Finding Home E-Book

Emily Dugan

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 468

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Award-winning reporter Emily Dugan's Finding Home follows the tumultuous lives of a group of immigrants, all facing intense challenges in their quest to live in the UK. Syrian refugee Emad set up the Free Syrian League and worked illegally in the UK to pay for his mother to be smuggled across the Mediterranean on a perilous trip from Turkey. Even if she survives the journey, Emad knows it will be an uphill struggle to get her into Britain. Australian therapist Harley risks deportation despite serving the NHS for ten years and being told by the Home Office she could stay. Teaching assistant Klaudia is one of thousands of Polish people now living in Boston, Lincolnshire – a microcosm of poorly managed migration. Aderonke, a leading Manchester LGBT activist, lives in a tiny B&B room in Salford with her girlfriend, Happiness, and faces deportation and persecution. Dugan's timely and acutely observed book reveals the intense personal dramas of ordinary men and women as they struggle to find somewhere to call home. It shows that migration is not about numbers, votes or opinions: it is about people.

Leseprobe

FINDING

HOME

FINDING

HOME

REAL STORIES OF MIGRANT BRITAIN

EMILY DUGAN

Published in the UK in 2015 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road, Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District, 41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

Distributed in India by Penguin Books India, 7th Floor, Infinity Tower – C, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon 122002, Haryana

ISBN: 978-184831-864-9

Text copyright © 2015 Emily Dugan

The author has asserted her moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Garamond 3 by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

About the author

EMILY DUGAN is Social Affairs Editor at The Independent, i and The Independent on Sunday. Her investigations into human trafficking have twice been awarded Best Investigative Article at the Anti-Slavery Day Media Awards and her human rights journalism was shortlisted for the Gaby Rado Memorial Prize at the 2012 Amnesty Media Awards. This is her first book.

For Oly

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1 The bus

Chapter 2 Ummad

Chapter 3 Harley

Chapter 4 Clive

Chapter 5 Hristina

Chapter 6 Emad

Chapter 7 When Harry met Sai

Chapter 8 Hassiba

Chapter 9 Aderonke

Chapter 10 Boston

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

References

Prologue

It was an unusual way to start the New Year: a dawn flight to Romania followed by 52 hours on a bus back to London. I wanted to catch the first coach leaving Bucharest in 2014 and witness the journeys made by people coming to Britain amid hysterical headlines predicting floods of new migrants. The glimpse it offered into the experiences of those making a life in the UK is what prompted this book, which explores the unseen lives of ten migrants from around the world.

As the public debate about immigration gets noisier, it is too easy to forget that we are talking about a collection of individuals. In this hyped-up discourse, newcomers are often talked about in terms of numbers – or worse – using the metaphors of pestilence and invasion. Even those defending migration often do so with unhelpful generalisations or an over-reliance on cold statistics. Their arguments fail to calm a debate that has always been more about gut feeling and identity than economics.

Generalisations have sullied the debate on all sides. How can a huge variety of people arriving from across the planet all be faceless scroungers? Or, as some liberals might have it, a homogeneous mass of saints who are all better and harder-working than us?

Over the last year I have immersed myself in the experiences of ten people who have arrived on this island over the last decade and attempted to make it their home. I travelled across Europe with Syrians trying to sneak into Britain; went to a mosque in Newcastle with Pakistani men who would be killed for praying back home; attended a Polish-language Mass in Lincolnshire so popular that much of its congregation watch from the car park; trudged around Glasgow’s homeless services with a man left stateless and homeless by a squabble between Zimbabwe and Britain; and witnessed a judge deciding in a court on an industrial estate whether one of the country’s leading NHS therapists should be banished to Australia.

It was a privilege to spend time with them and be let into their homes, cars and secrets. But in the scheme of their lives I was there only for a relatively short time. For this reason, with the exception of the prologue and epilogue, I have edited myself out. My experiences as an onlooker do not merit making me a part of their history.

This is not supposed to be a definitive picture of every immigrant experience in Britain, but a snapshot of ten lives whose detail might otherwise be invisible to society. The drama of their stories is at times more far-fetched than anything a novelist could come up with. I hope that putting their personal struggles and triumphs on paper may help promote empathy with the migrant experience of coming to Britain.

Journalists rarely get the chance to return to the people they interview – let alone spend days on end in their company. The intensity of a project like this forces you to tread a fine line between reporting and friendship. Though I risk offending new friends, I have endeavoured to keep these portraits as faithful as any one-off interview.

Almost everyone in this book wanted their name to be published. A few were worried about the impact it might have on their immigration status and chose not to print their surnames. In two chapters, the names in the story have been changed to respect their privacy.

These ten people share many common experiences: the struggle to reach Britain and stay here; the tug of two homes; battling with the inefficiency of a Home Office recently declared unfit for purpose; the slog of work and the pain of separation from those they love. But once you hear any of these stories in depth it is the differences that stand out. These differences are what make them human. They have the power to transform each person in the eyes of a sceptical public from immigrant to individual.

London, March 2015

CHAPTER 1

The bus

In Bucharest, a new life in western Europe begins at 4am in a draughty waiting room opposite McDonald’s. It is one of thousands of locations around the world – drab, prosaic and exotic – where the long journey to Britain starts.

As the first four coaches of 2014 line up under floodlights, crowds of families gather to send off their relations on a long journey across the continent. The names of European cities are barked out and luggage-laden people shuffle forward, tickets in hand. The busiest bus is going to Hamburg, closely followed by others to Paris and Zurich.

