Annie Christie's That Long Hot Summer
Episode Eleven
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: If you build it, they will come?
Swearwords: None.
Description: If you build it, they will come?
The solution was in front of their faces.
‘Wouldn’t you love to live there?’ Susie pointed at a ‘for sale’ sign on a run-down chateau.
‘Anyone would,’ Shelley replied.
‘So why not?’ Susie asked.
‘Well, I’m going back to England to be with Daniel and…’ Shelley said.
‘No, dimwit,’ Susie said, ‘I mean Mohammed. Why can’t they…?’
‘Squatting?’ Shelley said. ‘I can’t think of a quicker way to get noticed by the authorities.’
‘No,’ Susie said. ‘We’ll buy it.’
That simple? Actually it almost was. It was certainly one of Creative Solutions better plans. They went into the local lawyer’s office and discovered that it was on the market for a ridiculous 80,000 Euros.
‘A totally crowdfundable sum,’ Susie said. ‘We could make that in a week if we pitch it right. People want to help refugees. Refugees want to help themselves. Why not here?’
Susie and Mike talked it over on the phone. If Daniel and Shelley were a great combination, it turned out that Susie and Mike brought out by far the best in each other too. Together they constructed a killer app which got people to part with their cash pronto – all under the official radar so that it wasn’t on the national media that a refugee hotel was being crowdfunded in rural France. Imagine the field day that would have been made of that. But sometimes social media can be used under the radar. Going viral can be done in a range of ways. Reaching the appropriate target market without letting the authorities know is not a matter of the dark web, more one of clever use of algorithms. You don’t need to know the detail.
You just need to know the following. Shelley drove back to England. She took the quickest route, up through France, Calais to Dover (without picking up any more refugees in the Jungle, though she was sorely tempted) and from Dover up the spine of the country till she arrived back at Salford into the welcoming arms of Daniel who had felt lost without her and worried for her constantly.
‘I’m nothing without you,’ he said.
‘That’s not true,’ she said, ‘but I’ll take it as a compliment. Now, we have to get down to work.’
Susie, Mohammed, Nooda and Sami (who had recovered from his temperature as soon as he was checked into a holiday park – which fortunately did not ask to see passports) were in France waiting for the money to come through. But money wasn’t all they needed. And then Daniel came up with another creative solution.
He applied for, and got, a passport on behalf of his dead brother Christopher.
‘You do know that’s illegal?’ Mike asked.
‘I’m more concerned with ethics than the law,’ Daniel replied. ‘In what world is it ethical to allow Mohammed and his family to be sent to The Jungle, or a deportation camp or back to Syria? Anything that anyone can do to avoid that has to be right, doesn’t it?’
‘You’ve got my vote,’ Mike replied. ‘I just hope they don’t catch up with you.’
‘Look,’ Daniel said, ‘my brother’s life was stolen from him by a crazed gunman on an ordinary morning in Dunblane and the loss caused incalculable harm to many people. This is a chance to give Chris a life worth living. A chance to mean that he had not lived, or died, without purpose.’
Daniel felt that Ammar and Mohammed were as much his brothers as his blood kin Thomas and Christopher, and the issue of ‘identity’ went far beyond ownership of a passport. And he told Ammar as much.
‘Thank you for giving your brother,’ Ammar said when Daniel told him of the plan.
‘We are all brothers,’ Daniel replied. ‘Living or dead, we all need to care for each other and to do the best we can.’ And he really meant it.
‘I just wish I could give you a passport too,’ he said.
‘I can wait for the judgement,’ Ammar said. ‘And if no…’
‘There is no ‘no’,’ Daniel replied. ‘We’ll come up with a solution whatever happens.’
Though he wasn’t as confident as he sounded about the propensity of the British Government to ‘do the right thing’ by Ammar and his family.
‘Who would want their fate to be decided by a bean counter in Croydon?’ he said to Mike.
‘True,’ Mike replied. ‘But if we can’t outsmart Croydon bean-counters we don’t deserve to call ourselves creative solutions now, do we?’
* * *
The plan was for ‘Chris’ to head up the Creative Solutions building project in France. In due course the passport came through but they didn’t fancy trusting it to the post, it had to be delivered in person. Daniel couldn’t get the time off work and obviously Ammar couldn’t take it, much as he longed to see his brother, but there was more than one willing volunteer from Mr Zhi’s garden project who was prepared to sacrifice a life in northern England for one in rural France on a one-way ticket.
The money to buy the chateau was raised in ten days. It’s amazing how much money there is out there, just looking for a good home. A couple of big donors and a multiplicity of ‘small’ people who saw the potential of doing something better than blow £50 on a night out was all it took.
