually a Sunday job, ironing everything and packing the bag. And the bag is like sitting there. It's like remind you know, you come down the stairs and you see the bag. It's like this little reminder of it happening. Just again, doesn't get discussed. Just a feeling.
FernandoSometimes there's an invitation, a barbecue at someone's house, all of them welcome, just a couple of hours, you'll be home in time. But her son doesn't want to leave the home on a Sunday, and she won't leave him.
AnnemarieAnd I'm like, how do I say I can't go there on a Sunday? Because it wouldn't make sense to her or any w anyone else.
FernandoThen it's showered, prepped, and into bed early because Monday starts too fast and too early. She takes her son to the bus. The parents arrive, the children are quiet, sleepy. She says goodbye, throws the bag in, and drives home quickly.
AnnemarieYeah, that that's a weird feeling. Yeah, well, that I guess I think that empty nest feeling is something most mums will know that when they I think if your kids ever away, even if it's like a school trip or something, you're you're like, feels strange. I I actually felt that I would say that I felt I found it harder than Oliver did. Obviously it was third year by the time he went, but I actually struggled more than he did. That is weird, being in the house yourself. It's just something's not right. I don't know how to explain it. It's a we it's just strange. Of course, other parents will have other children still at home. I only have one.
FernandoHer mum still phones her during the week. What has she eaten? Come to house for dinner, has she eaten today? And Anne Marie thinks, what's the point? A bit of toast and bed. I asked her whether she ever goes and sits in his room during the week.
AnnemarieI'm laughing because I would some I would uh be on the phone to Oliver and his bed in his room. And then I would I and then Oliver he would come home and he would be like, Have you been in my room? And I'm like, Yes. It's like, oh my god, do you just sit in my room and just like cry and to like come home? Like a typical teenager, and just like, oh for God's sake. I was like, but it's nice and cozy in here. You go seeking something else, so yeah, I I ended up actually quite a lot. I was sitting in Oliver's room. I'd rather put on the telly or I would just sit and scroll on my phone. I don't know. But it felt different because it was in a in his I don't know if it was just a his room thing, but yeah, it's weird.
FernandoIn the winter, the week ends with the weather. She watches the forecast for days. The wind speeds, the gusts, checking whether the ferries will sail while her son is on the other side of the water.
AnnemarieI think you don't realise how on edge you are until you're like checking the weather out. You know, if you if you need to go away, you're checking the weather out constantly for the ferry. You're doing that every week in the winter, so you're like, hmm, hmm, hmm. And then if you feel like for a minute you forgot, oh I forgot to check, you're checking again. I think that points out like some at some points you you've got this anxiety.
FernandoIt builds towards the end of the week. And then it's Friday, and she's back at the same bus stop where she said goodbye on Monday.
AnnemarieWe're all there at the bus stop. Um no, we we pick them up at the bus stop Friday, and it's summertime now, so you can also get a chippy. It's even more exciting.
Speaker 15It's light.
AnnemarieThe chippy's open, it's late, and you get yeah, you get a chippy and you go home, and it's Friday. The world is back in order. Order has been restored, as they say.
Not yet
AmyWell, let's have some porridge, and we're gonna end up being late.
FernandoIn the morning, I was back at the same table, same seat, this time with Rosie and Erin, and a bowl of porridge in front of me.
RosieMy first cranberries? Oh yeah.
AmyCranberries raises anyone?
FernandoAnd off they went, I mean driving the school bus. I followed the same road towards Bunessen along Loch's Grieden, along arm of the sea lying beneath Ben Moor, the island's highest peak. The road was taking me to Rob and Owen's croft. The croft sits at the top of a hill. On the drive up I passed a flock of sheep, chickens, ducks, a small greenhouse, and scrap cars scattered along the road. And the wind. As a pilot, I live by the wind, and still it took me by surprise. The house at the top of the hill catching the full force of it from the west. Three of them, and by the time I was out of the car, Rob was at the door.
RobI was just I've got you here. I was just texting you too.
FernandoCan I park there?
RobYeah, yeah, yeah.
FernandoThat's fine.
Speaker 8Go on in.
FernandoHe welcomed me into their living room and no one brought us all a cup of tea. They first came here from Yorkshire in 1999. A week's holiday, and it was enough.
RobI guess I felt a real it's it sounds a bit tacky, but affinity to the place. It was a bit like coming home. It felt more than it wasn't a resort, it was more than a holiday, it was a place I I wanted to be, and I felt I felt the right me being here.
FernandoThey spent years after that looking for a place of their own on the island. Then this house came up. On the day they viewed it, the man selling it, a good friend of theirs now, asked if they would be living there.
RobAnd I said, not yet. So it was always in my mind that this was a future home. Because of the educational arrangements with with needing with children needing to board for high school over in Oban, we knew that that could never have been an option for our children. So we had to hold all that hope off.
FernandoThey held that hope off for 20 years. On the mainland, they were raising two adopted children. And the life spent adopting and fostering, Rob told me, means dealing constantly with separation and loss. Putting a child who has already lost too much into a situation where they must live away from their family again. There was no way they could do that.
