Only the hardy wade into the Channel in winter, and this year I’m one of them. Nearing the end of my stone-cold morning swim at Mermaid Beach in Folkestone, Kent, I notice something out of the ordinary. A commotion has broken out around a small inflatable dinghy a few beaches away as it skirts a vicious pile of rock groynes there to protect the shingle beach. Shortly afterwards, a fellow swimmer hollers in my direction, wondering whether I’ve seen the arrivals. They tossed their lifejackets in the water when they landed, he says, with what sounds like disdain.
I swim back to shore and walk up the beach, following a coastguard car. The dinghy is still bobbing up and down on the rocks, surrounded by military-looking jetskis; by the time I get there, it’s empty. Six men sit, soaking, on two semicircular stone banquettes adjoining the beach, surrounded by police and medics. According to the chatter on police radios, other men might have fled into a nearby coastal park, perhaps because they had contact information for people to help them. All six have been handed rugs and bottles of water; they look stunned, and a little sheepish. I ask a police officer if I can talk to the men and he shrugs his shoulders. “They haven’t been checked for Covid,” he says.
I’ve been living in Folkestone on and off now for nearly six years, and love the place and its beaches. Even before Covid-19 got many thinking about moving out of London in search of space and a better quality of life, Folkestone had become a magnet for a different kind of migrant: relatively well-heeled professionals or arty types from London. To some we’re sniffily known as DFLs, or Down-from-Londoners; there’s even an expensive beer called DFL, turned out by a local bakery, along with its sourdough bread, to help relieve us of our money. Just 20 metres away from where the new arrivals sit getting their breath back, construction workers are hammering away at a swanky beachfront development called Shoreline (tagline: “Where the land meets the sea”). Hardly any local people will be able to afford to live there.
Walking through a gaggle of police and nurses, I sit down beside one of the refugees: a handsome young man wearing a flimsy jacket who tells me his name is Mahmoud. He says he’s from the city of Deraa in southern Syria – a country that, by coincidence, I’ve spent much of the past decade reporting from. I’d imagined he might be elated to have arrived at his destination, but instead he looks stunned, as if he’s still processing what has just happened. The journey took seven hours in the freezing cold; at one point, he tells me, he was thrown into the water. He paid €3,000 (£2,514) for the privilege, but had no idea who the smugglers were – it was an amorphous company or syndicate. “It was a bad idea,” he says.
The current wave of arrivals began around 2015 when, thanks to the long aftermath of the Arab spring, millions of people fled chaos and poverty in the Middle East and north Africa to seek sanctuary and a better life. Most fetched up in countries such as Turkey, Greece and Italy; in time, some got as far as the UK, often concealing themselves on lorries or in the Channel tunnel to get here. It’s only in the last two years that this perilous new smuggling route – crossing the Channel on small boats or dinghies from Calais or Dunkirk in France to towns on the Kent and Sussex coast – became a serious prospect, when ferry security was toughened up and the pandemic shut down conventional travel routes. In 2018, 539 people attempted to cross the Channel in this way; by 2021, the annual number had swelled to more than 28,300.
In the past 12 months the boats have kept coming, and in even greater numbers. The day Mahmoud and the others arrived, 8 October 2021, turns out to be one of the biggest days ever for asylum seekers arriving on little boats: 624 people made the crossing, the fourth highest daily tally then recorded. Most, like Mahmoud, don’t make it on their own. If they’re lucky, they are intercepted by Border Force or RNLI lifeboats and taken to UK shores to begin their applications for asylum. The boats are a near-constant presence: you can watch them from the shore, see them attract inflammatory comments on social media or, in my case, swim right past them.
As Mahmoud and I speak, a medic arrives to check that he and his friends have drunk enough water. The older man sitting beside him is called Mohammed, but he knows no English. Neither does the third man, also Syrian. Three north Africans sit apart on the other banquette. Explaining as best I can that I am a journalist, I ask Mahmoud why he left Syria, and he tells me he’s fleeing the government of Bashar al-Assad. Had he been in the rebel Free Syrian Army? “No, no,” he says, waving the question away as if I don’t understand the gravity of the situation. “Bashar hates anyone who wants democracy.” Like many young Syrians, he might have been fleeing the prospect of imminent military service. Given he only left earlier in 2021, he might also have been escaping punishing new US sanctions, which are helping push the country to the brink of famine.
