‘I explained – again – that there is no “camp”, that refugees are forced to sleep in fields and hedgerows, camping where they can.’ Photo: istock / SorenP.
‘There are now many hundreds of refugees in the Calais area.’
Every day sees more small boats stopped at Calais. Anne M Jones reports on her ongoing work there
Obsessed with repairing as many sleeping bags as possible from the giant pile, I focus on nothing but my fingers, pliers, needles, and thread upon zips. I do this exclusively for four days. The work is one of themes and variations. The theme is zips, and one variation is finding one that is apparently totally jammed, then tugging it so hard with pliers that it eventually re-slides back into life up and down zipper teeth. Often this action results in a reverse opening from feet to head instead of the normal head to feet. This is not a disaster because then all I need to do is sew up the head end and open a small space along the seam of the feet, for a head hole. Hey presto, a resurrected sleeping bag. (This is but one variation, and if you have been patient enough to read this far I will not test your patience further, except to hope you now have an insight into the satisfaction thereby gained, which leads to this obsession.) My tally by the end of four days was thirty-five bags, plus four coats and a tent. This equals approximately seventy nights of warmth – maybe longer if the nights stay dry enough, or if the refugee is lucky in keeping a tent for a good period of time before a policeman slashes it to move them on.
This is my stint for this month, in a cold but well-lit warehouse – an improvement on the old one. Here I perch on the sleeping bags for warmth, and am grateful to friends who gave me Christmas presents of wrist warmers and a bright scarf.
My visit this time was delayed first by a Eurostar cancellation, then by a breakdown in my central heating, which caused a two-day wait for an engineer who never appeared. One good result from working in cold warehouses is that I am better at coping with cold than I was a few years ago. The delays did mean I had to travel on a Sunday, however, so when I arrived after a calm crossing I knew the bus service to the warehouse was infrequent. Striking up a conversation with another passenger, we agreed to share a taxi, with me being dropped off first at the warehouse, then her at the station.
‘Oh goody,’ she exclaimed, ‘I shall see a real refugee camp.’
I explained – again – that there is no ‘camp’, that refugees are forced to sleep in fields and hedgerows, camping where they can.
‘Why camp in Calais?’ she asked. ‘Why, if I were camping I would chose a nice warm place like Provence. They could find a nice spot in the woods and even make their own little garden around the tent.’
I was quite relieved when the taxi driver refused to do a round trip, leaving me standing alone on the quayside as she merrily waved me goodbye.
There are now many hundreds of refugees in the Calais area, and every day sees more small boats stopped before attempting a perilous crossing. I heard that on 30 December a boat containing twenty people, including a pregnant woman, was seized near Marck.
My inner life inspires my work, and though I miss contact with refugees themselves I obtained a glimpse into the world of one when I was asked to urgently mend gashes in a tent. The support worker was insistent that the man would not take a replacement. This had become his home, he had rescued it after it had been slashed, and he did not want a pop-up tent. ‘They make him feel he is suffocating.’
As usual, I met old friends and made new ones, including a group of paramedics who were busy dispensing seventy to one hundred doses of flu medication every day. Here, the advice was the same as we hear at home. But ‘Rest, stay in the warm’ are hollow words for those in the fields, though in the town there is now a community centre open every day in addition to one run by Secours Catholique.
Street decorations carried gold and silver motifs of trees and gifts, with Goldilocks and the three bears smiling outside the Hotel de Ville. There were no live animals in a tiny pen this year – a relief. We took ourselves to a local bar on New Year’s Eve, where a friendly French woman, built like a London bus and dressed in a glittery wide dress, dragged me onto the dancefloor. I cavorted there for the sake of good Anglo-French relations until others far more agile than me lost their inhibitions and joined in. We were accompanied by a small man with a smaller dog peeping out of his coat, and another sweet-faced man who told me ‘I was all on my own and I decided to come here, and it has been so beautiful.’ The woman from the bus, talking with one of the nurses, asked where she could go to help ‘les migrants’. At midnight I was given a rose, a glass of wine, and someone placed a plastic lighted bow upon my head. The French folk among us all kissed one another, and an hour later all the British sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
A few hours later I was in the icy warehouse nurturing my obsession while pondering on last night. Maybe our revels broke some of the hostile barriers between the British and the French. Maybe the bus lady will become like my friend Valentine in town, who has been granted permission to house refugees during the coldest weather. I began wondering what changes might be seen here in the coming year to improve this cruel situation. Lives are held on hold, totally wasteful of time and resources (the French word, ‘gaspilleuse’ is so much more expressive). But we volunteers keep on keeping on because this seems preferable to being observers in this endless tragedy.
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Anne’s recent book on the work in Calais (How Long, How Long Must we Wait?) has already raised hundreds of pounds for Help Refugees and Utopia 56. It is available from her via anne.150@phonecoop.coop.