RobSo we moved here in stages in that we bought the croft land around. So when we we bought the house, which was just the house and garden, in 2020 we bought the croft around us. Um, and one of the rules in crofting is that you must live within 15 kilometres of your croft. So that meant that I I moved here in 2020, literally a week before lockdown, and Owen carried on working in Yorkshire up to his retirement, which was just over two and a half years ago now. So I lived here on my own for nearly four years. The plan had had always been that um I would live up here, but I would be heading down to Yorkshire something like once a fortnight. And lockdown meant that actually I didn't see Owen for five months, and it really helped me to put my roots down and to make Mull absolutely my home. And it was actually a really valuable special time. Yeah. Sorry, Owen.
FernandoOne winter, the situation they could never have planned for arrived. Their granddaughter needed somewhere to live. She could not leave with her parents, and it happened on an emergency basis almost overnight. The question was whether between the two of them they could look after her. Owen was still working full-time in Yorkshire, so the answer was Rob and the Croft. Within days, he was back on the hill with the toddler, not yet too. More than once that morning, when the subject came too close to Rob, Owen would pick up the thread quietly and carry the answer on until Rob was ready to take it back. The croft is a hundred and thirty acres, and the sheep still needed feeding every day, whatever the weather.
RobSo very suddenly, she was instantly immersed in in crofting life, and I ha I had to learn to adapt to going out feeding the sheep with a toddler sat on my shoulders because obviously this isn't a terrain for a pushchair. Um so luckily she's quite a resilient child and quite up for it, and yeah, we were out in the snow and the rain and the wind working the croft together.
FernandoRob had told me before I ever came to the island that they never expected to be caring for a child again. Now they were raising her in the very place that would one day ask them to send her away. They had always known, of course, and as Rob adapted to living here, he adapted to that being the arrangement too. He became involved in a school community and a school system.
RobBecame aware of the normality of the fact that children go away for high school. So as I've adapted to living here, I guess I've also adapted to an understanding that that is the arrangement, and somehow you have to make it work. And this is where it gets absolutely outrageous because then Argyll and Butte engaged with us in 2022.
FernandoArgyll and Butte is the mainland authority that governs Mo. The council needed to build the new high school, and it came asking, What do you think? Are you for it? It was presented as a high school for the whole island. To the families of the South, that could only mean somewhere central, somewhere like Craignur, the port where my ferry had landed, near the middle of the island where the hospital is.
RobThat was just an amazing gift, this opportunity to have a high school that that could still a long way. It's it's an hour, it's going to be it would be an hour's journey to Craig Muir each day. But that would m make it viable for children to live at home with their families, and it just seemed like the most perfect timing.
FernandoThe gift did not last. The story of how it was taken back comes later. Leaving here, he told me, there is so much you have to compromise on. You make things work as best as you can. A lot of it isn't ideal, and much of that is part of the joy of it. The resilience, the strengths of a community that relies on one another. People get through. Then Rob stopped compromising.
RobPeople haven't been complaining about this. People have knuckled down, got on with it, hidden their tears, hidden their anger, and worked with it. For two generations. Since the 1950s, this has been the reality. It was Argyll and Butte that brought this about and said there was going to be an Isle of Mole campus. It showed photographs of Finnefort in its publicity. Um it absolutely was projected as being an island wide provision. And so everybody got behind that, got excited. This is something that we desperately need. And it's an outrage to have that just passively abandoned.
OwenThere is a perception that these are quiet people who just get on with their lives, put up with stuff, so we don't really have to give them the stuff that everyone else expects. They won't really complain if they don't get what everyone else, you know, so you they can be the kind of last in the queue. But when you when you have a choice that you don't have to have second best compared to your neighbours, why why would that be done?
FernandoFor the families who stayed generation after generation, there is something else. And Rob named that too.
RobIt's hard. There's a lot of talk about the the phone calls, the the tears, the the crying at the bus stop on Monday morning, the phone calls of an evening, the bullying that goes that goes on in the hostel. Um needing to find arrangements so that a child can maybe come home on a Wednesday evening. Um so that doing what we can to make it work, but particularly for those people that have been here for generations, this has been their norm. This has been absolutely normal, and there's an element of guilt that that people have had to oh toughen up, it'll all be okay, crack on, you'll get through this, it's all alright. This is for the for the best. Then and you've had we've had to do that in order to get our children to be able to cope. And so you've got that kind of intergenerational guilt for living with a system that you know is do that that we know has done some harm and caused disruption, but is the only option available, and so you've got to do it.
FernandoI have a thing for chiming clocks. It was one of them that told me nearly three hours had passed.
RobEducation is an absolute basic normal thing for everybody throughout our nations to access. And living away from family in every community is an extraordinary arrangement. It's never a normal arrangement.
Two voice notes
FernandoChildren sent away ten or twenty years ago are adults now. Some are parents themselves. A few have begun to say out loud what those years were like. The years their own parents got through by not complaining. Two of them, sisters, had agreed to tell me. Chivan grew up in Bunessen on the road Amy drives every morning. She's in her thirties now, a mother herself, and she runs a seafood bar in the Ross of Mull. At twelve, she was sent to board at the hostel in Nobel. Her younger sister, Gemma, went at eleven. The following day, their voice notes arrived. At Amy's and Sam's, I listened to them twice. And then a third time, and a fourth. Juvant's came first.