Without getting to know him better, it’s hard to say. I write down my name and telephone number in his still-wet notebook. “Welcome to the UK,” I say weakly, and shake the hands of all three men.
***
It is no wonder Mahmoud found his journey terrifying. The Channel is one of the busiest and most dangerous shipping lanes in the world. Whatever the enthusiasm of evangelical sea-swimmers, no one could survive in water like this for very long. A month later, at the beginning of November, someone dies attempting to reach the UK from France, after their small boat capsizes near Dunkirk. Little more than a day later, another person is found dead on a beach near Calais, after their boat rapidly filled up with water on the way across. A few days later, on my way back into the water at Mermaid Beach, I walk past another boat arriving and chat briefly to its shivering occupants. They include two Albanians and a young man from Iranian Kurdistan; none can speak any English.
As time goes on and Mahmoud doesn’t get in touch, I begin to wonder what became of him and the other new arrivals. As far as I can tell, an adult male like him would have been taken by bus to nearby Dover to be processed. After that, and possibly a stay in a cheap hotel, there’s a good chance he’d have been returned to a makeshift hostel in an army camp on the outskirts of Folkestone while his application for asylum is considered. The place is called Napier Barracks and it’s on the furthest western edge of Folkestone, in a hilly, sparsely populated army camp known as Shorncliffe. On a chilly afternoon in November, I set out from Folkestone to find it, but I get lost several times. Shorncliffe has a long and distinguished military history, and many of those who live around here work for the army or the Ministry of Defence. The Gurkhas have a base here, and there’s a large Nepali community in the wider area. Street names include Military Road and Gurkha Way; outside some of the barracks, large signs announce “MOD area, keep clear”.
Napier Barracks is a forbidding series of Victorian military blocks with views of the Kent Downs. The place once housed army cadets; it was pressed into service as a hostel in September 2020. At any one time, between 200 and 400 recently arrived asylum seekers, all men, are housed here; provided they give a forwarding address, they are free to come and go. I walk past the main gate to find a dozen north African men, mostly Eritrean, ferrying out metal goalposts for a football match in a field across the road. After them come a few Kurds, headed for an afternoon stroll.
***
In the following weeks, I take a walk here most days. The first person I strike up a conversation with is Sadeq, an Iranian Kurd in his 20s who arrived in the UK, by small boat, on 25 June, with 43 others. We meet on a park bench overlooking Napier, Sadeq patiently using an app on his mobile phone to translate from his local Kurdish dialect into elementary English. In Iran, he says, despite being “uneducated, illiterate”, he worked for a local democratic party, smuggling Kurdish-language materials across the border from Iraq. Every time he speaks about the Iranian authorities and what they might do to him, he jokily pretends to hold an imaginary noose with his head inside it. One day in April, the Iranian police arrived at his door armed with his photo. He was out, but his mother warned him to leave. “Go, go, go,” was all she said on the phone; it was enough.
Sadeq left Iran on 20 April, without any belongings. He didn’t bring his passport because, like many Iranian Kurds, he didn’t have one. He wasn’t even able to go home and say goodbye to his mother; it would have been too dangerous. His first journey by sea was from Turkey to Greece, with 37 others. “It was a small boat with an engine,” he says. “The journey lasted five days after the engine broke. There was a different group of smugglers in every country. My uncle paid for it all. He also paid for the journey to the UK.” Why the UK? “I don’t know,” he shrugs. “My uncle told me it was a safe place.”
The journey from the “Jungle” in Calais took eight hours; Sadeq had paid €1,700 (£1,423) for it. In the night, six of the smugglers ushered people on to the boat with knives; even so, the sea was so choppy that five of them immediately got out. During the journey they were ordered to keep their phones switched off, presumably to avoid detection by French or British police. What he remembers most were “big waves – we were so scared of them. And these really big fish.” The boat was intercepted by British police and taken to Dover, where Sadeq spent five days being interviewed before being packed off to a hotel in south London for two and a half months.
