Walking the Border Read online

  There’s always been resentment of the incomer, fear of the other, emotions that politicians the world over have been quick to exploit. There’s nothing like wrapping yourself in the flag of nation or race or ethnicity to whip up support, gain power and make a few quid on the side.

  In the UK today, few in the political and media establishments are prepared to depict immigration as anything other than a problem. A huge apparatus of state bureaucracy has been assembled to close the door; a state bureaucracy that, in obeisance to the fetish of the free market, has handed over the power to deprive individuals of their liberty to the likes of Serco and G4S. Such private corporations profit from running a series of ‘Immigration Removal Centres’, where people who are not EU citizens and who do not have the right paperwork can be held indefinitely without trial, wondering every day if this is the day they are going to be deported – to face uncertainty, or impoverishment, or shame, or persecution, or even death.

  Too few people pause to ponder the ethics involved. What moral justification can there be for treating somebody differently just because he or she was born on the other side of a border? To attempt to justify such discriminatory treatment would involve lending an arbitrary line on a map some kind of moral authority: on this side of the border live the deserving; on the other, the undeserving.

  This is not just an idle philosophical question. There are thousands of human beings – men, women and children – who have come to the UK to escape poverty or persecution, to make a better life for themselves. All too often they find their dream goes sour. They cannot – for one reason or another – go back to the place they came from. But if they stay they become non-persons. With no papers, no recognised status, no right to work and, in the official phrase, ‘no recourse to public funds’, they cease to be officially human. They are rendered invisible.

  While I was researching this book, I was anxious to find out what borders meant to a range of different people. A friend suggested I come along to the migrant drop-in centre she was involved in. I’d hear some stories from the visitors there, she said, that’d tell me all about what borders can do to people.

  The centre sets up its stall in a church hall one day a week. The hall is filled with tables spread with brightly-patterned cloths and laid for lunch. At the far end of the hall a few volunteers are working in the kitchen, chopping up fruit and vegetables donated by local shops. There is a smell of garlic and cooking oil, onion and spices. Someone’s bashing a halved pomegranate with a wooden spoon to extract the sweet seeds. The volunteers range in age from students to retired professionals. Some are migrants themselves.

  The visitors come from all over: Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, West Africa, Congo, Latin America – even as far as Mongolia and China.

  As well as lunch, the centre offers advice both on immigration and on welfare. Volunteers try to identify in what ways the centre might be able to help. Do they have somewhere to live? Do they have a GP? Do they have family here? Are they homeless, destitute? Difficult welfare issues are dealt with by a highly-trained adviser, while immigration questions are referred to one or other of the lawyers who work at the centre pro bono.

  There is an atmosphere of warmth and welcome, quiet calm and efficiency, sometimes livened up by a toddler on the rampage. Some of the visitors are cheery, but many are at the end of their tether – stressed, anxious, depressed. Some are in ‘regular’ accommodation, though this can mean the only bathroom they have access to is three floors away, a problem for a mother with a young child. Many are sleeping at a friend’s house, often in overcrowded conditions. Too many are street homeless. You can tell the ones who’re sleeping rough from the acrid smell of unwashed clothes.

  Fear makes many withhold key details of their stories. Sometimes they change their accounts as they begin to trust you. They’ve had enough of what officials will do to you if you tell them too much of the truth. They’d been made to feel they didn’t belong where they’d come from. And once they’d got to the UK – some of them smuggled, some trafficked, some on temporary visas – they’d been made to feel that they didn’t belong here either. If they did claim asylum, the whole system is geared to finding any chink of a reason to refuse them.

  So these borders, these arbitrary lines that we invest with moral agency – where are they? What are they?