Faced with cash purchasers at well above market value for a ‘quick sale’, the French legal system excelled itself and within a month everything was tied up. The workforce to renovate the chateau was remarkably easy to source from legitimate and illegal workers of the world. Some of those who had paid their £50 were more than happy to find their own way there to help in the process. Piotr, a legal Polish migrant with construction credentials, took ‘Chris’s’ passport along with a van, also paid for by crowdsourced money, down to France. Getting out of Britain wasn’t half as much of a problem as getting in – no one looked in the back of the van for refugees – and so a couple of weeks later Mr Zhi was tasked with bringing the Chateau garden back to its former glory. The project offered a new life for both garden and man, and Mr Zhi never looked back.
‘I so wish he hadn’t had to leave,’ Shelley said, ‘he’s done so many great things here.’
But that was the way of the world. We do what we can, when we can, where we can. And when we have to, we move on.
‘He’s going to be a lot happier there,’ Daniel pointed out. ‘And he surely deserves some happiness.’
That was indisputable.
‘Christopher’ Mohammed, his wife and son moved into the chateau along with Piotr and five or six other ‘labourers’. As more money rolled in, they kept the local economy going by purchasing building supplies. It was taking humanitarian relief to the heart of capitalism and winning, Mike joked.
In a few months the Chateau was looking quite the part. Its first guests were not exactly paying holiday makers, but no one imagined that it was actually a considerably up-market version of the Calais Jungle. It’s called, I believe, hiding in plain sight meets doing it for yourself.
The creative solutions Chateau was an exemplar of what resourceful people can do when they are allowed to put their minds and their labour together for a common purpose. Of course they needed money to achieve it. But money is something many of us have far too much of for our own good, right? And without even giving till it hurts, it was pretty easy to persuade enough good people that they could be part of tipping the balance in favour of those who really need help.
Refugee camps don’t have to be hell-holes. People are not just so much human capital and they are not spent forces when they are displaced. You just have to come up with creative solutions. The refugees don’t give in, so surely we owe it to them to try our best to help them. Not just to turn our heads when it gets a bit difficult. As Shelley pointed out on more than one occasion – when the law is stupid, if you can’t change the rules you bend them to the best of your ability.
Susie termed this ‘Each of us adding our little light to the sum of light.’
It comes to the same thing, whichever way you look at it.
There was no winter of discontent for the people at the Chateau. They were active. Worse was the waiting game played by Ammar and his family back in Salford. Six months stretched out and Ammar couldn’t bear having his life on hold. It’s not that he wanted to take risks, but he wanted to do something to help the cause. So, using Daniel’s National Insurance number, he took another job – a low-grade job in the service industry where no one was questioning where he came from or if he had the right to remain. They only cared that he turned up on time and did the job. It just proves that sometimes you don’t have to climb over fences, you can do just fine keeping your head down and being unobtrusive right under the eyes of the guards, because they are so busy looking out for those who are trying to scale the heights.
As the autumn progressed, Shelley didn’t go back to University. She set up Creative Solutions Refugee Action from Mr Zhi’s garden project premises. They converted some space into a clothes swap building and ran a food bank. They encouraged like-minded individuals to ‘host a family’ long before the governments of Europe got round to deciding how many migrants they would ‘host’. All of this just bypassed the asylum system entirely. And for the short term, it worked.
But all through the winter, the refugee crisis didn’t go away. And governments prevaricated, hoping the cold would dissuade, or kill, or who knows what. Burying heads in the sand or the snow is never the way to solve a crisis. Shelley didn’t need a degree in International Development to teach her that. But when governments fail, people have to step in. We all have to explore our own creative solutions to an intolerable situation, don’t we?
Daniel, who a few months before had identified himself with the loneliness of a Lowry painting, had learned that we are most alive when we step outside of our isolation and give ourselves to others. Love meant taking a risk, but Shelley showed him the way. Ammar taught him the value of a brother’s love in so many ways his head was still spinning, and he reflected that while the world in and of itself had become no less scary, he was now brave enough to live in it – to take his part and be the person he had always wanted to be.
‘Your parents would have been proud of you,’ Shelley said to him the day he held his dead brother’s passport in his hand – complete with a picture of Mohammed in place of a Christopher who never lived to be a man.
‘I hope so,’ he said.
‘You’ve given life to their son again,’ she said.
‘And so have you,’ he replied.
Want a happy ending? Should we leave them here kissing? We will leave them for now, but this is not the end. You know that, don’t you? It’s their story, but uncomfortably it seems that it’s becoming more fact that fiction and as much our story as theirs. We all need to consider some creative solutions going forward. Call them refugee, call them migrant – we are all surely in some sense our brother’s keeper? We are all complicit in the bodies of children being washed up on beaches. If we want a happy ending beyond fiction we have to make it ourselves.
‘Wouldn’t you love to live there?’ Susie pointed at a ‘for sale’ sign on a run-down chateau.