Then he was brought to Folkestone and Napier. Each block in the camp houses 28 asylum seekers, split into two sections of 14, with seven people on each side; MDF partitions have been placed between the beds, with a curtain for “privacy”. Like the others I speak to, Sadeq much prefers Napier to the isolation of a London hostel. “The food is very good, much better than London, and the security people are very good,” he says. All the same, there is no dentist and Sadeq’s teeth are hurting. He mimes scratching himself to communicate that there are also bugs. He has been promised that the authorities will find him a room in a flat somewhere in around two months: “London, Birmingham, Glasgow, anywhere.” In the meantime, there is little to do. He can’t contact his friends and family back home, he says, because he and they are afraid of surveillance by the Iranian authorities. Napier has a games room and the internet; Sadeq spends most of his time watching YouTube to improve his English. He’s been here 59 days, he says, clearly counting them down. Like the others I speak to, he has had little interaction with local people, but no bad experiences either. One retired man he met while walking even took him to Ashford for a day trip and bought him a new pair of shoes.
On another afternoon, after watching a football match in the field across the road from Napier, I wander over to speak to one of the best players – Leon, a wisecracking Kurd from the city of Sulaymaniyah in Iraq, who took the trip from Dunkirk by small boat eight months ago. The journey cost him £2,000, he says. There were so many smugglers and it was impossible to know who to trust, which was why he didn’t give any money up front; instead he left it with an intermediary with instructions to pay only when he called from the UK to say he’d made it. Everyone he talked to had done the same thing. “In my country, even the worst smugglers are better than my president,” he quips, making a common claim about corruption among the Barzani clan who run Kurdish Iraq. “But these people were not good. They lie to you. The journey will take one hour, they say – you will be in England, and everyone will be fine.”
The reality was different. “Everyone was crying and praying. All of us thought we were going to die. Water comes inside the boat, inside your clothes. I love my life; you think about everything.” Among 35 passengers there were about half a dozen children on the boat and an equal number of men and women. The journey lasted four hours; they were rescued by the British police. Both they and the French police were efficient and respectful, Leon says (“If anyone says they were not good, they’re lying”). By comparison, he claims, Belgian police imprisoned him and stole his money and mobile phone.
Much of his journey over land from Turkey was spent in total darkness: “You’re always in a truck or in a house. You can’t go out.” Leon refuses to tell me why he’d left Iraq, other than that he had problems with family and religion. And, despite the terrors of the journey, he has no regrets about coming to the UK. In time, he wants to go to university here, to study information technology. He’d also like to play for Manchester City, he says: “But at 24, I’m too old.”
***
Almost everyone I speak to, including Sadeq and Leon, hopefully extols Britain as a land of opportunity. They also talk about its benevolent approach to refugees as reasons to come here; some know a little English, or something of British culture. Jemal, a self-effacing young man, arrived in Napier on 12 November, having departed his native Asmara in Eritrea with two friends back in March. Even the first leg of the trip, to Sudan, was gruelling, and after that came an epic journey of five or six days on a huge truck through the Sahara. There were about 120 people, he says. “It was hot. We had water but no food, and no appetite.” The reason was that they were tired and “scared of bad people – criminals”. By May he was in Libya, where “there were people with guns”; from there, he paid €4,000 (£3,352) to travel with about 150 others in a boat to Italy. “It was beautiful and scary,” he says. “The boat was shifting to the left and right; people were seasick.” The journey lasted 36 hours and the passengers were eventually rescued by the Italian authorities, who took them to the island of Lampedusa.
