THE BIG READ: The dark side of a golden isle

SHONA Pitman grew up in a rough patch of a $2 trillion dollar island. Reared in Nicholson Park, a neighbourhood in Jersey once so dangerous the school buses took the long way round it, she was acutely aware she did not belong to the island’s elite.

Yet she considered herself lucky to be living in a tight-knit community on a chocolate-box seascape, even as material riches transformed her island paradise before her eyes.

“Growing up here used to mean something,” she said. “We used to be quite community-spirited. There was a great tourism industry, a lot of employment, farming as well. Finance has come in now. So much is geared toward that, the other industries that were so much a part of our lives are mostly gone.”