Annie Christie's That Long Hot Summer
Episode Nine
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: We're All Going on a Summer Holiday.
Swearwords: None.
Description: We're All Going on a Summer Holiday.
The journey across Europe took three days. Ferry from Newcastle to Amsterdam, then down the length of Europe – Germany, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Macedonia to Athens was a cool thirty hours – not counting stops. Twelve hours driving a day was the best they could manage. They swapped ‘shifts’ at the wheel because the campervan wasn’t like driving a saloon. And concentration was key. They paid particular attention at border crossings and the further south they got, the more they were aware of the task facing northward bound refugees.
Over and above all, they tried to make it look like they were on holiday. Destination Lesvos. Who wouldn’t want to go to a Greek Island in July? But Lesvos in July 2015 was much more than a tourist destination. Every day hundreds of refugees were being washed up on the shores at the start of their own long odyssey in search of a better life. A life better than being shot at and bombed and driven out of their minds with worry for their children. Even sleeping rough on a beach was better than that. Even walking long miles and being thwarted at every turn was better than that.
The further south they got the more aware they became of the sense of humanity on the move. A mass migration that was being misrepresented, when it was represented at all, on the media at home. Where desperate people were being labelled cockroaches. Man’s inhumanity to man at its inglorious best.
With each border they crossed, Daniel and Shelley stopped to find a shop selling them the appropriate sim card for that country. Smartphones are useless without the right sim card, after all. They put money on each sim card and to make sure they worked they kept checking in with Mike. Back at base nothing new seemed to be happening. Life went on. No one is indispensable. Ammar had fitted into Daniel’s life quite comfortably. No one was asking any questions in the research lab – well, except about chemistry and Ammar brought some new perspective to Daniel’s given tasks.
‘We could have been brothers,’ Daniel said to Shelley as they waited for the ferry at Piraeus.
‘Life is really random,’ she replied. ‘That’s why we have to do what we can.’
‘Can we really do anything?’ he asked.
‘Of course we can,’ she said. ‘Creative solutions, right. All it takes is a good idea, and the nerve to follow it through.’
They got to Lesvos and any qualms Daniel had vanished in the sand. It wasn’t the Jungle, but it was as far removed from the ideal holiday destination as could be. The first thing that struck him was the rubbish. The locals were doing what they could, but each day as more and more refugees were washed ashore (mostly alive) so the pile of life-jackets grew – discarded as they made their way forward.
They followed the news on their smartphones. David Cameron described the ‘migrants’ as a swarm – as if they were locusts – and while it was a completely inappropriate statement it did in some sense represent the type of movement that Daniel and Shelley saw in front of their eyes in Serbia and Macedonia. The refugees they saw were desperate people under incredibly difficult circumstances. People just like them. People attempting to hold on to their humanity. People beginning to lose the sense that they were actually ‘just like us’. It was an indictment on a Europe that could let such a thing happen.
‘First we bomb them from their homes, then we starve them out, then we steal their money to give them the smallest hope. We sell them a perilous journey and then we throw every obstacle known to man at them, forcing them to walk beyond endurance with no hope of anything other than hostility at the end of the journey,’ Shelley said passionately. ‘They may be a swarm but if so, we are the cockroaches.’
The couple of days they spent by the beach on Lesvos were enough to convince them that this was a problem which required creative solutions on a much larger scale than they could achieve.
‘It’s inhumane,’ Daniel said.
‘Problem is, it’s totally human,’ Shelley said. ‘It’s what we, as a species, have become. It’s sickening.’
‘We can’t let it be like this,’ Daniel said. He was fully committed.
But Lesvos was not their final destination. They had a loose date in Izmir, Turkey. It was where they hoped to find Ammar’s wife and children. It was being managed by Mike and Ammar via smartphone. They checked in every day at six o’clock for an update. After three days in Lesvos they got the call to proceed.
The ferry from Lesvos to Izmir was remarkably comfortable – more comfortable than the ride that people were paying a lot more for to come the other way in boats that barely warranted the name.
If Lesvos was where dreams were washed up on the beach, Izmir was the place lives were bought and sold. The Turks not only turned a blind eye, but were turning a profit out of the market in human traffic.
‘Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase Turkish bazaar,’ Shelley said.
‘It’s disgusting,’ Daniel said. ‘Human trafficking. People smugglers. How can they sleep?’
Shelley cut him off. ‘We’re about to become people smugglers,’ she pointed out.
‘It’s not the same thing,’ Daniel replied. ‘We aren’t doing it for money. We’re not smugglers, we are taking humanitarian action.’
‘Just checking you’re still on board,’ she said and smiled.
