Most evenings, while Katya Zaikhchuk was waiting in Poland for the Home Office to grant her and her 15-year-old son, Sasha, a visa to come to England, she would get a video call from her host, Clare Birkbeck, as she cooked supper at home in Essex. “I’d walk around the house, showing her the kitchen and the bedrooms, trying to make her feel comfortable, showing her what living in our house would be like. I was more worried for them than nervous for us,” Birkbeck remembers.
She and her husband bought a Ukrainian flag from Amazon, and their daughter made a poster decorated with yellow and blue curled ribbons and carefully transcribed a welcome message from Google Translate, which they took to the airport when they went to meet their guests in April. “You could see they were both very nervous. When they saw us, they hugged us and cried.”