  The world’s longest land border between two countries is that between the USA and Canada. It runs for 5,500 miles and is marked by a twenty-foot-wide strip or ‘no-touching zone’ cleared through the forest and prairie. For a considerable proportion of this distance the Border is dead straight, following the 49th Parallel, ignoring topography and traditional tribal lands. It is technically illegal to cross the border anywhere there isn’t a border control – but there is nothing to stop you. Unlike the ‘Demilitarized Zone’ between the two Koreas, the no-touching zone doesn’t have a minefield. There are no guard towers with machine guns, backed by heavy artillery and tanks. There isn’t even a fence.

  In contrast, the USA’s southern border with Mexico is guarded by 17,000 members of the United States Border Patrol. There are nearly seven hundred miles of double chain-link and barbed-wire fences and solid steel walls. In places the fences run through the middle of towns. The remaining 1,300 miles of border – much of it wild and tractless – is monitored by towers, cameras, sensors and aerial drones. Many would-be migrants now avoid the fence by seeking out remote trails through the desert mountains. Unprepared, hundreds die of thirst or sunstroke. Their bodies sometimes lie undiscovered for months. Some have hanged themselves from trees to hasten the inevitable end.

  Similar barriers have appeared over the centuries wherever the rich world has found itself cheek to cheek with the dispossessed. The Chinese protected their ‘civilisation’ from the ‘barbarians’ beyond the gates with the Great Wall. The Romans built Hadrian’s Wall to mark the edge of the Pax Romana. The Warsaw Pact ostensibly built the Berlin Wall to keep socialism safe from destruction at the hands of the Western capitalist marauders – although the real reason was to stem the haemorrhage of skilled workers to the consumer utopia of the German Federal Republic.

  The Israelis claim the West Bank Barrier protects their citizens from Palestinian suicide bombers. The Palestinians see the invasive and disruptive maze of fencing and concrete as just one more move in an expansionist land-grab. In 2004 the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion stating that ‘the construction of the wall, and its associated régime, are contrary to international law’.

  While Fortress UK refuses to become part of the Schengen Area, some EU member states seem set on constructing a Fortress Europe. Spain, for example, has separated its wealthy North African enclave of Melilla from neighbouring non-EU Morocco with razor wire. This has inflicted hideous injuries – or even death – on numerous migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa who have tried to cross it.

  Some don’t make it this far. In October 2013, while I was writing this book, the bodies of ninety-two people, mostly women and children, were found in the Sahara Desert in northern Niger. It is thought they were being trafficked to Algeria and that their lorry had broken down. They were found scattered over a large area – sometimes a mother with her children, sometimes children alone. What motivated these people to attempt such a dangerous journey is not difficult to fathom. Niger comes at or near the bottom of a range of indices of development, including life expectancy, education and income. Save the Children have declared that Niger is the worst country in the world to be a mother.

  At the other end of the Mediterranean from Melilla, Greece has built a four-metre-high wall along its land border with non-EU Turkey. Towards the end of 2013 Turkey itself started to build a wall along its border with Syria. Refugees from the conflict in Syria, and other conflicts in Afghanistan, Somalia and Eritrea, have tried to get round such barriers by boat. Those landing on Greek islands are kept in conditions that Amnesty International has condemned as ‘shocking’. />
  Some boats don’t make it. A popular route across the Mediterranean traverses the straits between North Africa and the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily. In October 2013, the same month as those 92 corpses were found in the Sahara, at least 359 people were drowned when the 20-metre boat carrying them from Libya to Lampedusa capsized. They’d paid at least $3,000 per head to get a place on board.

  There are increasing numbers of reports of EU states on the Mediterranean ordering illegal ‘push-back’ operations. These involve naval or coastguard vessels intercepting migrant boats in international waters and towing them back to where they came from without finding out whether any of the passengers are entitled to protection under international law.

  For too many Britons the sea is also, as Shakespeare wrote, a wall or moat ‘Against the envy of less happier lands’. At ports such as Dover sniffer dogs and carbon-dioxide detectors surround disembarked lorries, looking for stowaways from those ‘less happier lands’. International airports also serve as borders. Huge queues develop, especially at Heathrow, as each individual arriving on a flight from outside the UK is subjected to close scrutiny by tight-lipped, inscrutable officials. Even for UK and EU nationals it feels like a place where your identity might be doubted, even taken away from you. For most people, going through passport control is the only time they are aware of being put under suspicion by the state.