‘On board and dishing out the life-jackets,’ Daniel replied. ‘For free.’
‘Okay, let’s go,’ Shelley said.
They locked up the campervan and set out to the café they’d agreed to meet up with Ammar’s wife, Riham. They found it and sat waiting. And waiting.
Information about Riham’s journey was sketchy. Mike had been trying to sort flights or trains or anything that would make the trip from Syria to Turkey (which could be achieved without visas) as easy as possible. But it seemed he kept drawing a blank.
‘No sign,’ Daniel texted Ammar at half past seven.
‘Problems on the road,’ Ammar texted back. ‘She says they’ll be there tomorrow, maybe Wednesday.’
‘We’ll wait,’ Daniel texted back. ‘Tell her we’ll be here at seven each evening until she comes.’
‘Thanks, my brother…’ Ammar texted but the phone died at that moment and Daniel had to wait till they returned to the campervan to re-charge it. He’d forgotten his powerbank. Stupid. Just when he needed to be paying most attention, he made a rookie error.
They went back to the van and waited. And if the waiting was hard for Daniel and Shelley, they couldn’t begin to imagine how tough the trip was for Ammar and her two small children. Fleeing for their lives. Izmir wasn’t safety, it was just the first port of call. The responsibility for their safety then became part of Shelley’s ‘creative solution’.
Tomorrow came and went. Texts went back and forward.
‘Tomorrow,’ Ammar said. ‘I spoke with her on the phone. She says tomorrow. They will all be there.’
He sounded distraught. Daniel didn’t like to probe.
It was with dwindling hope that they arrived at the café on the following evening. At a table in the corner was a family – a man, two woman, two girls and a small boy.
‘Is that them?’ Daniel asked.
‘Snapchat a picture to Ammar,’ Shelley said.
Daniel did so.
‘Yes,’ Ammar texted back. ‘That’s her.’
‘Who with?’ Daniel asked.
‘It’s my brother,’ Ammar texted. ‘He drove them there.’
Daniel and Shelley went over and introduced themselves to the group.
Ammar’s brother Mohammad enfolded Daniel in his arms. ‘Thank you, my brother,’ he said. ‘You are saving our lives.’
He explained how, when all other means had failed, he had bought a car and driven them all from Aleppo across the desert – and he told of the punctures and the problems along the way. Daniel missed most of this because Mohammed didn’t speak much English and he recounted the story in French. Luckily Shelley’s French was up to scratch – and she relayed the story to Daniel.
‘We must be safe,’ Mohammed said in his badly broken English. He looked desperate.
‘You’re not going back there?’ Daniel asked naively.
Mohammed looked at him like he was crazy.
‘We can’t go back,’ he said.
Daniel was beginning to panic. There were more of them than they could possibly help. The plan, on becoming real, began to look impossible.
‘We can’t take them all,’ he said to Shelley.
She looked at him.
‘But we can’t leave them,’ he added. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’
Shelley had a creative solution. It wasn’t perfect but it stood best chance of success.
‘We’ll get them ferry tickets,’ she said.
They’d been watching the ferries and no one seemed to be paying that much attention. But it was agreed that they would travel separately. Not so much as a glance on the ferry.
Shelley and Daniel boarded, with Riham, Maya and Jodee hidden away in the back of the campervan. They were instructed to make no noise until they were let out at Athens.
‘It’s like bloody Anne Frank,’ Daniel said. ‘And all they are trying to do is escape from hell.’
The ferry journey did not go smoothly. Shelley and Daniel did not catch sight of Mohammed, Nooda or Sami during the crossing. They found out why as they drove off at Piraeus.
‘They were turned back,’ Ammar texted. He’d had a frantic phone call from Mohammed at the point when they were kicked off the boat. Money, smartphone, ticket – not the full deck. Passport required. No visa no travel. Back to Izmir.
‘Tell them we’ll come back for them,’ texted Shelley.
‘He says they will make their own way. He says they will walk,’ Ammar replied.
‘He can’t walk,’ Daniel replied. ‘He…
‘We have to keep going,’ Shelley said.
‘Tell them to wait,’ Daniel said. ‘Wait there and we’ll come back for them. He was glad that he’d left Mohammed with a wedge of money at least. Ammar had made sure of that.
‘They must wait,’ Daniel said again. ‘Tell them to get a hotel room and wait.’
Ammar relayed the message.
It was agreed that Mohammed and his family would wait in Izmir and give things time to calm down. The campervan contingent would return back to England and then Shelley would go back (with Daniel’s passport) and bring them all back. Daniel wasn’t happy about this, but he was finally convinced that a few weeks in Izmir after all they’d suffered in Syria was not going to be that bad.