SiobhanGrowing up in Vanescent on Mull, I had such an amazing childhood growing up with my brother and sisters in our family home. When I turned 12 and it was time for me to start high school, I had to then go on board at Glen Crusin Hostel. My life changed on that first day. I went from being very confident and happy to an emotional, terrified, and anxious child. I struggled massively being separated from my family and everything I had known. In my first year at high school, there wasn't a day where I wasn't sick due to crying so much. I found the whole transition extremely traumatic. Even to this day in my 30s, the thought of it all makes me sick. No matter how much love and kindness the staff in the hostel and the school gave me, nothing helped. It didn't matter what anyone did or said to try and help me, nothing comforted me at all. Looking back now, I can see how traumatizing it was for me as such a young child. Even to this day, the taste of apple juice or the smell of trisamy shampoo makes me physically sick as it takes me back to the worst year of my life.
FernandoAfter first year, the situation improved slightly. Gemma and their cousins started school in Auburn, so Chiovan had a little bit of home with her. It also meant the hostel was now happening to them. She spent her efforts trying to make it easier.
SiobhanNot that that was possible. No child at the age of 11 or 12 could cope with being forced away from their home so young. I left school with very little grades. I had no one to help me with my homework or encourage me to study for my exams. If I had been able to stay at home, my education would have benefited so much as I would have had the help and support from my family.
FernandoThe second voice note was Gemma's.
GemmaAt the age of 11, I was forced to board over in Oban, where I had no family support or guidance through my education. All my friends would return home to their own bed and the comfort of their family, whereas I had to return to a building full of strangers all on my own. I had no security living in the hostel. Shouldn't all these things be a normal necessity for a young child? Was that so hard to ask for for a child so young?
They are our children
AmyYou look nice, Sam.
SamNo, I had a bath. Been on a run.
AmyHave you?
SamMe, Jude, and Hawken all went and did 5K.
AmyOh my god, amazing. Where did you go on the road?
SamYeah, after we'd been doing forestry as well, and it was you know that that's bloody hard work.
FernandoLater that evening, we were back around the kitchen table. Amy, Sam, and me.
SamI'm gonna do a very slow 5k. Do you wanna come?
FernandoThe girls were fast asleep, worn out by school, and a swim at the island's only pool up at Craig Noor. The last two evenings at this table, the conversations had been about other families. This time, it was about theirs. They came to Mull from Lancashire for a month or two with no intention of staying. Amy had the job lined up in France, and that was the plan. Then while they were here, the job running the estate came up, and they changed their plans, though they still didn't think they would be staying for long. The people offering the job in France told Amy she could take as long as she wanted.
SamWe ended up staying and we loved it. We just fell in love with everything about it. And then we had two kids. And and I mean, did we plan any of it? Not really, but you know, it we just we just like I say, we fell in love with this place and um we decided that we'd like to stay longer. And we had some children, and we didn't realise what an impact having children would have on us, and we also didn't realise what an impact the island would have on our children, and so now we're like in this situation where we have these two children who love their life here, who have all these amazing friends, they've got these incredible teachers, they've got all the other incredible parents at the school, and they are so lucky to have all these things, but there is this uh reality that once they finish at that primary school, that has to end, and they will either go to Auburn or we'll leave. Yeah, so that's our reality. We we either stay and our children leave at eleven, and that's just and that's just not an option, to be honest for us.
FernandoI asked why Auburn was not an option. Sam went first, and he began with the other side of it. He has a friend who went to school in Auburn and has nothing but good things to say about it. A talented rugby player who got things there the island school could never have offered him. Someone else, hearing Sam had been asking questions, sent him a message just to say they'd gone and had the best time.
SamIt's really important to remember that that is the case for a number of people. My answer to that now is that over the last five years social media, phones, safety of children online, and the safety of and and how children can be accessed online changed so much that it's now for me unrecognizable, and I'm not someone that uses any of these platforms, but the one thing that I can't get my head around is not being able to be on top of this new phenomenon that's just arrived, and I believe it's really dangerous, and I believe it's something that even the best parents in the world can't place, and I want to be I want to be on top of it, and I want to be the one whose ultimate responsibility for the for the for the welfare of my children lands with me, and I am the one who takes the responsibility for it, and I don't think I can trust that out to anyone else, and so that's that's my main that's our main reason for saying we don't want them to go to Woburn.