The first coach to London in the New Year – a 52-hour journey – was expected to be the moment that a flood of migrants to Britain materialised. Excitable newspapers reported for weeks beforehand that Romanians’ unfettered access to working visas would result in a mass invasion, with coach loads arriving daily.

But only one person getting on at the start of Eurolines route 441 is going all the way to London.

Most are off to Germany, Belgium and Holland – where work restrictions for Romanians and Bulgarians have also been loosened, seven years after the countries joined the EU.

Mihai drags his suitcase into the hold and climbs aboard. He is 29 and has been working in construction in London for the last year without papers. His shaved head makes him look tough in the half-light, but his easy smile dispels the image quickly.

For Mihai the biggest change in 2014 is not the first opportunity to work in Europe – but his first chance to get the minimum wage. ‘Because I don’t have papers the bosses take advantage,’ he says. ‘When I first came to the UK a Romanian man lied to me. When the boss paid us on Fridays, everybody else had their pay in an envelope but mine wasn’t. I found out this guy had taken my envelope and was taking his cut from it so I only got £50. We had a fight and I never got my money back. He made me steal copper pipes from sites and take them to the Caledonian Road. I told the boss about his stealing and now he is gone and I get paid directly.’

He still works for the same building company and feels vulnerable to people taking advantage. He doesn’t trust the men he works with. This year, he says, will be different. ‘I want a National Insurance number so much. I want it to work, not to take benefits. We work more than ten hours a day and my boss pays £60.’

He understands the bad press some migrants have received and sometimes shares British prejudices against his compatriots. ‘Nobody wants them but I understand because there are a lot of Romanians and Bulgarians who do bad things. They are stealing and killing for drugs. Because of them, we who work get a bad reputation. There are a lot of poor people in Romania and it makes them bad because they are desperate. When people ask: “Where are you from?” and I say Romania, they run away. They think you’re a gypsy.’

Mihai works in King’s Cross and lives in Hendon, north London, in a flat with twelve other builders, most of whom are from Romania. He was home in Bucharest for Christmas to see his partner Roxana and their four-year-old son, Mario. ‘I want to bring my girlfriend and child to England. I miss them very much and it makes me cry because I love them so much, but the rent is a problem.’

To rent even the tiniest flat for him and his family would leave almost no money under his current wage and make saving for a better life impossible. It could also be even harder for his family to get food and other essentials than it would be back in Bucharest, where the cost of living is relatively cheap.

In Romania he worked as a driver and was in the army as a fireman but he says that did not make enough money to keep a family. The minimum salary in Romania is 850 lei a month, about £160. ‘People leave Romania for one reason only: money,’ he says. ‘It’s the hope for a better life.’

Mihai taught himself English watching the Cartoon Network and 90s films (his favourite is Titanic). He has also worked in France and Italy but likes London best and hopes one day to make it a proper home. That does not make him unfamiliar with how rapidly things can go wrong in Britain. ‘I have a friend who lived under the bridges in London. He tried to find work and was washing dishes but he had nowhere to live. He started working for some Albanian guys selling drugs. When you’re that desperate for money it pushes you to do bad things. Now he’s back in Romania and says it’s too hard to make a living in the UK.’

The 1,600-mile bus trip is favoured by many since it costs under £100 and you can take more luggage than on a plane. The first five hours are spent navigating hairpin bends on single-lane roads covered in black ice. It is still dark but the mountains are lit by a dusting of ice reflecting back the moonlight. Gazing out, Mihai says, ‘I’m going to miss this. It’s so beautiful.’

His eyes prick with tears after calling his partner and son. ‘My girlfriend is crying,’ he says. ‘I didn’t let her see me off because it’s too hard. I’ll try everything to bring her next time. In a situation like this you realise how much you love somebody.’

Sitting at the back of the bus are Vali Draghici, 40, and Julian Oprea, 29, from Buzău. They are going to Frankfurt to work in steel welding and construction. Vali tried to work there two years ago, but without papers he was exploited, he says. A Romanian agent promised him 1,500 euros a month but paid only 700 the first month and then nothing in the next. Vali says: ‘We only stayed for two months last time because the pay was bad. But this time it’s eight euros an hour.’

Despite being victims of it themselves in Britain, casual racism is common among the passengers. Over a lunch of gruel at a rest stop, Vali asks: ‘Why don’t the English want us? There are other immigrants in the UK like Indians and niggers so why don’t you want Romanians and Bulgarians? We are better.’

Marin Ninca, 58, is one of three drivers working on rotation on the coach. He has been a driver for almost 45 years and has noticed little change in the numbers going to and from Europe over the last decade – despite the recent hype. ‘There’s no difference. All the routes I make I go with a full bus and I come back with a full bus. I take people to work and I bring them back when they’ve collected their money. Germany, Holland, Belgium, they are all more popular than Britain. They are the most well-known places to go.’

At 2pm the bus reaches Deva, the shabbiest city so far: crumbling brutalist apartment blocks fed by huge rusty pipes, dirty roads, dilapidated houses. Later, as darkness falls, the coach arrives at the north-western Romanian city of Arad, the last place to collect passengers before the journey across Europe begins. Families seeing off relatives are caught in the headlights, their smiles cracking and turning to grimaces as the bus pulls away.

