The Ferry Boat Children - by Fernando Pinho

SubscribeSign in

Travel Stories<br>The Ferry Boat Children<br>For the children of south Mull, secondary school means leaving home age eleven. Their parents' silence was never consent.

Fernando Pinho<br>Aug 10, 2026

Share

Before we start, a quick note. I meant to write you something gentler.<br>The plan was a flight to Mull.<br>Then a friend who lives there told me this story. A story of what’s happening to some families in Mull. So, I decided the gentler piece could wait. I flew north, crossed the water and spent a week at kitchen tables, on crofts, in a bookshop, listening.<br>This is still a travel story. Not about the view, but the thing the view was hiding.<br>There’s a podcast version of this piece, with the real voices and the sounds of the island in it. If you’d rather listen, it’s on Apple and Spotify. It’s worth a pair of headphones.

Room for more

Amy and Sam’s morning begins at a quarter to seven with their two young daughters landing on the bed.<br>Downstairs, around the big kitchen table, in front of the wood-burning stove, there is porridge. They talk about the day ahead, and each of them, in turn, names one thing they are grateful for. They do this every morning.<br>Then it’s the small, muttered urgency every parent knows, the wellies, the coats, where are the coats, the banana that has to go in the bag before anything else can happen. Sam runs the checklist out loud. Erin is already in the van. Rosie is here somewhere.<br>And then they are in, and the doors close, Amy in the driver’s seat, and the van pulls away up the single-track road, two children in the back and room for more.<br>Soon after they leave, the road climbs, and the open sea falls away behind them.<br>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. It slides shut, and now there are four.<br>Over the next twenty minutes, the van stops a few more times, a child or two climbing into the back each time. The little ones play with a Hatchimal. The older ones are quiet today.<br>By the time the school comes into view, there are eight of them. The youngest is five, the oldest eleven.

The primary school at Bunessan<br>Amy knows every one of them. She knows what each of them had for breakfast. She has driven this bus for two years, the school run down the Bunessan road, every morning and every afternoon.<br>In a few months, the eldest child on Amy’s bus will be gone. 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.<br>She’ll go every week, until she’s an adult.<br>The little ones on the bus will still be here. She will be the one who goes. And then, one by one, the rest will follow.<br>She’s eleven.<br>In her house, the breakfast table will still be full of the ordinary morning noise. But her chair will be empty for most of the year. And the parents of the little ones still riding the bus, Amy and Sam among them, already know their turn is coming.<br>They will say goodbye, and drive home.<br>The Ferry Port

Two days earlier, I had flown north in Saoirse, my small plane. Cambridge to Glasgow in under two hours. Then, two more hours driving north to Oban, to the ferry port where around thirty children from Mull arrive every Monday morning for the school week.<br>From the pier at Oban I could see Mull already, across the water. The crossing to Craignure still takes about an hour.

My decision to cross the sea was my own. I could do it at any time. The children can’t. For the families of south Mull, it has been like that for generations.<br>The ferry’s horn sounded. Mull, ahead. I drove off the boat and turned toward the Ross of Mull, to the south, where Amy and her family were waiting for me.<br>Order Restored

Annemarie’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, Annemarie would tell me. Home was not really home anymore.<br>Now, two generations later, her son is on the ferry every Monday morning.<br>The following day, after their yoga class, Annemarie came over for dinner. Sam had put the girls to bed an hour earlier. The four of us sat at the same table where the porridge goes round in the mornings, and at some point, the talk turned to the school.<br>Annemarie started with the weekend routine. Her son arrives on Friday evening. They have Saturday to be a family, to do family things. And then Sunday, and the circle starts all over again.<br>You know that Monday morning dread, she said, when you hate your job and you can’t face going back? The children get that on a Sunday.<br>Sunday is the day of washing, drying and ironing, because the clothes that came home on Friday have to be packed again for Monday. And then the bag sits at the bottom of the stairs....