Sunday: a police clearance day. The refugees must decamp early and cluster their tents on temporary ground or risk detention and confiscation of their possessions. Diakon Aaron, a deacon in the Eritrean Orthodox church, greets me. He calls to the only other person up and about, Demsas, to help him clean their camp.
‘We try to keep the place very clean. Gendar (gendarmes) respect us, and we respect them. They are not like CRS.’
Yet another fence has been erected by the Calais authorities, transecting the public footpath beside which the Eritreans camp. But there’s an unlocked gate and we reach the ‘fireplace’, the heart of the camp. The fire embers, sandwiched by two cracked breeze blocks, gently smoulder. The place is immaculately tidy. Beside the fire, a broom of neatly tied leafy branches. Diakon picks up final pieces of orange peel.
It is 8.15am: time to pray.
These days, just half a dozen refugees and two deacons come to Sunday tsolot (prayer). Shoes and hats off, we stand on the green plastic tarp facing east. It’s the feast of St Peter and St Paul.
The soundscape is of lorries speeding northward to the port, and the discordant music of a gull squawk, a magpie’s cackle, the clear-cut clarion of a woodpecker. Above, silent, a plane’s vapour trail. Everything around and above points to movement. But for these guys, who have crossed continents and seas to reach Calais, movement has all but ceased.
A procession of six vehicles arrives, parking 20 metres from where we are praying.
A policewoman takes photographs.. Six armed and Covid-masked Gendarmes emerge from each minibus. One detachment marches towards the Eritrean campsite. The second stands guard beside the vehicles. The truck drives to where the Eritreans have neatly piled their rubbish. Prayer continues. This dark ritual is enacted every two days.
Tsolot ends. A ferry has arrived; the traffic flows south: cars, caravans, campervans. Always lorries. Diakon picks up a plastic flagon of water and blesses us, a handful of water thrown at the face, a second rubbed into the head, and a final pouring into our cupped hands to drink.
We walk back to the ‘fireplace’. I am invited to eat.
At the Eritrean camp in the ‘Jungle’, Mesfin has received sad news of his father’s death in Eritrea. We go to pay our respects, joining a circle of some 20 Eritreans sitting in a circle. With a few words of English and Tigrinya, communication opens. There are smiles and laughter. We are brought orange juice, and coffee. Later, Hagos explains ‘When someone dies we gather and sit with the family, and talk and remember and laugh together.’
A week later, the authorities destroy that camp, ‘home’ to around 100 Eritreans. A relentless hostility towards the displaced person; the exile at the border. Zero tolerance.
In November 2019, Gog Sain, a young Nigerian exile died on a cold night from the fumes of a makeshift heater. The Calais authorities denied his friends the chance to mourn. Heartless. Zero tolerance. Now, the wooden cross marking his grave is split. A rosary swaying in the persistent Calais wind is inscribed ‘Bethlehem’ - another border city; a place of violent deaths. But perhaps also the tiniest glimmer of hope: Bethlehem was also a place of birth. A very particular birth.