Most of the 50 passengers are returning to existing homes in western Europe, where some have been living for decades. The loudest is a 32-year-old brunette who calls herself Pamela. Her real name is Alexandra Benitez-Pozo. She lived in Barcelona for twelve years and, since last summer, Cologne, making money as a pole dancer and sex worker.

She is on her way back from a Christmas break with her family in Bucharest. Her boss gave her ten days off, and to save money she has spent five of them on a bus. She leaves her four-year-old daughter, Esthella, with her sister in Romania.

‘I’ve been a go-go dancer for twelve years and I can’t lie, I do a bit of prostitution to make money. I can make 200 or 2,000 euros a night. I send home about 800 euros a month – that supports my mother, father, sister and two nephews.’

She has family in Britain, but prefers to work in Germany where prostitution is legal. ‘I have two brothers, one in Manchester and one in London,’ she says. ‘The one in Manchester has babies and works as a cleaner. The one in London steals and takes drugs. He was there a year and nobody helped him, so he steals.’

She interrupts the journey periodically to shout criticism at the driver, or exchange ribald jokes with a group of builders who have gathered at the back of the bus to keep her company. ‘You can’t afford me,’ she keeps reminding them.

At a rest stop just before the Hungarian border, several people get off and change their last fistfuls of leis into just a couple of €5 and £5 notes. Once all the passengers are back on board, Pamela passes around a large brown envelope, demanding three euros each to bribe the border officials. ‘Otherwise we’ll wait hours while they search our bags.’ Everyone pays up.

As it turns out, it isn’t the luggage that delays things. When border police get on the bus they stop at the seats of an unlikely couple. Aziz, a man from Afghanistan in his thirties, travelled from Bucharest with a very young woman, Georgiana, and they argued for much of the journey. The ID Georgiana hands to officials is cracked in half along the photograph and stuck together with Sellotape. When they take her off the coach, Aziz stays inside, staring ahead impassively. It turns out she’s seventeen and travelling on her older sister’s card. Strict laws to prevent trafficking mean it is illegal for her to travel without a parent or papers proving parental consent. The consensus on the bus is that she was being taken to Belgium to work as a prostitute, but Aziz says later that he met Georgiana in his cafe in Antwerp and that they were just on holiday visiting her family in Bucharest.

After three hours of deliberation, Georgiana’s luggage is taken off the bus and Aziz leaves her with a few euros. As it pulls away, Aziz stares resolutely ahead. She’s left standing alone in the cold, sobbing.

Twenty minutes into Hungary, the sound of retching brings the bus to an abrupt halt. A Dutch tourist has guzzled half a litre of Pálenka, Romania’s moonshine, and coated the back of the coach in vomit. The driver is apoplectic. ‘Baggage! Passport!’ he barks, before dragging the drunkard from his seat. The man, who can barely stand, shouts ‘fuck you’, but stops fighting when he sees how angry the driver is. He is jettisoned at a dark petrol station in the middle of the freezing night.

Every passenger has a story of separation, a sacrifice made for a shot at prosperity. Roxana, 28, who joined the bus in the mountain city of Sibiu, Transylvania, is leaving Romania for the first time. Roxy, as she likes to be called, has left her husband Laurentiu behind while she takes a job in London as a live-in au pair. ‘We’ve been together five years and we’ve never been apart,’ she cries, tissues clasped in her lap. They married in 2012 and her phone is full of smiling pictures of them. ‘Look!’ she says proudly, comparing recent photos to one on their wedding day. ‘My cooking made him bigger.’

At the top of her handbag is a velour heart-shaped pillow with a silhouetted couple dancing on it and the words ‘love you for ever’ written in Romanian. Periodically she picks it up and holds it close. In another’s hands it might seem tacky, but it was a parting present from Laurentiu and when she hugs it she can almost feel him there with her.

Roxy is leaving behind a good job in a restaurant which paid 1,000 lei (£185) a month, not enough to start a family. ‘In Romania you have to work so hard for little money,’ she says. ‘I’ve prayed every day. I thank God I’ve been given a chance to change my future. I wish to make children but I don’t have money to buy a house. Once I have money I can come back, buy a house, make children and be happy.’

She got her new job as an au pair to five-year-old twins after she was recommended by a friend who had previously worked for the family. She’s already spoken to them on Skype and is optimistic. ‘The twins are very sweet. On Skype the kids say “Roxy, Roxy!” and kiss the computer. I can’t wait to meet them. I think they are a nice family and I am very lucky.’

All she knows is that their father will meet her at Victoria coach station. Her own family history is less rosy. Her mother died when she was thirteen and her father turned to drink. He flew into drunken rages, she says, and would disappear for weeks, leaving her to bring up her four-year-old younger sister. Roxy was forced to bake cookies in the evenings after school to sell and support the family. At fifteen her father once beat her so hard that she was in a coma for a week, she says. ‘But he’s ill now and dying so I have forgiven him.’

Roxy’s travelling companion from Deva is Mihaela Sirbulescu, 24, who is on her way to Rotterdam, where she has lived since she was nineteen, making flower bouquets. She first went there with a Romanian boyfriend but around six months ago he broke up with her and now leaving home after a Christmas break is harder than ever. Though she and Roxy have never met before, the two talk softly together, ahead of a journey that is making them both apprehensive. ‘Nowhere is better than home,’ Mihaela says later. ‘In the beginning it was good but since my boyfriend ended things it just doesn’t feel like home. Yesterday I cried all day, from eleven in the morning until eleven at night. It just hurts too much to go.’