Now in Europe, Jemal began to breathe more easily. One friend went to Switzerland, “because he had family there”, and another set off for the Netherlands. Jemal went to the Netherlands, too, where he stayed with some cousins for three weeks. After that, he went to Belgium, then Calais for two weeks, contemplating the final leg of his journey to Britain. By this time Jemal had been on the road almost continuously for five months, and he was entirely alone. He paid €2,500 (£2,095) for a journey by dinghy with 60 others, but the vessel turned out not to be in a fit state. He laughs darkly. “We paid our money and then had to make it ready ourselves – working with the smugglers, pumping it up with air, fixing the motor and battery.” As usual, the smugglers didn’t make the trip, some of the passengers appointing themselves navigators. “One man was using a compass on his mobile phone. Four or five others were helping; maybe because of their work before, they knew something about this.” The journey was scarier than the one from Libya to Italy; there were too many people for such a small boat and Jemal had no idea who the smugglers really were and how far they could be trusted. Then there was the fact that he couldn’t swim. Most of all, he began to worry that a fight might break out among his fellow passengers. “Some people are good, some are bad, and this was a very small boat.”
I ask why he’d left Asmara and he talks about coronavirus and the lack of facilities there: “There was no safety, and the hospitals aren’t good.” In Asmara his family ran a small supermarket; he has four sisters, and one brother who left before him and is now in Sweden.
Only after talking for some time, and almost in passing, do I begin to understand one of the main reasons Jemal has come here to apply for asylum: he’s afraid of being called up for military service amid a brutal local civil war (“The Eritrean government, if they want a soldier, they might come to me”). It becomes a theme. Over the next weeks I swap WhatsApp messages with Sadeq, who eventually tells me he’s gay. It was, he confesses, a prime reason he decided to leave. A few days later he says his application for residency in the UK has been declined. Being gay in Iran is punishable by imprisonment and even execution: why hadn’t he mentioned it on his application at Napier? “I couldn’t talk about it because the translator was Kurdish,” he texts. “I don’t want Kurds to know.”
***
The story of how an informal support network for people like Sadeq and Jemal grew up in Folkestone is largely one about women of different ages helping young men. Sally Hough is one of them. Hough, another DFL, used to work in London galleries before making the move to Folkestone with her partner a decade ago.
We arrange to meet in a Folkestone coffee bar and she sweeps in and orders a bacon burger before apologising if I don’t eat meat. “I feel like I should be vegan now,” she jokes, referring to the main demographic working with asylum seekers in the town. Like many others, Hough’s first experience of helping refugees was in 2019, when she mentored a boy for Kent Refugee Action Network (Kran), a local NGO dedicated to supporting young and unaccompanied asylum seekers. A friend was supporting a Syrian family who had been rehoused in unsuitable accommodation: “Dreadful and mouldy, mattresses for small children with springs sticking out of them.” The pair set up a crowdfunder, which raised £800. When she went shopping locally for mattresses, one local bed shop insisted on selling them to her at the wholesale price. With more money than they needed, Hough decided to do something to help those at Napier, too – collecting toiletries, shoes and bottled water, and delivering them to the barracks by car.
Softly spoken but steely, Hough says her efforts have not been well received by everyone. On her first drop-off in October 2020, she and a friend encountered camera-wielding members of an amateurish far-right group who mocked and abused them, accusing them of bringing in drugs. They weren’t local, Hough says, and the police and the camp manager intervened. Though the harassment soon dried up, she decided the safest way to distribute the mounting pile of donations might be to use a room in the camp. Then came the fire, in January 2021, when some of the residents allegedly set light to a block to protest about the spread of Covid-19 in the camp. Hough was in a local park picking up her children when she saw the smoke rising; then the men from the camp began to send her videos. “It was an awful feeling. I thought people were going to die.”
For a time Hough worked with local organisations, such as Napier Friends, which helps, among other things, to organise English classes in the camp. But she is withering about the way Napier has been run by the Home Office which was criticised in a report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons into conditions at the site. Now, working with other local charities, Hough manages a volunteer-run drop-in centre 10 minutes’ walk from the camp, to which many Napier residents come for advice about the asylum process, to learn skills or just to have cake and coffee.