‘Many people wait months, even years with no hope,’ Shelley said. ‘They’ve just got to wait a few weeks and we’ll be back.’
‘We’re not going to keep getting lucky,’ Daniel said.
‘We don’t have any other option,’ Shelley replied. ‘At least they are in Izmir, with money and not getting bombed. They will be safe if they keep their heads down.’
And so the road trip began. Riham and the girls hid in the back of the van as they drove up through Macedonia but when they got to the border at Serbia, they got out of the van and Daniel went with them as they walked over the border from Serbia to Hungary. It had looked like a flashpoint and remarkably it was easier just to walk over the border a few hundred yards from the checkpoint than to get through border controls, where vehicles were all being checked.
Again, Daniel experienced something of what it was like to be a refugee. He had a passport, he was legitimate, but it was still adrenalin busting to have to make your way across one piece of land to another – stepping over the barbed wire torn down by sheer volume of human ‘traffic’ from one field to another. What did borders even mean? How could it be so dangerous and difficult simply to put one foot in front of the other and claim you were in another country. They walked for the best part of a mile, part of a seemingly endless chain of people, before Shelley drove up alongside them and ‘rescued’ them.
‘And people do this for weeks on end,’ Daniel said as he settled back in his seat. ‘It’s impossible.’
Riham and the girls stayed silent in the back of the van the rest of the way, the border experience at Hungary being frightening enough to keep them silent. The girls sat on the side of the bed, speechless, just waiting to hide in the cupboard when the next crossing came up. Riham went and stood in the shower.
At Austria someone came in and checked the back of the van. The girls stayed quiet, hidden under the beds. They could see the soldier’s boots and they were scared enough to make no sound. Luckily no one checked the shower, where Riham was cowering. The soldiers left and they were waved through. But everyone’s nerves were jangled from that point on. The fear that gripped them made the journey far from pleasant. Children who are too afraid to cry are a heartbreaking sight to behold.
It took five days to reach Holland. One last ferry journey and they would be ‘home’. Because this was not an established migrant route, as long as Riham and the girls stayed quiet in the back of the van, no one thought to question. Daniel and Shelley were so obviously a young couple just having a summer holiday – why would anyone suspect them of people smuggling? And so they made it.
When they finally pulled up outside Daniel’s house, Ammar was there to meet them. The tears flowed. Fear, pain and joy all mingled together. They had done it. But everyone was aware that this was not the end of the journey. It was just the start of another one. Now they had to get asylum. And there was bad news about Mohammed.
Over and above all, they tried to make it look like they were on holiday. Destination Lesvos. Who wouldn’t want to go to a Greek Island in July? But Lesvos in July 2015 was much more than a tourist destination. Every day hundreds of refugees were being washed up on the shores at the start of their own long odyssey in search of a better life. A life better than being shot at and bombed and driven out of their minds with worry for their children. Even sleeping rough on a beach was better than that. Even walking long miles and being thwarted at every turn was better than that.
The further south they got the more aware they became of the sense of humanity on the move. A mass migration that was being misrepresented, when it was represented at all, on the media at home. Where desperate people were being labelled cockroaches. Man’s inhumanity to man at its inglorious best.
With each border they crossed, Daniel and Shelley stopped to find a shop selling them the appropriate sim card for that country. Smartphones are useless without the right sim card, after all. They put money on each sim card and to make sure they worked they kept checking in with Mike. Back at base nothing new seemed to be happening. Life went on. No one is indispensable. Ammar had fitted into Daniel’s life quite comfortably. No one was asking any questions in the research lab – well, except about chemistry and Ammar brought some new perspective to Daniel’s given tasks.
‘We could have been brothers,’ Daniel said to Shelley as they waited for the ferry at Piraeus.
‘Life is really random,’ she replied. ‘That’s why we have to do what we can.’
‘Can we really do anything?’ he asked.
‘Of course we can,’ she said. ‘Creative solutions, right. All it takes is a good idea, and the nerve to follow it through.’
They got to Lesvos and any qualms Daniel had vanished in the sand. It wasn’t the Jungle, but it was as far removed from the ideal holiday destination as could be. The first thing that struck him was the rubbish. The locals were doing what they could, but each day as more and more refugees were washed ashore (mostly alive) so the pile of life-jackets grew – discarded as they made their way forward.