AmyI have the same concerns definitely about all of that stuff. It's a blooming, scary world out there, and um we I want to be able to check in on my kids every day when they come home from school and see what's happening with them, and and I know teenagers go mum and grumpuff upstairs, you know, we're not stupid. Um, but you you will be able to notice little little changes in behaviour and stuff more so than than than anybody else. But yeah, I just I I I don't want um this thing that we've got going here, this family thing, this wonderful thing um to stop when they're 11 for them, you know. I don't I don't want um that to be split apart. I want to be, I want to I want to feed to know what they've eaten, I want to feed them, I want to sit round the table at night, I want them to be able to walk our dog when they get in. Um if you know, just those little family things that we do that um that are in our routine, that are so good for those kids, um, you know, meals around the table, um, helping them if we if they want us to with their homework, um all of that. And and also then what Anne-Marie was saying about it's not like you get them home on a weekend and you have this magical weekend with them before they then go off. She's like, you're washing all their clothes, packing their bags, getting them ready to go off again on the Monday. Um, and you you don't you don't want to go flying around the island visiting friends, this, that, and the other. They because they're so exhausted after their week that you that stuff like that's not possible. So it's like I don't want to be cramming my the time that we have together as a family into a couple of days. I want them to sleep in their own beds and um have us there if they need us. It's just very simple in my mind. It's very simple. And little things like even with Erin who's five, just this week, so we all have our porridge in the morning and we can see if they've eaten it all and it and and if they if they haven't or whatever, I know okay, I might give them a couple of extra bits in their snack because Erin's was off of porridge this morning. She's gonna be really hungry. Just little things like that, just knowing what they've had to eat.
FernandoIt's a very simple There was something else, some said, that probably happens to a lot of parents. Before he had children, he knew kids went to Auburn for high school, and it didn't mean anything to him. They go across, they stay in a hostel, people go to boarding school, whatever.
SamThen you have kids, and then you realize that an eleven-year-old is really, really young, and there's so much that they need from you still.
AmyThey're just babies. They are. And we're like, they're going.
FernandoNear the end of the evening, the talk turned to the ways they might still make it work. Yeah, it's the same. There is one they have looked at. When you have children. Sam stays for the estate, and Amy takes the girls away for the high school years.
SamDo we love this job so much that we're gonna split up our family for six years? No, I don't think we do.
FernandoIt was late when we finished. The girls had been asleep for hours, one floor above the whole conversation. That night, they knew nothing of any of this. Their parents make sure of it.
Nothing is decided
RosieBut I've been famous.
FernandoThe next morning was my last at the house. The plan was to drive the lens of the island up to Topermori in the north. Just before the girls left for school, the gratitude went round the table again. This time I was in it.
RosieSarah, Daddy, Sarah and Daddy, Fernando, and Mummy, and Lady and I have to work.
AmyOh everyone.
FernandoEveryone, not when he came to me, I said I was grateful for the days I'd spent with them. They left the way they had the first morning. Wellies, coats, the bags already in the bus. A reminder not to forget the orange.
AmyOh, and they won't see you will then. No. So you need to say bye to Fernando, because he's gonna be gone. Thank you very much for next time.
FernandoThank you. I'll next time I'll come here, I'll bring my children as well.
Speaker 8Please do.
FernandoThen off they went. And the van pulled away up the single track road. The same road, the same sea falling away behind it. I left in the heaviest rain since I'd arrived. The rental car's radio wouldn't tune to anything, so I listened to the rain instead. An hour up the road, near Glenforce, I stopped at a farm shop I'd read about. On my way out of the car park, two carers flagged me down. A woman and a man in their 30s. They had a flat tire and they were a mile short of their next patient. Could I take them up the road? One of them asked where I was from. I said, Portugal. 20 years in Britain now. They'd made the same journey 10 years ago from Zimbabwe. Somewhere before Salon, the talk turned to the schools. The woman told me she'd been to boarding school herself back home. It's not like this, she said. My parents knew what they were signing up for. They wanted that for us. I dropped them in Salon and drove up north, thinking about that. The children of the South don't get signed up. They get sent. Anne Marie's mother was sent at eleven in that first generation. At Amy's table, Anne Marie told me how it went. You got back maybe once a month if you were lucky. Her mother survived on her own, learning life skills from the kindness of other mums in Oban. A generation later, the same arrangement reached for Anne Marie from a different angle.
AnnemarieBut interestingly, when I was living with my nana, um the hostel said that because my mum didn't live here, we would have to pay for me to go to the hostel. Because you were living here with your own. Because I was living with my nana. So then they said I think they got a lawyer or something, and they said my nana would have to adopt me for us not to and it was a ridiculous amount of money. Like I think it was like thousand it was thousands and thousands. Like it was just no way. It wasn't like silly, it was ridiculous. Um so anyway, then we had to set about trying to get my nana to um adopt me so that we didn't have to pay so that I could go to school. And uh then they said Nana was too old to adopt me.
FernandoIn the end, she went to school on the mainland anyway, though not to nobody. Anne Marie is one of sixteen cousins. Her mother was one of six siblings, and most of that generation went through the hostel too. Now her son is there. The arrangement is not a policy to this family. It's an inheritance. And in the middle of it, there was Glasgow. When her son was coming up towards high school age, Anne Marie knew he could not board at eleven.