Napier used to have an appalling reputation, Hough says; people who thought they were being transferred there sometimes ran away, or jumped on a bus to London. Improvements have been made, thanks to the efforts and activism of the residents and people like her, together with a judicial review that meant the Home Office was forced to make changes. The food is certainly better and the barracks are less isolating than a hostel, but the dormitory-style accommodation is essentially the same: the residents can socialise, but they can’t sleep. “Someone goes to the toilet and the lights go on and off. Someone misses their family and calls them, and that wakes someone else up and makes them miss their family, too. Before long lots of people are awake.” Sadeq had told me he was always tired and yawning. The only reason asylum seekers get sent back to Folkestone and Napier, Hough thinks, is that “the Home Office want to prove a point – that they’re being tough”.
Hough isn’t the only local working independently to help refugees. Shortly after I move into my flat in the town, I notice a stream of young men turning up on the doorstep of my middle-aged neighbour, Teresa. (Teresa – not her real name – really is a vegan.) “She’s like a mother to us,” one man tells me. Teresa moved to Folkestone in April 2019, after the end of a long marriage, and immediately set about doing what she could to help young refugees. With her children grown up, she sees it as the role of people like her “to help younger generations”; she has enabled a few asylum seekers to secure tenancies by offering to be their guarantor, and assisted others with their visa applications and interviews at a local jobcentre.
Our lunch over, Hough offers me a lift to the camp; I have arranged to meet Jemal again. Along the way, she greets several young men we pass on a residential street. They come to the drop-in centre, she says. Some have told her that occasionally a car will slow down and someone will shout, “Go back to where you came from” or similar. Every single person in Napier, I’m told, is likely to have heard that once.
***
How much sympathy do the people of Folkestone really have for the asylum seekers who arrive on the beaches? Between the mouthy far-right activists and those who have the time and inclination to help, most seem to be in the middle, and broadly understanding of the asylum seekers’ plight. If some tut-tut at the anarchy of dinghies washing up on their beaches, that’s forgivable. The asylum seekers themselves would agree; they would much prefer a safer, more orderly way to get in.
When journalists come to Folkestone to report on the regeneration of the town, some end up at the museum, musing thoughtfully over a picture called Landing of the Belgium Refugees. It recalls the arrival of Belgians fleeing the first world war, among them 16,000 who came on a single day in October 1914, and the welcome they received from the local authorities.
But much has changed in Folkestone since 1914. After a brief period of prosperity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it fell into a long period of neglect. The last straw was the mothballing of its ferry port in 2000, killed off by the arrival of the Channel tunnel. Walk through the housing estates behind Folkestone’s new “creative quarter” and you’ll find pockets of squalor and deprivation reminiscent of the 1950s. Most here accept that culture-led regeneration and the recent arrival of well-heeled Londoners are among the best things to have happened to the town for decades. But such progress hasn’t trickled down to the local population, and average rents in Folkestone went up by as much as 26.7% in the last year, the second highest rise in the country. In many ways Folkestonians have more to fear from migrants like me than those arriving, desperate, on inflatable dinghies from overseas.
As the weather deteriorates and the smugglers persist in trying their luck, the final week of November brings fresh catastrophe; at least 27 asylum seekers, mostly Kurds like Sadeq and Leon, are found dead when their inflatable capsizes near Calais. At midday the following Sunday, a few hundred people gather on Sunny Sands, Folkestone’s most popular beach, for a vigil to remember the dead. By the time I arrive, the slogan “Safe routes now” has been etched in giant letters in the sand. The event has been organised by Bridget Chapman, spokesperson for Kran and an energetic advocate for local asylum seekers. About 25 Napier residents are there, too, given lifts by Sally Hough and Napier Friends. At the drop-in centre, she tells me, there has been an explosion of interest among people wanting to help.
Soon after, the trail of dinghies and small boats dries up for a while; fierce weather and the roaring sea have made the journey all but impossible. But just before Christmas, despite escalating rhetoric from the British government, they start up again. When the wind drops and the seas calm, determined swimmers think about venturing back into the water, but it makes Hough anxious. “It’s not long before we hear the helicopters,” she tells me, when I call for an update. “We hope everyone has arrived safely, and that there was at least one person who was welcoming on the beach.”
All refugees’ names have been changed.