Through Hungary and Austria, Romania’s single-lane roads are replaced with fast motorways. The coach speeds through the night. Once the sun is up we are in Germany. In Frankfurt, a dozen people get off. As the bus nears Cologne, Pamela gets changed and puts on make-up, ready for a night with clients. ‘Today I go back to work. Tonight I will finish at around 7am. Then it’s Friday and Saturday and it’s open all the time. What can I do? If I don’t work I don’t get paid.’

In Cologne, five people change coach for the last leg to London. Four of them are Romanians: Roxy, Mihai, and two brothers in-law from Turnu-Severin, Romeo Dinescu, 33 and Gelu Ipsas, 39, who have been working as builders in London since 2009. The fifth person is Mark de Groote, 24, a Dutch jewellery maker living in London, who is returning from holiday in Romania. Roxy has to wait longest for all her bags to come off the coach. ‘I didn’t know what to buy or what to take,’ she says, looking abashed. The indecision seems to have resulted in an unfeasible amount of baggage – three suitcases and a carpet bag. One of the bags, she says, is just shoes.

On the new coach Roxy is told that her four suitcases are too many, and that she will have to pay a ten euro charge. Her face blanches. With only a few cents to her name she starts to panic. But other passengers step in and soon the cases have been spread among the group.

The bus is already almost full of people looking settled into the journey. When many refuse to give up the spare seats next to them, Roxy looks more nervous than ever. Such unfriendliness wouldn’t happen in Romania, she says.

After dropping off people in Brussels, the bus arrives at Calais at 2am. Wind and rain lash the windows. A neon sign flashes ‘The port of Calais wishes you a Happy New Year 2014!’ The ferries are delayed because of the storms and in the normally calm port, the waters rage. Roxy is afraid of the sea and has never been on a ferry before. As the coach pulls onto the ramp she looks wide-eyed at the tempestuous water below.

Inside the boat people stagger around, holding onto rails as it is buffeted across the Channel. As the waves get bigger Roxy excuses herself to the bathroom and comes back white-faced.

In the hope of perking people up, Roxy offers to buy coffees, which at service stations in Romania cost one lei (18p). On her way back from the Costa bar with a latte and an espresso she looks shocked: ‘This is a day’s work in Romania,’ she says, aghast.

At 4am the bus comes off the boat – and is hauled straight to an enormous warehouse for a full baggage search. Only then can the bus finally leave for London.

But minutes after passing the White Cliffs it turns around and comes back again. The steering is broken and everyone must wait for a replacement coach that has space for just 30 of the 40 passengers. When the new bus arrives a stampede of people rush through the heavy rain clutching their belongings. Inside, Roxy looks out at the streaming windows and laughs: ‘Welcome to England.’

The bus is freezing while the engine is off but there is a CCTV camera above almost every seat. ‘They have cameras but no warmth?’ she asks, incredulously.

As London starts to go by, she smiles with recognition at the red buses and looks excited. Peering up at the dark buildings, Mihai recalls the first time he stepped out in this new city. ‘I was so lost; all the buildings are made with red bricks and it was hard to remember where I was because everything looked the same.’

As the coach turns into Victoria, though, Roxy holds her red pillow closer and looks frightened. ‘My heart is going like this,’ she says, tapping her chest fast. Mihai stays to make sure she meets her new family safely. A man in a hoodie walks past twice before deciding that Roxy is the woman he is looking for. This smiley man is her new boss, Jas, a 45-year-old jewellery importer from Ealing, west London. He proudly shows phone videos of his five-year-old twins, Rohan and Karena. Back out in the rain, Mihai and Roxy follow him around the corner to a silver Lexus where her cases are piled into the boot.

On seeing Roxy go, Mihai looks unsure of himself. Standing on a rainy intersection, he turns on his heel and begins to head back to the bus stop and a night in a house with twelve workmates he still struggles to call friends.

The Daily Express predicted an influx of migrants by coach under the headline ‘Benefits Britain Here We Come’ – but on this bus, Roxy is the only Romanian arriving in London for the first time. Once in the car, she waves goodbye and looks ahead, ready to start her new life. Working Britain, here she comes.

Working without a National Insurance number weighs heavily on Mihai. Being an illegal employee makes him feel unwanted in Britain and he is desperate to join in and pay taxes. For more than a year he has felt uneasy about his illicit income, knowing that without being registered he risks prosecution. A few days after arriving back in London in the New Year, he goes to ask his boss for help applying. Working regulations have been lifted for Romanians, so there is no longer any reason to be in the shadows. His boss just says he is too busy to help and changes the subject. After this happens a couple of times, Mihai decides to do it himself. Not confident of his English, he gets a friend to call the helpline and book an appointment in Camden Job Centre Plus.

A fortnight later Mihai is standing under the green Job Centre Plus sign near Mornington Crescent station. He is half an hour early and his hands are already quivering with nerves. He worries what will happen if they realise he has already been working without permission. A G4S security guard on the door takes his papers and ushers him in. No guests are allowed inside, so Mihai sits alone waiting to be called.

He is ushered inside and when asked why he has come, Mihai’s explanation comes tumbling out. He recalls later: ‘I told him the truth – that I’d always worked; that I washed dishes and I’d done driving and building. He said it’s OK and it’s better to show that I’ve worked and not been stealing things. I said, “I want to pay taxes. I want the people in the UK to know that I’m working hard and I want to pay to live here.”’

