You just have to look at the faces of the migrant ‘children’ who have begun to arrive in Britain over the past couple of days from the Jungle in Calais to realise that many are not children.
Just as I did when I visited the illegal shanty-town a couple of weeks ago and met a man from Afghanistan who said he was a boy. I found him inside a remarkably solid timber shack which had the words ‘Welcome Restaurant’ painted above the door.
He was one of a dozen or so men, sitting about on divans and chairs, watching a cricket match between Pakistan and the West Indies on a large flat-screen television which was powered by a generator. The scene reminded me of Rick’s Café American in the film Casablanca set in Vichy-controlled French Morocco in 1941 where the clientele wait and wait and wait. Night had fallen and the remains of a candle were lit for me on a table.
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