I was talking to my friend Henry Wuga the other day. We covered this and that: the intense summer scent of sweet peas, and his grandson’s recent wedding at Wells Cathedral, which Henry attended with the help of his daughters. Quite a feat considering he lives 400 miles away and is 98 years old. We talked about the simple joy of being with loved ones after the past two desolate years. Years in which his wife, my mum, and so many died. And Henry told me he finally got to hold the newest baby in the family; how intently the boy looked at him with his “big black eyes” as they read a book together. “He turned the pages,” Henry said. “What joy to be a great-grandpa.”
We also talked about the government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Time is running out and the first flight is scheduled to take off in less than a week. On 14 June, a group of people from countries potentially including Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran, Eritrea, and Iraq will be flown 4,500 miles from these islands to which they fled in hope of just treatment. How wrong they were. There have been reports of hunger strikes in detention centres and some of the 100 or so men selected for ejection say they are suicidal. Now at this grim 11th hour we discover children may be among them. “To be an unaccompanied child is difficult at the best of times,” Henry said to me. “But to send you alone to a country where you don’t speak the language, to which you have no connection whatsoever, and where you may be in danger all over again … well, it is inconceivable to me.”