AnnemarieThere was just no way I he could go there uh in first year. And I knew it, and my mum knew it, and um I ended up getting offered a job when Oliver was in primary four. And I remember sitting at the kitchen table talking about it, and mum said, Well, you need to go next year anyway. So we went away. And it was sad, but also, you know, I had a new job. You you look for it, you think, well, you know, we'll go go to Glasgow, we'll start there, we'll find friends, we'll do this, we'll do that. It's exciting sometimes a change, but yeah, that was like there's and I'm not saying that's the same for every child. Some children will be okay in first year, but I just I I you know your child, and I was like, nah, he won't be. And we we were okay in Glasgow for a while, and then eventually, I don't know, over the years I just started thinking I would actually quite like to go home. You start to think different, your children's a way but older, and as he was getting older, there's a diff he's got a different set of needs, like he needs a community now. A, you need people around you, and B, have I always got to just be in Glasgow? Because I don't want to be there. So, but he might need to come home still, he's still young, and I thought would rather I'd rather we were actually home for him to be able to do that. So he was going into third year by that point, and I thought that's fine. By then he'll be okay. And he was. Third year is a sweet spot, I think.
FernandoAnne Marie and her son came home. Some families never do. Robin Owen had said something about these two back at the craft.
OwenOne of the things that remote communities, rural communities are having a problem with, and it's UK-wide, um, is actually having the bedrock community of working families to do the work that you need in any community. And what tends to happen is, in a way, a bit like us, you know, people work elsewhere and retire into a remote place. Um, they then need that support from people who end up being carers or even just, you know, gardeners or uh you know uh little little bits of help here and there, as well as the health professionals, the public transport, uh, and all these sort of things.
RobThe teachers, the nurses, um, the people to cluck to empty the bins, doing distribution, cleaners. Um and we're losing our working population because so many of our working population are moving elsewhere. And so that means that we can't recruit carers. So those privileged folk who move here after their work is done are actually finding that then as they get to their later, later years, they have to move away because there's nobody to look after them. Can't recruit carers, can't recruit somebody to come and do your cleaning, and which then kind of forces the economy into the transient seasonal holiday economy, and means that all houses become holiday lets rather than homes, and that which it just further isolates a community. But actually, you can grow a business then. If you if you don't need to factor in moving away once your child's 11, you can grow a business, you can bring in other partners and it can expand. Whereas actually so many of our businesses are short term because A, you can't recruit people to come and work with you, B, you may well be moving away in order to live with your child.
FernandoSomewhere in North of Salem, I remembered the recordings. The day before, Amy had taken my microphone on a school run, stopping at the gates and gathering voices for me.
AmyI just know that he's after like a variety of voices, so it's not just So the voices of the South rode north with me.
FernandoOne of them was Germain, who runs a campsite in a south with her family. Amy sat down with her, my microphone between them.
Speaker 15We built our house and we put in the campsite with the intention of being down here. But at this moment it looks like we will be moving, um, which is a shame. And we've actually loved living down here. And to take the kids away from it, we've got to explain why, which is a bit difficult as well. Um the longer that we're down here, the more we want to do down here, and we're kind of having to now sort of shelf that. We have all these plans of things we want to do in Pennygale, but we're not doing them or holding back in the moment until we know what's gonna happen.
AmyIt's that feeling of not being able to truly settle because you just don't know. We have the same, like I I in a much minor scale. I have wanted to start like a polytunnel, and the polytunnel's gonna cost like three grand or whatever if you're gonna get a decent one that's not gonna get blown over by the storms.
Speaker 15Well, I can see that we'd like to do water sports. This is something that we'd like to do in the area in the bay. We call it Port Ningale because we like to involve the water, but we just don't know how to grow the business, we don't know the future um for the kids here. And we've already seen the benefit with the cafe opening, and you just think how else can it flourish um if we all put our heads together at the same time?
AmyOkay, great. I think you should start a polytunnel. I know we totally should start a polytunnel, it's stupid, isn't it? But it's just encouraging. I think it's like a I think it's like we we're always just too busy to start the bloody polytunnel, but I think it's also a subconscious thing of like that's a that's a project of longevity. Like by the time that you've to start a garden and to start a polytunnel all properly, I mean it's expensive, and I'm like, oh, and then in five years' time when my soil is absolutely at its most perfect state, I'm gonna go.
FernandoRobert put all of this into a much older story. Through the 19th century, landlords across the highlands forced tenant families off the land to make way for sheep. The clearances, whole townships on Mull were emptied, some of them on the Ross itself. The Gallic-speaking communities of these islands never fully recovered. It's not an history anyone here reaches for lightly.
RobLand has been used as a as a tool of oppression, um, and thinking about the clearances, how people were forcibly removed from their homes. Um situation in that it has cleared some families from this land, and I think we need I need to bear that in mind that there are families that don't no longer live here because they want to live with their family, with their children. And and I think that's a really powerful, awful situation.
FernandoCrafting law was first written in the aftermath of the clearances to keep the land in the hands of the people who lived on it. To this day, a crofter is required to live on a croft or close by it in order to keep it. And yet, Rob pointed out, if you prioritize your family life, you can't live here. Amy had told me about the pool. When the girls were small, she would get in the water at Craig Noor with them, and so would the other mothers from Tavermori and Salon. An hour in the pool together, then a coffee after. Some lovely friendships started that way, she said. And then they faded. You get busy. But it's not just busy.