  Britain also has internal borders. Back in the eighth century, Offa of Mercia marked the frontier between his kingdom and the Welsh with his eponymous dyke. Between the Welsh and the English the physical barrier of the dyke – whose course is still broadly followed by the Anglo-Welsh border – was reinforced by difference in language.

  The same could not – and still cannot – be said of the inhabitants of southern Scotland and those of northern England. In the Middle Ages they all spoke the same northern variety of Anglo-Saxon, and even today they share many dialect words (‘bonny bairns’ are to be found as far afield as Edinburgh and Newcastle). The accents are broadly distinct, although, as I was to find as I walked along the Border, they sometimes mingle. Throughout the Middle Ages the Anglo-Scottish Border continually shifted. The question of the division of the Debatable Lands between Sark and Esk was only settled in 1552 with the construction of Scots’ Dike, and in some remote parts the Border was not clearly defined until the nineteenth century. Loyalties were often stronger to relatives and allies across the Border than to the notional authorities in either London or Edinburgh.

  It is thus more a matter of historical accident, diplomatic fixing and legal wheeler-dealing that the people of Northumbria and Cumbria find themselves in England, and the people of Berwickshire and Roxburghshire find themselves in Scotland. Berwick itself changed hands thirteen times between 1147 and 1482, finally ending up in England.

  On the A1 just north of Berwick, still within England, there is a farm called Conundrum. I’m not sure of the significance of the name (the origin of the word itself is a conundrum), but for me it sums up the whole oddity of the Anglo-Scottish Border – and of borders more generally.

  I myself am uncertain about where I belong. Although I was born and schooled in Edinburgh, and then spent the first ten years of my working life in Glasgow, my parents weren’t Scottish. They had moved north from London two years before I was born. My father was Anglo-Irish, from Dublin, and my mother born in Liverpool of a Lancastrian father and a Scottish mother. I myself have lived for the last quarter century in London.

  So I have my own conundrums, out of which the idea of walking the Border emerged and became something of an obsession. I studied maps in greater and greater detail, fascinated by the wandering course of this random line, and of the names along its way: Sarkfoot Point, Solway Moss, Scotland Gate, Liddel Strength, Skurrlywarble Wood, Harelawslack, Hobbs’ Flow, Bloody Bush, Foulmire Heights, Deadwater Rigg, Butter Bog, the Hearts Toe, Wideopen Moor, Gallows Hill, Folly Farm, Meg’s Dub . . . I traced the line of the Border along rivers, across fields, through thick conifer plantations, over remote and tractless hills and moors. I could tell from the map that much of the route was far from picturesque. There were surprisingly few paths. It wasn’t an established walking route, like the Southern Upland Way or the Hadrian’s Wall Walk. That was part of the attraction. It would be a journey of discovery, of unexpected meetings with strangers, of encounters with the past, whether historical or legendary. It would also be an inward journey, as my intention was to walk much of the way alone.

  My original plan had been to walk the entire length of the Border in a single push of seven days. But as the going turned out to be much tougher than I had expected, and the weather as unkind as I should have expected, I ended up by doing the walk in three stages – at the end of May, in mid-July, and in November. I also ended up walking in company – good company – for three out of the ten days I eventually took to complete the distance.

  In between these trips, back home in London, I continued to visit the migrant centre, collecting stories of what borders can mean to those who are told they are on the wrong side of one of these arbitrary lines.

  Many break under the strain. Those lines on the map can turn into mental whips, chains, snares, depriving those caught up in them of freedom and dignity – even sanity.

  One failed asylum seeker from the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo was so far deep in depression he could not even remember the age of his young daughter. She was in care in Manchester. Her mother was in a psychiatric ward. He himself was broken by months of living rough on the streets. He’d spent time in jail for trying to leave the UK on a stolen passport to join the Congolese community in France. When the UK tried to deport him to the DRC, he was refused entry. He had to be flown back to Heathrow.