When the interviewer asks if he wants to go on benefits. Mihai is quick to reply: ‘Why would I want to do that? On benefits I’d get maybe £800 but if I work I could get £2,000.’ To illustrate his point, he says, ‘I like working – look at my hands!’ and upturns his calloused palms to the interviewer, smiling. But Mihai is not offended by the question and often remarks that the prejudice is a fair one. ‘Some Romanians in Britain are just here for the benefits. In the communist time if you had more than seven children, especially boys, you were a hero mother and got more benefits. That has been in our culture.’

As the interview goes on and Mihai’s fingers continue to tremble, the man tries to reassure him. ‘Don’t be scared’, he says, ‘I’m not going to kill you.’ Mihai is asked for all the addresses of the places he has lived – on the Holloway Road, in Finchley and now in Hendon – before being told that he will hear back in three weeks’ time.

When he walks outside he is still shaking, but smiling too. ‘It was OK – he was nice,’ he says, relieved. His reasons reveal the prejudices still common among his fellow Romanian exiles – he struggles to adjust to the idea of Britain being multi-racial. ‘I was nervous I might get an Indian guy because my friends told me they’d be racist to me. I heard people got rejected by them. But it was a black guy and he was nice, funny.’

Mihai does not want to bring his girlfriend Roxana and their son Mario to join him until he has found better work and can afford a place of their own to live in. ‘My first four months in Britain I didn’t have any accommodation, I was just walking round like a dog in the rain. I slept in hallways and I was depressed. I don’t want Roxana to be depressed.’ The current home would never be suitable for them, he says. His terraced house in Hendon, north London, is now shared with twelve other builders, all men, who are squashed into a handful of bedrooms. The conditions are cramped but he is still charged more than £250 in rent. When the heating turns off it is Mihai’s job to gather £5 each for the meter from his reluctant housemates. He is stuck – unable to afford to leave but desperate for his own home so he can be reunited with his family. He hopes a National Insurance number may help him towards a better-paid job as a driver, which he prefers to construction labouring.

A fortnight later Mihai calls, elated. ‘I got the letter, I got it!’ A card with his National Insurance number has arrived in the post and now he is part of the legal workforce. His British driving licence has also come through and his dream of a career as a driver now feels within reach. The two small cards are the only prompt he needs to begin planning a future in Britain with Roxana and Mario. ‘I miss them so much. I worry about her; she went back and took her high school exams recently but she failed some. She works at McDonald’s in Bucharest until late every day and had no time to study. I hate McDonald’s now. Whenever I pass it I feel angry; they make her work from six in the morning until eight in the evening. That’s fourteen hours. I won’t even eat there in London now.’

Mihai wants to get married in September. He and Roxana had not planned to have a child and until now have had little time to think about a wedding, which in Romania means saving huge sums so you can entertain several hundred people. When he suggests an autumn ceremony, Roxana is coy. ‘She says I have to ask her properly, not on the phone,’ Mihai explains. ‘I love her and I want to marry her. If we do it in September then she and Mario come to Britain afterwards, and it will be easier to find a home.’

With Roxana’s words at the top of his mind, Mihai decides he will drive to Romania at Easter and surprise her with a proposal. He often does the drive to Bucharest, delivering cars that friends want brought over from Britain. They pay his expenses if he drives the car and it means he can avoid the slower bus route. He loves driving, despite a near fatal accident in his early 20s, when he was driving fast on the motorway with no seatbelt and careered into another car. He had to have both his legs reconstructed after his knees were crushed under the steering wheel.

He is excited to be going back, and looking forward to seeing the Romanian countryside on the journey. He often reminisces about the mountains near Bucharest. His aunt lives there by a lake where they would all go fishing for catfish and carp. ‘The carp are so big there that even the army divers are scared of them,’ he laughs. ‘One said he saw one with a giant head and wasn’t going in.’

The night before leaving he buys some ear plugs to make sure he gets a good night’s sleep, undisturbed by his housemates’ Friday night drinking. ‘They like to drink moonshine all night and say nasty things about the people at work. I prefer to stay in my room. I have to sleep because I’m not going to stop on the journey, I will drive all night because I just want to get there and see Roxana.’

When Mihai arrived in Romania he could hardly wait to get to Roxana. He had not told her he was coming, keen for his arrival – and proposal – to be a surprise. But when he opened the door to her flat, Roxana and Mario were not alone. Sitting with the two of them on the sofa was another man. The three were easy together, like a family, and Mihai’s stomach flipped with jealousy.

Friends of Mihai’s had hinted there might be someone else – ‘We’ve seen her in bars with other men,’ they told him, trying to warn him of what might be happening. But Mihai did not want to believe it. He thought they were stirring up trouble. He loved Roxana, quietly enjoying the responsibility of looking after her and Mario, regularly sending home almost everything he earned once he paid the bills.

With little explanation for the intimate scene, Roxana opted for the truth. ‘I’m in love with him,’ she said, ‘and my feelings for you won’t come back.’ Mihai left the flat in a rage. He went to his sister who tried to calm him down. ‘Don’t be angry,’ she soothed, ‘you’ll only regret it later.’