AmyYou know, there's that divide. There's that divide.
FernandoThat is it's If all those mums knew their children were going on to high school together, we would all make so much more effort to get together to make those friendships bond. The whole island would be so much more together. The rain had eased by the time the road dropped down into Tobermori, the painted houses along the harbor, the end of the island. It was here at the Provincial Maud, the Gallic music festival, that every primary school on Mull gathered on the beach last September and sang the same song, one they had all learned. Amy was there watching all the island's primary children singing together. And she thought about what happens to them at 11, she told me. The children of the north and the middle go to high school together in Tobermori. The same faces from the beach. The children of the south go to high school too, but across the water. And the friendships made in that choir end there.
The story in Balamory
FernandoI drove into Tobermori with a song in my head. This is the town where they filmed Bala Mori, the BBC Children's Program. It's about the brightly colored island village where every day brings a problem. And every problem is solved by tea time. The sim tune has never left me. Since I started working on this podcast, my children keep asking me the question that opens every episode. So what's the story in Balamori? I'd come to ask the town exactly that. In a museum, in a restaurant, a couple of shops, I tried to bring up the school. Each time the conversation went somewhere else. How did we get here? Rob told me the story the way he has been told on the island for as long as he has known it. A long time ago, when it was decided where the island's high school would go, the vote split exactly down the middle, central or Tobermori. The man in a chair had the casting vote. He was a Tobermori man and he casted it for Tobermori. The man would have been a provost, Rob Thanks, from the years when Tobermori still had its own council. I went looking for the vote and could not find it in a record. Nobody could give me his name. On the island, it's told as fact. For Tobermori's children, a central school would mean a bus ride south to Craignur, half an hour each way. For the children of the Ross, it depends which end they start from, forty-five minutes to an hour and a half, and then home to their families at the end of the day. In 2022, the council held meetings on the island and put a bid to the Scottish government for a new school. That bid succeeded the following October, paid for by a government loan the council would have to repay. The island understood what that meant, but for the first time since that casting vote, the boarding could end. The families of the South knew where they wanted the school. Craig Noor at the middle of the East Coast, where the island had already put the things it wanted everyone to reach. The hospital, the pool, the ferry to the mainland. The landowner there offered the site as a gift, the campaign says. Level and large enough. Months later, in a chamber, one of the council's leaders disputed that anything comes free. The site came with conditions, he said, and the infrastructure would fall to the council. Argyle and Butte kept holding meetings on the island. John Morgan convened the island's own council, Mull Community Council. This is what he remembers being told.
JohnBut it was all don't worry, it's um you know, don't worry about location, nothing's decided. And they went and spoke to people in Finnifert. They asked kids what colour they like their classrooms and stuff. They had pictures of Finnefert in the project brief thing.
FernandoThe condition had been there from the start. In September 2024, the community understood what it meant. It was funding to replace an existing school, like for like. The only existing school was in Tobermory. Highlanders proposed splitting the sites. The new high school would go in the center, and Tobermory would keep its primary school. That December, counsellors were asked to confirm they would not consider it. Not affordable, the council said in its press release. The loan would pay for nothing twice, no second dining hall, gym, or playing fields. Three months later, on the 7th of March 2025, the counsellors met to choose the site. Anne Marie was in that room. She had told me about it over dinner at Amy's. The Mull Campus Working Group, the people running the campaign for a central school, had asked her to speak.
AnnemarieSo the meeting of the council and you can make a deputation, I didn't know what that was. Um everybody wanted me to speak, of course, being the right the voice of someone that they can't dismiss as being an incomer. And they wanted to show where, you know, or talk about lived experience. And I was really hesitant because even after today of the open interviews, I am not good at public speaking. I terrified of it. I genuinely hate it.
FernandoAnd there was the other pressure. She said, How am I supposed to speak for a whole community? You can't. You're not going to get everyone in agreement. So Anne Marie didn't speak for them. She stood up in the chamber and read their words instead.
AnnemarieMany of us on the island can remember not having electricity or mains water. Should we have just kept the status quo then? Over the years we have fought together for better ferries, roads, broadband, medical and dental services in a hospital. My question is why has education driven such deep division? Families will continue to leave until there are no carers, no nurses, no volunteer farmen, no shops, and most tragically, no families. I just want to live at home and bring up my children around my family and live in a house that we have built instead of letting it out as another holiday home. Emptiness syndrome arrived too soon, I wasn't ready. We live in a world where the rights of the child are promoted and encouraged in school from an early age, yet my son, due to the simple geography of being from the ROS, loses his rights to live at home with his family. To the extent that they made themselves sick to avoid going. We can't continue to do it. I urge you all to consider these profound impacts as you make your decision. Our community's future, our children's well-being, and our island's cohesion are all at stake. Let's work together to find a solution that keeps our children close to home, preserves our unique way of life, and ensures that the benefits of a new school campus are shared by all of Mall.