‘Anyone would,’ Shelley replied.
‘So why not?’ Susie asked.
‘Well, I’m going back to England to be with Daniel and…’ Shelley said.
‘No, dimwit,’ Susie said, ‘I mean Mohammed. Why can’t they…?’
‘Squatting?’ Shelley said. ‘I can’t think of a quicker way to get noticed by the authorities.’
‘No,’ Susie said. ‘We’ll buy it.’
That simple? Actually it almost was. It was certainly one of Creative Solutions better plans. They went into the local lawyer’s office and discovered that it was on the market for a ridiculous 80,000 Euros.
‘A totally crowdfundable sum,’ Susie said. ‘We could make that in a week if we pitch it right. People want to help refugees. Refugees want to help themselves. Why not here?’
Susie and Mike talked it over on the phone. If Daniel and Shelley were a great combination, it turned out that Susie and Mike brought out by far the best in each other too. Together they constructed a killer app which got people to part with their cash pronto – all under the official radar so that it wasn’t on the national media that a refugee hotel was being crowdfunded in rural France. Imagine the field day that would have been made of that. But sometimes social media can be used under the radar. Going viral can be done in a range of ways. Reaching the appropriate target market without letting the authorities know is not a matter of the dark web, more one of clever use of algorithms. You don’t need to know the detail.
You just need to know the following. Shelley drove back to England. She took the quickest route, up through France, Calais to Dover (without picking up any more refugees in the Jungle, though she was sorely tempted) and from Dover up the spine of the country till she arrived back at Salford into the welcoming arms of Daniel who had felt lost without her and worried for her constantly.
‘I’m nothing without you,’ he said.
‘That’s not true,’ she said, ‘but I’ll take it as a compliment. Now, we have to get down to work.’
Susie, Mohammed, Nooda and Sami (who had recovered from his temperature as soon as he was checked into a holiday park – which fortunately did not ask to see passports) were in France waiting for the money to come through. But money wasn’t all they needed. And then Daniel came up with another creative solution.
He applied for, and got, a passport on behalf of his dead brother Christopher.
‘You do know that’s illegal?’ Mike asked.
‘I’m more concerned with ethics than the law,’ Daniel replied. ‘In what world is it ethical to allow Mohammed and his family to be sent to The Jungle, or a deportation camp or back to Syria? Anything that anyone can do to avoid that has to be right, doesn’t it?’
‘You’ve got my vote,’ Mike replied. ‘I just hope they don’t catch up with you.’
‘Look,’ Daniel said, ‘my brother’s life was stolen from him by a crazed gunman on an ordinary morning in Dunblane and the loss caused incalculable harm to many people. This is a chance to give Chris a life worth living. A chance to mean that he had not lived, or died, without purpose.’
Daniel felt that Ammar and Mohammed were as much his brothers as his blood kin Thomas and Christopher, and the issue of ‘identity’ went far beyond ownership of a passport. And he told Ammar as much.
‘Thank you for giving your brother,’ Ammar said when Daniel told him of the plan.
‘We are all brothers,’ Daniel replied. ‘Living or dead, we all need to care for each other and to do the best we can.’ And he really meant it.
‘I just wish I could give you a passport too,’ he said.
‘I can wait for the judgement,’ Ammar said. ‘And if no…’
‘There is no ‘no’,’ Daniel replied. ‘We’ll come up with a solution whatever happens.’
Though he wasn’t as confident as he sounded about the propensity of the British Government to ‘do the right thing’ by Ammar and his family.
‘Who would want their fate to be decided by a bean counter in Croydon?’ he said to Mike.
‘True,’ Mike replied. ‘But if we can’t outsmart Croydon bean-counters we don’t deserve to call ourselves creative solutions now, do we?’
* * *
The plan was for ‘Chris’ to head up the Creative Solutions building project in France. In due course the passport came through but they didn’t fancy trusting it to the post, it had to be delivered in person. Daniel couldn’t get the time off work and obviously Ammar couldn’t take it, much as he longed to see his brother, but there was more than one willing volunteer from Mr Zhi’s garden project who was prepared to sacrifice a life in northern England for one in rural France on a one-way ticket.
The money to buy the chateau was raised in ten days. It’s amazing how much money there is out there, just looking for a good home. A couple of big donors and a multiplicity of ‘small’ people who saw the potential of doing something better than blow £50 on a night out was all it took.
Faced with cash purchasers at well above market value for a ‘quick sale’, the French legal system excelled itself and within a month everything was tied up. The workforce to renovate the chateau was remarkably easy to source from legitimate and illegal workers of the world. Some of those who had paid their £50 were more than happy to find their own way there to help in the process. Piotr, a legal Polish migrant with construction credentials, took ‘Chris’s’ passport along with a van, also paid for by crowdsourced money, down to France. Getting out of Britain wasn’t half as much of a problem as getting in – no one looked in the back of the van for refugees – and so a couple of weeks later Mr Zhi was tasked with bringing the Chateau garden back to its former glory. The project offered a new life for both garden and man, and Mr Zhi never looked back.