He would pick over Roxana’s words for months afterwards. ‘I don’t know how long they were together and if she told me I wouldn’t believe her’, he said in the weeks afterwards. ‘Everybody lies to me. I know that guy, he doesn’t make money – he just likes to party. He doesn’t like to work and she works so hard. I don’t know, maybe he knows how to talk to a woman but I always tried to protect her and give her a good life. I don’t hate her. I just fear what may happen to her.’

In retrospect he notices the signs that things were wrong. ‘I would call her maybe fifteen times a day and she barely ever answered. She would just say, “I don’t have time to speak, I have things to do.” You can feel it when a person changes; you feel it in your soul.’

He returns from the trip more motivated than ever to make his life work in Britain. ‘It broke my heart. All my feelings for her, she didn’t feel them on her side. I’ll be in London for a long time now because I don’t want to go back to Romania. After that trip I hate Romania.’

The cousin of the boss, Enache, has moved into the house in Hendon, where he was given the whole top floor to himself. After becoming a good friend to Mihai, who is quieter than the others and less fond of moonshine, Enache asked Mihai to take the other room on the top floor with him. The friendship is a great support to Mihai, who confides in him some of what happened when he went to Bucharest. ‘You are Spartan,’ Enache told Mihai when he heard the story. ‘You have to stand up straight; she’s not worth anything.’ The separate quarters mean he can stay away from the chaos and noise of the other twelve builders and he becomes less bothered by the idea of moving out or changing employers.

With a British driving licence sorted, Mihai persuades the boss to take him on as a van driver, buying and delivering materials to the company’s sites across London, Kent and Brighton. Not wanting to think about his imploded personal life, he drives all the hours he is offered. The work numbs the sadness and soon he is making up to £2,500 every month, working fourteen hours a day. Within four weeks he has driven 4,000 miles, stopping only to sleep and barely remembering to eat.

He likes delivering things for the company and feeling useful, taking pains to find the best deals on his smartphone before picking up materials from suppliers. He misses having a job with a civic purpose. When he was nineteen he worked as a firefighter as his army national service. He loved it in spite of the risks and built a reputation for courage. One day he saved two children from a burning building, giving them his own oxygen mask and his spare as he carried them out. The smoke inhalation left him in a coma for several days afterwards.

Saturdays are the only day off, as some of the management are Jewish and want to observe the Sabbath. Most of the workers spend the Friday night drinking followed by the Saturday in a hungover stupor, but Mihai uses the time to help out friends. Since he is allowed to use the van as his personal car, he drives them to the supermarket to carry their food home and to run errands. With good English he often goes to translate for people needing to pay bills or organise a mobile phone contract.

In the months after discovering Roxana’s infidelity, one thing keeps gnawing away at Mihai. His son Mario never looked much like him – or anyone in his family – and he is beginning to wonder if the boy may have been a trick to exploit him for money. He had been in a relationship with Roxana when she fell pregnant six years earlier, but not for very long. She had been only sixteen and didn’t take life very seriously. ‘Just get a DNA test,’ one friend advised. Mihai wanted to go back to Romania and visit his grandma anyway, because she had fallen ill with worsening diabetes and heart problems, so he called Roxana and said what he wanted to do.

Roxana was not enamoured with the DNA test idea but when she continued to refuse, Mihai threatened to take her to court for it. He was still sending around £400 a month for the upkeep of his son, more than the legal requirement for a father, and he did not like the nagging feeling that he had been duped. ‘OK, OK’, she acquiesced, making him hope that his worries had just been paranoia.

In July, Mihai arrived back in Romania. He did not tell anyone he was coming, except his grandmother, though even she was unaware of his real business there. At a hospital in Bucharest, he paid almost 1,000 euros to have himself and Mario tested. A nurse took a blood sample, as well as a piece of fingernail and hair. The results came back: Mario was someone else’s son.

The news crushed Mihai. He replayed the early years of his relationship with Roxana, remembering, ‘I never wanted to believe the people who said “Mihai, I saw her out in pubs late at night” when I was in London, or before that, in Italy. I didn’t want to trust them because when you love somebody you need to trust them, but they were right.’

As soon as he found out he went back to his grandmother’s house and fell apart. He was in the country only for a couple of days and he spent the rest of his time lying on the bed in her small flat with his head in her lap like a young boy, while she stroked his hair and told him stories about her life. He could not bring himself to tell her the details about what happened, just saying ‘I broke up and it wasn’t OK’. His explanation was enough for her. She had always provided the love his parents failed to. His mother and father were indifferent to him when he was growing up, caught up in alcohol problems and their own failing relationship. ‘To live with your parents and feel alone is a hard feeling,’ he would say later, ‘but my grandma loves me unconditionally.’

In August Mihai worked more than ever, blocking out the pain of the last few months. Much of the work had moved to Brighton and involved long drives to and from London lugging around supplies. One night he came back so tired that when he sat down at the table to eat his soup he fell asleep, the spoon still in his hand. When he woke the next morning in the same position, the bowl of cold soup next to his head, he simply began eating it. Once he’d finished, he went out to work again.

It is autumn 2014 and the boss at Mihai’s construction company has finally registered all his staff with National Insurance numbers. Restrictions on Romanian and Bulgarian labour were lifted many months earlier, but he tells Mihai he had not had time to do it before. ‘I’m close to the bosses now’, Mihai says. ‘They don’t make dirty things, they are good men and they always pay. I’ve worked for them for more than two years now and there’s no day they didn’t pay.’