  Then there was the birdlike nurse from Iran. The first thing you noticed about her was her huge, frightened eyes. Some weeks after she’d arrived in the UK to study English she’d been told by friends back home that the security forces were looking for her. They’d heard she’d treated an anti-government protestor at her hospital. Her asylum request was refused on the standard grounds that she hadn’t claimed immediately on arrival in the UK.

  I spent many months talking to a West African mother of two. She was living in a garage. Her local social services refused to take any responsibility for her baby and toddler, even though their health was suffering and her accommodation had been condemned as not fit for human habitation. Eventually she confided in me that her fare to London on a visitor’s visa had been paid by a woman friend of her father whom she knew only as ‘Nana’. When she arrived in London Nana took her passport, made her swear a juju oath, locked her in the house and forced her into prostitution. She was told that if she went to the police she’d be put in prison. After three years she managed to escape. She is now in a safe house.

  One of the biggest characters at the centre is a small but forceful old man from Belarus, who was born in a labour camp in Siberia. Eventually he and his mother found their way back to Belarus, where he became active in the opposition, first against the Soviet authorities, and then, after independence, against ‘the last dictator in Europe’. His activities cost him his front teeth and his family, whom he had to leave behind when he fled. It took the UK authorities ten years to grant him asylum.

  These are just a few of the stories I gleaned the year I walked the Border. It has indeed been a journey of discovery. As I zigzagged between Scotland and England, only thwarted by the roughness of the ground, I sought to find what makes us different. I’m not sure I found any kind of answer. Back in the city, though, the city of migrants, I found what makes us the same.

  TWO

  RUMOURS OF WAR

  Gretna and the Solway

  We don’t sound very Scottish, do we?

  – Barmaid in Gretna

  Day Zero: Thursday, 23rd May 2013 The two-carriage train south from Glasgow Central to Gretna Green is in no hurry. It’s one of those few rambling lines that Dr Beeching forgot to c
lose. At first your track is one of many running in parallel, but as the city sprawls south through Crossmyloof, Pollokshaws and Nitshill into Renfrewshire, the tracks diverge. You soon leave the Virgin expresses to hurtle down the main West Coast Line, and your little wandering train is on its own, heading for Ayrshire. People get on, people get off. No one has much luggage. They’re just doing the stuff they need to do – shopping, visiting relatives meeting friends.

  The names of the stations resonate: Barrhead, Dunlop, Stewarton, Kilmaurs, Kilmarnock, Auchinleck. And so on past the coal bings of New Cumnock and Kirkconnel, into the valley of the Nith.

  This is wilder country, with woods of twisted oaks showing only a hint of yellow leaf, even at the end of May. Above sheep-filled green fields the hills are still winter brown. It’s been a long, hard spring. Not much more than a month before, in mid-April, many lambs died in snowdrifts.

  We pass through the market towns of Sanquhar and Dumfries before coming to Annan, a royal burgh and former port. Daniel Defoe, visiting in the 1720s, thought the place to be ‘in a state of irrevocable decay’. A century or so later Thomas Carlyle, who was born at nearby Ecclefechan, considered Annan ‘a fine, bright, self-confident little town’. Annan was more recently synonymous with its nuclear power station, commissioned in 1959 and known as Chapelcross. For years its four mighty cooling towers dominated the flat lands along the shores of the Solway. Their sinuously curved shapes looming on the horizon imprinted themselves on my memories of childhood holidays in Dumfriesshire. To me, with their plumes of steam billowing eastward on the wind, they represented a glimpse of the future. What I didn’t know then was that the primary purpose of Chapelcross was to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

  Chapelcross was decommissioned in 2004. Three years later the towers were demolished in a controlled explosion. Within ten seconds the horizon was cleared. Only heaps of rubble remained.