FernandoAnne-Marie shared more messages from parents. The counselors listened. One of them called it the most powerful deputation she had ever heard in that chamber. Their officers had already written a recommendation in the papers in front of them, but the counsellors accepted it. The preferred site for the new school was in the north. Again. The court found the council had acted lawfully in how it decided. In his published opinion, the judge said the meetings had never been a consultation in law, only engagement. So the standards did not apply. The counsel had argued exactly that. No one was entitled to a consultation on the choice of site, and nothing more was required. The plan resumed, and because the school is moving, there now has to be a proper consultation about moving the school to a new site, not about where the new site is. I put the ruling to Rob back at the craft. I said, according to the court, the council did everything it should have done.
RobNo. No. I think it's really important to be clear. It's not that they did everything that they should, it's they what they did was within the law.
FernandoThis March, two scholars of human rights law looked at the same facts. Professor Katie Boyle and Dr. Michelle Donnelly of the University of Strascly. A child boarding in Auburn, the scholars wrote, is in alternative care in fact and in law. Five days of every seven, hundred and seventy-nine days a year, most of a child would from eleven onwards. In international law, they added, separating a child from their family is meant to be a measure of last resort, case by case, temporary, kept under review. The court had not been asked whether the decision was right or what it does to the rights of a child. Those questions, the lawyers wrote, remain unanswered. The island does not shout about the school. Part of it is how small places work, Anne-Marie told me.
AnnemarieThat's really hard in a small place. It is really hard to, you know, they say don't stick your head over the parapet. That is hard in a small community and an island community because you need to rely on each other. Like, don't you? You need to know folk here. Yeah, and they need to be friendly. You need to be friendly, and so it's easier to not fall out over things. So if you are really opinionated on something, then yeah, you're likely gonna end up falling out of folk, and most folk will try and avoid that.
FernandoShe told me about the people who tell her quietly that they want a school in the middle and cannot say so in public because of where they work. Amy's eldest daughter is four years from the boat. Amy has never talked to the girls about any of it, and told me that she and Sam probably wouldn't even if the girls were older.
AmyYeah, that that that is such a difficult situation to be in where you're ca where your kid is about to start the run-up to go to Auburn, and um you've gotta just keep that as positive as you can in the household to give them the chance to have the best start.
FernandoParents cannot say it in public either. Not because of the council, because of the children. The boat is still coming. There is a price for that silence. It gets counted. Every person who never wrote in, who never stood up at a meeting, who never complained counts as someone content. And the ones who did speak are few enough to be named a vocal minority. The campaign wanted to know where the island stood. They say they asked Argyll and Bud to help running a proper ballot. The council's published position is that a site cannot be chosen by ballot. So Anne-Marie wrote a survey herself, and it went out under Mull Community Council. The island's own council, not the one deciding. Six hundred and sixty-five people answered. A third of them lived in Topermori, which is roughly the share of the island that does. Nearly two-thirds wanted a split site that the council would not consider. Fewer than a third back the shape the council chose. Argyll and Butte Council have never run a survey of their own.
Out of sight, out of mind
FernandoOne man wanted to talk. I found him in his own bookshop. He didn't have a microphone, I did, and it was clipped to me. So all of this was recorded from the wrong side of the table. It's rough in places, I'd rather you heard him. Duncan is a PE teacher. He has grandchildren on the island, and he's the force behind Mull's swimming pool. He wanted to talk about a sports hall. A generation ago, the island had no sports facilities at all. The children were asked where a playing field should go. They chose the middle. A stretch of waste ground between the island's two ferries, somewhere everyone could reach. The islanders built it themselves, but they have maintained it ever since. There has never been council money in it. The pool was harder. Duncan's committee wrote to the council every year and heard nothing back.
DuncanThey physically wrote against it. Oh, well, we can't afford the revenue cost of running the pool and mall. Now, if they just told us that 20 years before, so what we did is we found a solution. We got a local hotel, the Isle of Mull Hotel, who agreed to cover the revenue costs, you know, but that was like 28 years it took our committee. That was 28 years out of all our lives.
FernandoThe hotel covered the running costs and the pool was built at Craig Noor in the middle. John told me about the same pool. He worked at the Tobamori ferry for 13 years. So he's heard what the town thinks about it.
JohnThe swimming pool, which Duncan was the force behind in Craig Newir. People say to me, people under because I worked in Tobamori for 13 years on the ferry up there. And I've had people say to me, If the top if the pool should have been in Tobamori, I'm like, how how'd you work that out? And you say, Well, it would have been used more. I'm like, Yes, I agree, it would have been used more, you'd have had more footfall in the pool, but that's not why it was built. It was built to provide a pool for the people of Malanayona. And they're like, Yeah, but it would have been used more, can't you see? And I'm like, Yes, I can see. It's for Malanayona, not to be just a pool to be used more.
FernandoThis spring, Duncan and his committee asked the council to back the sports hall. It declined. The council said there wasn't enough money for all the bits. Both of Mull's own councillors had supported his one. The islanders are raising the money themselves again. Duncan's campaign takes no side on the school, so I asked him what he made of the council itself.