Driving around in his own van makes him feel very fortunate. ‘I was very lucky with this boss. When I go to the builders’ depot or to Wickes I see a lot of people and they are mostly Romanians who are searching for work. They ask everyone who goes outside if they have work for them. When I drive in they’re looking at me and asking me for work. I feel sorry for them. Usually there are 30, 40, or even 50 people waiting on Staples Corner. They wait hoping for any work. Sometimes they find work, sometimes they work and don’t get paid. Most don’t have a National Insurance number. I have a lot of friends in Romania who want me to bring them to London to work. A lot don’t know what it’s like here, though. They think: “Oh, it’s London, I’ll find honey on the street.” They don’t realise how hard it is to find a job.’

The twelve other builders who Mihai lives with in north London are keen to set him up with a new girl after Roxana’s betrayal. He was uninterested at first; he was badly hurt and just wanted not to think about women for a while. Then one of his housemates with a girlfriend in Romania started to tell him about this girlfriend’s widowed sister, Irina. The more Mihai heard about this gentle woman and her young daughter Maria, the more he liked the sound of her. They made friends on Facebook and soon they were messaging each other all through the day, Mihai sneaking a look at his mobile whenever he stopped the van. Irina is six months older than him and had just turned 30. Her husband died in a car accident two years earlier, leaving her behind with their daughter Maria, now seven. Where they live, a village about ten miles outside Bucharest, there is no pavement and the car had mowed him down on the road’s edge. Now she survives on the proceeds of a small garden-farm, raising pigs and selling corn. She cannot work full-time because of her daughter and she never has more than around £70 a month.

‘I like her because she’s fighting with life and she doesn’t expect anything from anybody,’ Mihai says. ‘She doesn’t complain about life. I haven’t met her yet but when I come back to Romania I want to come and see her. I think she’s a little bit afraid in case I’m that kind of man who only wants to sleep with her but I don’t want anything from her.’

The friendship gives Mihai a renewed sense of purpose. When he hears that Irina has an old Nokia phone with no Facebook messenger on it, he sends her a Samsung smartphone for her birthday so they can chat whenever they want. He asks if her daughter Maria would like anything and Irina is suspicious. ‘You’re a stranger, why do you want to buy something for my little girl?’ Mihai could not really explain. ‘I just feel I’d like to do this.’ It made him feel good to help out when they had so little. Eventually Irina put Maria on the phone to Mihai one day and she asked for a doll. ‘She didn’t want gadgets or phones or tablets, she just wanted a doll. It was wonderful. I felt wow, I want to meet both of them.’

With no money now being sent to Roxana, he enjoys the chance to spoil others. On his sister’s birthday he sends her an enormous flat-screen television.

Over the late summer and autumn Mihai grows to like Irina more and more. ‘I like her because she doesn’t want anything for free; she works for what she has. When I call her she has her headset on and she is always working, cleaning, cooking or out on the farm. She doesn’t know but she gave me life lessons. I spend £700 here in London on nonsense, on Playstation games and junk food and things like this. She only has £70 a month and she is raising a child.’

She never asks him for anything, despite her situation, and the contrast with Roxana is striking. ‘She never complains. When I called Roxana she always complained and said “It’s hard, I have nothing.” When I call Irina I don’t hear any of that; she’s only telling me what she’s doing, like “Now I’m taking care of my flowers, or now I’m washing, or playing with Maria.”’

There are not many pictures of her on Facebook, but the few there are show a beautiful young mother with dark glossy hair. Mihai resolves to go to Romania in October to meet her. He has only five days off but he can do it cheaply; his boss is letting him take the van. The week before he leaves he feels like an excited teenager. Irina is planning to cook for him and he is desperate for it to go well. ‘I’m nervous about it but I will ask her if she will go out with me. I told her I want to know you better because you’re a nice person. I saw good things in her and I know I need to fight for her if I want her, to gain her trust.’

The previous two times Mihai returned from a trip to Romania it had been under the shroud of a fresh betrayal. First the discovery of Roxana’s infidelity – and then the realisation that Mario was not his real son. But his last trip of 2014 ends differently. Irina has agreed to a relationship and as he goes about his deliveries in London it is with a smile fixed permanently to his face.

The October visit to Irina and her daughter Maria was a success. They talked and talked at her farmhouse and he sat with Maria while she played with the doll and toy pram he had given her. He got to see his grandma, who cooked his favourite dinner of pork meatballs and cabbage pickle, and he visited his sister. Though he rarely sees his mum and dad, he is close to his sister and her son, who was named Mihai after him and is also his godson. Mihai junior is nine and spending time with him eases the pain of losing Mario. They play football in the garden and Mihai tells his namesake that one day he can be like Lionel Messi if he works hard at the football academy he is training at.

Reminders of the hurt he felt at losing Roxana and Mario still return sometimes, but seeing seven-year-old Maria and his nephew Mihai help him recover. ‘It’s not Mario’s fault, I don’t hate him. But I won’t see them any more because it harms my soul. I don’t want contact with them. There’s something here for Mario,’ he says, patting his chest, ‘but the deception was too big. To raise a child for six years and then discover it’s not yours … They are feelings you can’t find words for.’

When he returns to Britain he feels torn between the two countries for the first time all year. But he still sees the flaws back home. ‘I miss my grandma and my sister and my nephew but that’s it. People say: “You don’t miss Romania, you traitor.” I love my country but life is very hard there.’