‘I so wish he hadn’t had to leave,’ Shelley said, ‘he’s done so many great things here.’
But that was the way of the world. We do what we can, when we can, where we can. And when we have to, we move on.
‘He’s going to be a lot happier there,’ Daniel pointed out. ‘And he surely deserves some happiness.’
That was indisputable.
‘Christopher’ Mohammed, his wife and son moved into the chateau along with Piotr and five or six other ‘labourers’. As more money rolled in, they kept the local economy going by purchasing building supplies. It was taking humanitarian relief to the heart of capitalism and winning, Mike joked.
In a few months the Chateau was looking quite the part. Its first guests were not exactly paying holiday makers, but no one imagined that it was actually a considerably up-market version of the Calais Jungle. It’s called, I believe, hiding in plain sight meets doing it for yourself.
The creative solutions Chateau was an exemplar of what resourceful people can do when they are allowed to put their minds and their labour together for a common purpose. Of course they needed money to achieve it. But money is something many of us have far too much of for our own good, right? And without even giving till it hurts, it was pretty easy to persuade enough good people that they could be part of tipping the balance in favour of those who really need help.
Refugee camps don’t have to be hell-holes. People are not just so much human capital and they are not spent forces when they are displaced. You just have to come up with creative solutions. The refugees don’t give in, so surely we owe it to them to try our best to help them. Not just to turn our heads when it gets a bit difficult. As Shelley pointed out on more than one occasion – when the law is stupid, if you can’t change the rules you bend them to the best of your ability.
Susie termed this ‘Each of us adding our little light to the sum of light.’
It comes to the same thing, whichever way you look at it.
There was no winter of discontent for the people at the Chateau. They were active. Worse was the waiting game played by Ammar and his family back in Salford. Six months stretched out and Ammar couldn’t bear having his life on hold. It’s not that he wanted to take risks, but he wanted to do something to help the cause. So, using Daniel’s National Insurance number, he took another job – a low-grade job in the service industry where no one was questioning where he came from or if he had the right to remain. They only cared that he turned up on time and did the job. It just proves that sometimes you don’t have to climb over fences, you can do just fine keeping your head down and being unobtrusive right under the eyes of the guards, because they are so busy looking out for those who are trying to scale the heights.
As the autumn progressed, Shelley didn’t go back to University. She set up Creative Solutions Refugee Action from Mr Zhi’s garden project premises. They converted some space into a clothes swap building and ran a food bank. They encouraged like-minded individuals to ‘host a family’ long before the governments of Europe got round to deciding how many migrants they would ‘host’. All of this just bypassed the asylum system entirely. And for the short term, it worked.
But all through the winter, the refugee crisis didn’t go away. And governments prevaricated, hoping the cold would dissuade, or kill, or who knows what. Burying heads in the sand or the snow is never the way to solve a crisis. Shelley didn’t need a degree in International Development to teach her that. But when governments fail, people have to step in. We all have to explore our own creative solutions to an intolerable situation, don’t we?
Daniel, who a few months before had identified himself with the loneliness of a Lowry painting, had learned that we are most alive when we step outside of our isolation and give ourselves to others. Love meant taking a risk, but Shelley showed him the way. Ammar taught him the value of a brother’s love in so many ways his head was still spinning, and he reflected that while the world in and of itself had become no less scary, he was now brave enough to live in it – to take his part and be the person he had always wanted to be.
‘Your parents would have been proud of you,’ Shelley said to him the day he held his dead brother’s passport in his hand – complete with a picture of Mohammed in place of a Christopher who never lived to be a man.
‘I hope so,’ he said.
‘You’ve given life to their son again,’ she said.
‘And so have you,’ he replied.
Want a happy ending? Should we leave them here kissing? We will leave them for now, but this is not the end. You know that, don’t you? It’s their story, but uncomfortably it seems that it’s becoming more fact that fiction and as much our story as theirs. We all need to consider some creative solutions going forward. Call them refugee, call them migrant – we are all surely in some sense our brother’s keeper? We are all complicit in the bodies of children being washed up on beaches. If we want a happy ending beyond fiction we have to make it ourselves.
About the Author
Annie Christie is a pretty ordinary person, except that she was born Annie Christie and then married a man called Christie and so is still called Christie despite having taken on her husband’s name. She sometimes wonders if she should have called herself Christie-Christie: but who would believe that?
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.
That Long Hot Summer is Annie's third McSerial written for McStorytellers.
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.
That Long Hot Summer is Annie's third McSerial written for McStorytellers.