DuncanAnd it's just been terrible. And it's not to do with individuals in the council idea because people come and go. It's to do with it's a mainland culture and it's an island culture. We're out of sight, out of mind.
FernandoIn June, the island institutions did what its parents cannot. Four community organizations wrote an open letter to the council's chief executive. From the northwest of Mull to the Southwest. John's name is at the top.
JohnYou know, we haven't we've only had one person writing to us from the north of the island that's concerned about the school movie. And um that kind of that sort of has evolved over the last year as we found the um that it's just a diff difficult position and we need to take more of a stronger position if we were going to try and move it on. The council didn't want to work with us. We even offered to sign non-disclosure agreements to work with them to try and um do a do work on the site selection process and things like that. They're just not interested. They're just doing their own thing. And as you know, they they came in with a they went to the Scottish Government with the wrong bid without consulting first. If they'd gone with a different bid for a split site, that might have worked better. Um they could once the whole UN Convention on Human Rights, the rights of the child um Became apparent, we really felt we had to nail our colours to the mast, as they say. People have seen it's once in a generation, it's more than that. This would be the next 50-60 years. That's it for another 50-60 years, there won't be any way to fix it. So it's got to be done right this time. And people have been talking about a central school for decades, you know, for a long, long time.
FernandoThey asked for the decision to be reassessed and for the funding rules to change so they take account of islands. As I record this podcast, the council has not replied. In Edinburgh, the First Minister John Sweeney has promised a full review of the funding program. I put all of this to Argyle and Butte Council before publication. The council did not answer my questions, they pointed me to their website. On Friday I left Mull back across the water to open. I came off the ferry and they were there on the pier waiting to board the boat I had just stepped off. Bags packed for home. The ferry boat children. Every
An empty school bus
Fernandoschool day, Amy drives the school run. I couldn't go with her, so on the Wednesday, she clipped my recorder to her jacket and drove. The tape begins on the way back, the bus empty, the long road down the Ross. At the gates and outside our houses were the parents who wanted to speak. And one by one they did. Some of those voices we have already heard. At one of the gates, a father talked to Amy about what the island does not have. He has five children. Two of them went to the hostel and are at university now.
ParentHe had all sorts of problems with um social media and she had no one at the hostel to talk to about it. You know, she's a 15, 14, 15-year-old girl. She's having all sorts of people contact her and online bullying and what have you, and she got to the point where she she just couldn't cope anymore. And there's no one at the hostel realistically they can talk to. It's very easy to look at things on an individual basis and say, well, this individual needs this and that individual needs that. But when it's a group of individuals, it becomes a community. And when you've got a community that's been let down by a by a process, yeah, then the council is best representing all of us need to listen. I don't know what. I think for me that's the main point is that there's there's been a there's been a supposed process, but there was an opportunity, like you said, for we chose to come and live in an island that didn't have a secondary school provision. But things move on, things change, and there's an opportunity for a review of that, and that's not happened. And I guess I don't know what the answer is. I don't think it's uh just having continuing with the status quo, or it's certainly not for me. But I don't know that I think that the for me the answer would be to have a proper exploration of all the possibilities and look at everything, and that just didn't happen. And that was what that's the missed opportunity, and that's a real shame. I agree with that. Because there's there's probably a solution somewhere. There is a solution somewhere, but it just needed a proper explanation, uh exploration, and that opportunity seems to have been missed.
FernandoAfter the last stop alone, Amy played Siobon's voice note.
SiobhanAs it takes me back to the worst year of my life. After first year, things improved slightly as my younger sister and cousin started school, so I had a little bit of home with me. It was then their turn for the trauma to start, and I then used all of my efforts to try and make that little bit easier for them than it was for me. Not that that was possible. No child at the age of 11 or 12 could cope with being forced away from their home so young. I left school with very little grades and had no one to help me with my homework or encourage me to study for my exams. If I had been able to stay at home, my education would have benefited so much as I would have had the help and support from my family. It keeps me up at night thinking that I might have to put my child through the same trauma that I went through, and I cannot do that to her. If the school is not built centrally for all of the children on the island, my only option would be for me to move away.
FernandoThe voice note ends. Amy is crying alone at the wheel of an empty school bus.
AmyIt just makes me so it just makes me so emotional. Listening to that to that and to all the other Then she gathers herself.
FernandoShe always has since we were at university together. And she speaks to the van or to the recorder or to nobody. What follows is exactly what the tape holds, word for word, gap for gap.
AmyMakes me emotional listening as well to you know Shimaine just now, like Schmaine's little girl, Sophie's little best mates with my little girls. Rosie and Erin. Um and they're gonna end up, you know.
FernandoAmy never finishes the sentence.
JoyThat was the Ferry Boat Children, reported and produced by Fernando Pinio. The full story is written up at FernandosLogbook.com. Music is by Chad Lawson. The chamber recording is from Argumeland Butte Council's webcast. Thank you to Amy and Sam, to Robin Owen, to Anne Marie, to Duncan, to John, to Chavon and Gemma, and to the Perrins who let us into their homes all stomped at the school gates to talk. Special thanks to Alice Dillman and Laura McVay. This episode is for the children of Mull.