He has found a Romanian shop in Burnt Oak that sells his favourite Fruity Fresh pear juice from back home. Every few weeks he drops by to replenish his supplies. He is easy-going again, enjoying the company of his housemates and even going out drinking with them occasionally. But mostly, he drives. In the first nine months of being in charge of the van he has driven more than 35,000 miles. Next Easter he will make another long drive, back to Romania to see Irina. He would like to bring her to Britain but he knows she loves the farm and, with little English, would struggle to make a living in London.

As the days wear on his plans for the future change. When he first heard of Roxana’s betrayal he was convinced that his long-term future was in Britain. Now he thinks he may save up for five years and build a better house for him and Irina in her village outside Bucharest. To have enough for a house – and to supplement what would be a lower income in Romania – he will need to save more than ever before. The prospect is not daunting to him. ‘I am powerful,’ he says, curling his bicep with a cheeky grin. ‘I can work as long as there are days.’

CHAPTER 2

Ummad

It took a YouTube video to persuade Ummad Farooq that Sunderland was the university for him. While the promise of decent wages drew Mihai to Britain, for Ummad it was the lure of a peaceful education in the country of dreaming spires. From his bedroom in Karachi, he scrolled through university websites on his laptop. He had whittled the decision down to a handful of MBAs with affordable fees that might offer scholarships as a reward for his First Class degree. Then he saw the Sunderland video. The slogan was ‘Life-Changing’ and its slick visuals cut between students in the pool, the bar, and finally in their graduate jobs. The campus looked calm and idyllic, far from the bustle of Karachi’s 23 million people – and even further from the threat of violence that had begun to hang over his family.

Ummad had wanted to live in England for so long that when he made it to Sunderland aged 21 he embraced a new Mackem identity. He was enthused with a desire to learn the local culture and history, bounding around campus in a hoody, jeans and a bright white smile. As a practising Muslim he did not drink, though he did not mind when his friends did, within reason. He would go to a local Wetherspoon pub, the Lampton, eat fish and chips and watch the football with them.

He believes Muslims must assimilate and adapt to their surroundings. ‘If you wear a shalwar kameez and bathroom slippers in Britain I think it’s weird and disrespectful,’ he says. ‘Why not use camels instead of cars then? It’s not like you have to look like that to be a Muslim in Britain. It was a necessity of the time having a beard because of the dust in the desert. I’m not an Arab, I’m a Muslim. For me if you’re living somewhere you need to respect the values of local people. We are very clear on the need to cover our bodies but Islam doesn’t restrict you so that you have to wear a burqa and sunglasses and gloves. Why would God make religion that hard?’

Ummad had reason to savour his new life and religious freedom in Britain. His family had the superficial trappings of comfort in Karachi: an enormous villa, several maids and a successful business, but danger beyond their gates meant they were living in a gilded prison. Ummad’s father Farooq was a prominent businessman with a company importing generators. He was also a leading Ahmadiyya Muslim, which increasingly put his family in the cross-hairs of extremists.

Ahmadiyya is a sect of Islam whose followers believe that another prophet came after Mohammad in the nineteenth century, called Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. This idea has seen them condemned as heretics by other Muslims and their right to worship is now forbidden under a series of draconian laws in Pakistan. It has been illegal for an Ahmadi to call themselves Muslim since 1974, when the otherwise liberal leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto introduced the law to appease conservative critics. Ahmadis’ freedom to practise their religion was outlawed entirely a decade later, when the country was under military dictatorship.

Now, just touching a Quran, wearing Islamic clothing such as a skull cap or shalwar kameez, or calling their place of worship a mosque, can result in thousands of pounds in fines and up to twelve years’ imprisonment. Even having a building that looks like a mosque is illegal and police have torn down Ahmadi minarets, so that most of their mosques in Pakistan look like houses. Ahmadi graveyards have been desecrated because the tombstones contained Quranic passages.

Ummad thinks this persecution is less about their perceived blasphemous beliefs and more because of the strong stance the community takes on promoting peace and tolerance. Their motto is ‘Love For All, Hatred For None’ and they are outspoken in saying that no killing can ever be justified, particularly not in the name of Islam. ‘Politics has nothing to do with religion but in Pakistan they’re all connected and that’s where things go wrong,’ Ummad says.

Prejudice against Ahmadis is so enshrined in law that police are even accused of turning a blind eye to violent attacks. In 2010 when the Punjabi Taliban besieged two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore and killed more than 90 people, police arrived late and were accused of doing little to prevent the massacre. Three days later a Lahore hospital’s intensive care unit, where many victims were being treated, was attacked and another twelve people killed.

Where once Ummad’s family got by living quietly and keeping a low profile, now they feared leaving the house without an armed escort. On the few occasions they did they carefully timed their movements to avoid a predictable routine that could be exploited by would-be attackers. Despite the danger at home, when it came to the youngest of their three children leaving Pakistan for England, Ummad’s parents worried. Before going, his mum piled up his suitcase with pots and pans until it weighed more than a fully stocked kitchen cabinet. ‘Mum,’ he groaned, ‘you know they have pans in England, right?’

Ummad had always lived in Karachi and loved his home but that wasn’t enough to stop the rush of relief when he left. He’d spent so many hours poring over websites and imagining his life in Britain that when he finally arrived it could have been a disappointment; instead the anticipation only added to the excitement.