They followed the news on their smartphones. David Cameron described the ‘migrants’ as a swarm – as if they were locusts – and while it was a completely inappropriate statement it did in some sense represent the type of movement that Daniel and Shelley saw in front of their eyes in Serbia and Macedonia. The refugees they saw were desperate people under incredibly difficult circumstances. People just like them. People attempting to hold on to their humanity. People beginning to lose the sense that they were actually ‘just like us’. It was an indictment on a Europe that could let such a thing happen.
‘First we bomb them from their homes, then we starve them out, then we steal their money to give them the smallest hope. We sell them a perilous journey and then we throw every obstacle known to man at them, forcing them to walk beyond endurance with no hope of anything other than hostility at the end of the journey,’ Shelley said passionately. ‘They may be a swarm but if so, we are the cockroaches.’
The couple of days they spent by the beach on Lesvos were enough to convince them that this was a problem which required creative solutions on a much larger scale than they could achieve.
‘It’s inhumane,’ Daniel said.
‘Problem is, it’s totally human,’ Shelley said. ‘It’s what we, as a species, have become. It’s sickening.’
‘We can’t let it be like this,’ Daniel said. He was fully committed.
But Lesvos was not their final destination. They had a loose date in Izmir, Turkey. It was where they hoped to find Ammar’s wife and children. It was being managed by Mike and Ammar via smartphone. They checked in every day at six o’clock for an update. After three days in Lesvos they got the call to proceed.
The ferry from Lesvos to Izmir was remarkably comfortable – more comfortable than the ride that people were paying a lot more for to come the other way in boats that barely warranted the name.
If Lesvos was where dreams were washed up on the beach, Izmir was the place lives were bought and sold. The Turks not only turned a blind eye, but were turning a profit out of the market in human traffic.
‘Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase Turkish bazaar,’ Shelley said.
‘It’s disgusting,’ Daniel said. ‘Human trafficking. People smugglers. How can they sleep?’
Shelley cut him off. ‘We’re about to become people smugglers,’ she pointed out.
‘It’s not the same thing,’ Daniel replied. ‘We aren’t doing it for money. We’re not smugglers, we are taking humanitarian action.’
‘Just checking you’re still on board,’ she said and smiled.
‘On board and dishing out the life-jackets,’ Daniel replied. ‘For free.’
‘Okay, let’s go,’ Shelley said.
They locked up the campervan and set out to the café they’d agreed to meet up with Ammar’s wife, Riham. They found it and sat waiting. And waiting.
Information about Riham’s journey was sketchy. Mike had been trying to sort flights or trains or anything that would make the trip from Syria to Turkey (which could be achieved without visas) as easy as possible. But it seemed he kept drawing a blank.
‘No sign,’ Daniel texted Ammar at half past seven.
‘Problems on the road,’ Ammar texted back. ‘She says they’ll be there tomorrow, maybe Wednesday.’
‘We’ll wait,’ Daniel texted back. ‘Tell her we’ll be here at seven each evening until she comes.’
‘Thanks, my brother…’ Ammar texted but the phone died at that moment and Daniel had to wait till they returned to the campervan to re-charge it. He’d forgotten his powerbank. Stupid. Just when he needed to be paying most attention, he made a rookie error.
They went back to the van and waited. And if the waiting was hard for Daniel and Shelley, they couldn’t begin to imagine how tough the trip was for Ammar and her two small children. Fleeing for their lives. Izmir wasn’t safety, it was just the first port of call. The responsibility for their safety then became part of Shelley’s ‘creative solution’.
Tomorrow came and went. Texts went back and forward.
‘Tomorrow,’ Ammar said. ‘I spoke with her on the phone. She says tomorrow. They will all be there.’
He sounded distraught. Daniel didn’t like to probe.
It was with dwindling hope that they arrived at the café on the following evening. At a table in the corner was a family – a man, two woman, two girls and a small boy.
‘Is that them?’ Daniel asked.
‘Snapchat a picture to Ammar,’ Shelley said.
Daniel did so.
‘Yes,’ Ammar texted back. ‘That’s her.’
‘Who with?’ Daniel asked.
‘It’s my brother,’ Ammar texted. ‘He drove them there.’
Daniel and Shelley went over and introduced themselves to the group.
Ammar’s brother Mohammad enfolded Daniel in his arms. ‘Thank you, my brother,’ he said. ‘You are saving our lives.’
He explained how, when all other means had failed, he had bought a car and driven them all from Aleppo across the desert – and he told of the punctures and the problems along the way. Daniel missed most of this because Mohammed didn’t speak much English and he recounted the story in French. Luckily Shelley’s French was up to scratch – and she relayed the story to Daniel.
‘We must be safe,’ Mohammed said in his badly broken English. He looked desperate.
‘You’re not going back there?’ Daniel asked naively.
