Yesterday I did my weekly shift for Citizens Advice in Newport Isle of Wight. I sit at my CA desk at the back of the open plan ground floor reception area of County Hall, while all sorts and conditions pass by – from the Lord Lieutenant (the King’s representative on the IoW), Leader of the Council, council workers of all kinds, through to security staff. After nearly 2 years there I can say this is basically the front line on the Isle of Wight. Immediately surrounding me sit the Council Contact team at their desks, answering phone enquiries about everything from bin deliveries to Council Tax, from bus passes to homelessness. Some also meet the public face to face. Their job to triage the callers, some of whom they send up to me or the 19 year old intern (looks about 12) who sits behind me. We also log on to the 2 CA phone lines.
Through the door or the phone comes a full range of enquiries – about noisy neighbours, uncooperative ex-spouses and endless requests for Foodbank vouchers, crisis grants. I once had a 72 year old who’d never claimed his state pension. Yesterday it was all about disputes at work- unfair dismissals and sexual harassment from fellow staff. ‘Small scale misery’ I call it. My job as a volunteer is to hear the stories and distil them onto our Computer system- Casebook- , creating a task for our various Advisers to follow up. (Not that there’s a lot that can be offered for single homeless or poor people seeking legal help. There’s precious little out there for them. .)
Yesterday, however, brought something different. For a long time there was waiting in reception a man of Middle Eastern looking origin. One of the Contact Team approached me. ‘Do you speak any languages?’ she asked. ‘French and German,’ I answered. ‘Might be useful,’ she added. ‘I don’t quite know what he wants, but he’s got some papers.’ So, forgoing my lunch break, I stayed, and eventually she brought him up to me, ‘Guten Tag,’ I greeted him. ‘How can I help you?’ Then, in good German, (better than mine 50 years since University) he told me his story. His name was Ahwar, part of the huge Syrian wave that came to Germany in 2015-16, encouraged by Angela Merkel’s cry of ‘Wir schaffen es’ (We can do it!) and the genuine welcome offered by many Germans, leaving his family behind in a bombed-out city. He learned German, trained to be and worked as an Accountant. Eventually, after long delays, he was granted citizenship. (He showed me a Syrian and German passport). But things had changed, he told me. He’d lost his job, experienced lots of harassment with thefts. There is now no chance of his family following him to Germany and , even with the new Syrian government, he saw little prospect of returning home to live in a destroyed city. So he decided to chance his arm. Clutching both passports he travelled to Calais, then took a ferry to Dover where, after an interview with a border official he was (according to his papers) ‘detained’ yet allowed to stay for 7 days. (I found this bizarre) So he took a bus to London, then considering Scotland and N Ireland, he plumped for the Isle of Wight ‘for a quieter life.’
Was he fleeing persecution? No. ‘Did he want to join family?’. No. He wanted to come ‘ for humanitarian reasons.’ So I managed to get an Appeal form which we completed and sent off. He’ll have no chance, of course. In two days’ time he will be illegal and will join a large group of similar souls hidden throughout the country.
My shift came to an end and I told him I had to go but he stayed. The Council worker thanked me for my help (strictly well outside CA’s remit, as my boss, closeted in an office half a mile away, told me when I phoned for help) and gave me a very large Belgian bun for my efforts (I passed this on to Ahwar). I asked where he’d be sleeping tonight. The Bus Station. So, with the words from the Gospels ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me’ ringing in my ears, I decided (possibly unwisely) to take him out to Wetherspoons for a cheap meal. He refused food, saying ‘Ich lade Sie ein’ (You be my guest) which I refused so we settled on a Cappucino. While queuing up for this at the bar behind an old bloke who took a long time to get his order in (a quadruple Captain Morgan’s (rum) with a dash of Coke at 3.30pm) I looked around and wondered what the assembled crew would make of my efforts. Compare me to the vessel from which I was drinking the coffee, no doubt, or a lot worse.
When we sat down I asked him why he came to the UK when he could have freely settled in any EU state. ‘It is better to come to the UK after Brexit’. What with the German, the noise and the politics I didn’t really understand this, but it makes a mockery of all the ‘take back control’ rubbish fed to us 10 years ago. He told me what a harsh environment Germany had become with the AfD, and I told him about the rise in Reform UK and the genuine hatred felt by many Brits to migrants and refugees. I urged him to go back home before he becomes illegal, telling him that detention centres are no fun. . ‘I have no home,’ he said, ‘they don’t want me in Germany and home in Syria is rubble.’
Many would have little time for Ahwar’s story, leaving as he has a democratic free country which has invested a lot in him, and coming here, but it made me think about my situation. I have a home on so many levels. I have a house to which I returned that evening and a long suffering wife whom I regaled with this story (quite a novelty on the IOW). I have family just down the road. I have a church family, and various musical families. After 34 years on the IoW I feel this is my home, part of a country I love which is at peace (though I fear for its future). I can’t imagine what it must be like to say ‘I have no home.’ I can’t imagine what it must be like (for Ahwar, and for our Ukrainian neighbours) to survey a homeland in ruins. Yet I have done little to earn this stability and security.
I left Ahwar, telling him I’d pray for him (I’d already told him I was a retired priest). He wanted my details but I didn’t feel able to give them. I felt guilty in a vague way, not for anything I’d done, but just about the state of things.
That night I went to a folk club I attend weekly and usually play something. There we sang John Ball, a song by the radical Christian folksinger Sydney Carter. Some of the words go:
Who’ll be the lady, who will be the lord When we are ruled by the love of one another? Who’ll be the lady, who will be the lord In the light that is coming in the morning.
IT is a beautiful song, with a stirring tune. Ahwar said he wanted to be admitted to the UK on humanitarian grounds. That very word ‘humanitarian’ seems to belong to another age, when we were moved by the sight of a Syrian boy washed up on a beach. It belongs to the age of the UN, the age of Live Aid, ruled by love of one another. Please God, that age is not past.
I sang two Dylan songs, in preparation for my concert, but in retrospect, following the day I’d had, I wish I’d sung, ‘There but for fortune’, made famous by the plaintive soprano of Joan Baez in the early 60s, because it sums up what I felt that evening
‘Show me the country where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of the buildings once so tall
And I’ll show you a young man with so many reasons why
But there but for fortune go you and I, you and I.’
That sense of empathy seems to have gone from our political life today, but it is surely the heart of our humanity: there but for fortune go you and go I.
Sadly, the song that would correspond best to Ahwar and many more in a worse state than him might be that written by Woody Guthrie:
I ain’t got no home, I’m just a-roamin’ ’round,
Just a wandrin’ worker, I go from town to town.
And the police make it hard wherever I may go
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
Hugh's Views 