They could have been on a school trip. Fifty teenagers from Vietnam, dressed for the biting cold in puffer jackets, smart trainers and woolly beanies, sat on the pavement by the bus shelter outside Gare Calais listening to music and watching videos on their smartphones.
They were waiting for the 423 bus to take them back to a forest outside Dunkirk, where they have been staying at night with about a thousand others. It had been a disappointing morning for the group.
Their attempt to cross to the beaches of England on a dinghy from Wimereux, a quiet coastal town 20 miles south of Calais, had been aborted at the last minute by their handlers.
Five people, including a seven-year-old girl, had drowned after being thrown from an overcrowded boat shortly after leaving the French shore at around 5am.
A fight had broken out on the vessel after those who hadn’t paid tried to board, aid workers said.
There were 112 on a boat that would have been overcrowded with half that number.
The engine had stalled and it was the weakest who lost out, thrown into the freezing waters.
The child’s father, an Iraqi, had been found by rescuers on the vessel cradling his daughter. Her limp body had been recovered from the waves but she was unresponsive.
Not that this was the information passed to the Vietnamese.
“The police took a knife to the boat so we couldn’t go”, said a 17-year-old among the group, who said she could not give her name.
Did she not know that what she was attempting could be fatal – indeed had been that very morning? That the drownings brought the death toll to 15 in the Channel this year?
“It will be OK, I think the tide is OK,” she said. At her feet were a few luminous lifejackets that she had found by the side of the road and brought with her.
Was she aware that the British government had passed a law just a few hours earlier under which she was liable to be deported to Rwanda on arrival in the UK?
“I heard some information”, she said. “Can you tell me more about Rwanda?”
Nothing that could be said trumped her hope.
“We are illegal here, we don’t have any papers,” the girl said. But would she have papers in Britain? “I can’t say, I can’t say,” she added, as one of the four Middle Eastern men standing close by loomed into view. “This is my crisis.”
It had been described as a political win for Rishi Sunak on Monday night when the House of Lords finally backed down after months of parliamentary to-and-fro over the Rwanda scheme.
A first tranche of people to be deported to the central eastern African country this July will be identified by a team of case workers in the coming weeks.
The government’s belief is that their threat of deportation to Rwanda on arrival in Britain will be believed over the promise of a new and better life made by smugglers.
It is an attempt to pitch a new hard reality – deportation to Rwanda – against the hope and lived experience of those turning up in significant numbers on the French coastline: the young Vietnamese and the hundreds of others from Iraq, Sudan, Eritrea and elsewhere who had also been turned around from Wimereux at the last moment on Tuesday morning.
The calculation at the moment is clear. Those trudging back to the “jungle” outside Dunkirk on Tuesday night said they were under threat of being sent back home while on mainland Europe.
They knew of people who had made it to England and not returned and even sent money back.
They had been chased to the end of the road. “England is hope”, said Walid, a 30-year-old Iraqi, who said he would try to cross in the coming weeks. “I will try my luck. I can’t stay here”.
Dany Patoux, a volunteer for the French charity, Osmose 62, had been at the beach when the body of the young girl and her father were brought to shore.
She had seen the man at least three times before, at this beach and in Bologne, with his wife and two younger children.
Each previous attempt to cross had been foiled by the police.
“He fell into our arms and was in tears,” Patoux said of the morning’s horror. “He saw his daughter die in front of him.”
Yet, the rest of the man’s young family had stayed on the boat. Indeed, after the dead had been recovered and 47 others had voluntary got on to a rescue boat, the dinghy had carried on its journey with scores more to England.
In the face of unimaginable horror, some of those on that vessel had maintained belief in a better life on the other side of the choppy waters.
“In all the countries they have crossed before, either they were tortured or persecuted, threatened with being deported, and the conditions here are not worthy of animals,” said Patoux. “What they are hoping in crossing to England is to find shelter, to find warmth.
“They have heard about the law from Rwanda but they know it takes time to be active so they are willing to take that risk, to get there before it is in place.”
The scramble to get on the boat that morning may have been in part because people were concerned to get to England before the Rwandan flights started, Patoux suggested.
“But I don’t think anything [will] change when it is law,” she said. “Most of them have family members there or they hear that people do stay and do help back home financially. They are not hopeless.”