Mohammed looked at him like he was crazy.
‘We can’t go back,’ he said.
Daniel was beginning to panic. There were more of them than they could possibly help. The plan, on becoming real, began to look impossible.
‘We can’t take them all,’ he said to Shelley.
She looked at him.
‘But we can’t leave them,’ he added. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’
Shelley had a creative solution. It wasn’t perfect but it stood best chance of success.
‘We’ll get them ferry tickets,’ she said.
They’d been watching the ferries and no one seemed to be paying that much attention. But it was agreed that they would travel separately. Not so much as a glance on the ferry.
Shelley and Daniel boarded, with Riham, Maya and Jodee hidden away in the back of the campervan. They were instructed to make no noise until they were let out at Athens.
‘It’s like bloody Anne Frank,’ Daniel said. ‘And all they are trying to do is escape from hell.’
The ferry journey did not go smoothly. Shelley and Daniel did not catch sight of Mohammed, Nooda or Sami during the crossing. They found out why as they drove off at Piraeus.
‘They were turned back,’ Ammar texted. He’d had a frantic phone call from Mohammed at the point when they were kicked off the boat. Money, smartphone, ticket – not the full deck. Passport required. No visa no travel. Back to Izmir.
‘Tell them we’ll come back for them,’ texted Shelley.
‘He says they will make their own way. He says they will walk,’ Ammar replied.
‘He can’t walk,’ Daniel replied. ‘He…
‘We have to keep going,’ Shelley said.
‘Tell them to wait,’ Daniel said. ‘Wait there and we’ll come back for them. He was glad that he’d left Mohammed with a wedge of money at least. Ammar had made sure of that.
‘They must wait,’ Daniel said again. ‘Tell them to get a hotel room and wait.’
Ammar relayed the message.
It was agreed that Mohammed and his family would wait in Izmir and give things time to calm down. The campervan contingent would return back to England and then Shelley would go back (with Daniel’s passport) and bring them all back. Daniel wasn’t happy about this, but he was finally convinced that a few weeks in Izmir after all they’d suffered in Syria was not going to be that bad.
‘Many people wait months, even years with no hope,’ Shelley said. ‘They’ve just got to wait a few weeks and we’ll be back.’
‘We’re not going to keep getting lucky,’ Daniel said.
‘We don’t have any other option,’ Shelley replied. ‘At least they are in Izmir, with money and not getting bombed. They will be safe if they keep their heads down.’
And so the road trip began. Riham and the girls hid in the back of the van as they drove up through Macedonia but when they got to the border at Serbia, they got out of the van and Daniel went with them as they walked over the border from Serbia to Hungary. It had looked like a flashpoint and remarkably it was easier just to walk over the border a few hundred yards from the checkpoint than to get through border controls, where vehicles were all being checked.
Again, Daniel experienced something of what it was like to be a refugee. He had a passport, he was legitimate, but it was still adrenalin busting to have to make your way across one piece of land to another – stepping over the barbed wire torn down by sheer volume of human ‘traffic’ from one field to another. What did borders even mean? How could it be so dangerous and difficult simply to put one foot in front of the other and claim you were in another country. They walked for the best part of a mile, part of a seemingly endless chain of people, before Shelley drove up alongside them and ‘rescued’ them.
‘And people do this for weeks on end,’ Daniel said as he settled back in his seat. ‘It’s impossible.’
Riham and the girls stayed silent in the back of the van the rest of the way, the border experience at Hungary being frightening enough to keep them silent. The girls sat on the side of the bed, speechless, just waiting to hide in the cupboard when the next crossing came up. Riham went and stood in the shower.
At Austria someone came in and checked the back of the van. The girls stayed quiet, hidden under the beds. They could see the soldier’s boots and they were scared enough to make no sound. Luckily no one checked the shower, where Riham was cowering. The soldiers left and they were waved through. But everyone’s nerves were jangled from that point on. The fear that gripped them made the journey far from pleasant. Children who are too afraid to cry are a heartbreaking sight to behold.
It took five days to reach Holland. One last ferry journey and they would be ‘home’. Because this was not an established migrant route, as long as Riham and the girls stayed quiet in the back of the van, no one thought to question. Daniel and Shelley were so obviously a young couple just having a summer holiday – why would anyone suspect them of people smuggling? And so they made it.
When they finally pulled up outside Daniel’s house, Ammar was there to meet them. The tears flowed. Fear, pain and joy all mingled together. They had done it. But everyone was aware that this was not the end of the journey. It was just the start of another one. Now they had to get asylum. And there was bad news about Mohammed.
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.