Knocking from the roof box revealed we’d brought more than wine back from France...
How one couple found a migrant hidden in their car, after record number cross Channel in a day
It had been a typically glorious French holiday. My wife Lucy and I had spent a week in Nice and then slowly meandered back through the French countryside. We arrived in Folkestone last Wednesday tanned and relaxed, with a boot full of Haut-médoc and – we were soon to discover – a Sudanese stowaway in the roofbox.
We presume the man climbed in at the Cité Europe, a shopping mall close to Calais where we always go to stock up on wine when we are driving home through the Channel Tunnel.
The roof box on our Mercedes estate was a few years old and not in the best of nick. I had broken the lock a while ago and it could be prised open with a screwdriver.
When we came back with our wine and loaded up the boot nothing seemed out of place. It was only driving on the M25 when another car pulled up next to us and gestured that the lid had flapped open on the roof box that we realised something was amiss.
We pulled over in the rain and I quickly lashed it shut with a tow rope we keep in the back of the car. Then we headed home to the quiet residential street in the Berkshire town of Hungerford where we live.
As we unloaded the car we started to hear a knocking from the roof box. I thought it might be a neighbour playing a prank but then Lucy said: “Someone is in there.”
Obviously, this week a lot of the focus has been on refugees and migrants crossing the English Channel. On Wednesday a record 409 people were recorded making the dangerous journey in dinghies prompting the Prime Minister to warn the UK is a “target and magnet” for people traffickers.
But as the authorities begin to focus their attention on the Channel it seems a new route is opening up and migrants and refugees stowing away in holidaymakers’ roof boxes is becoming more common.
Earlier this summer, a British family found two teenage stowaways in their roof box after pulling into a petrol station near Normandy. Last September a couple from Newbury in Berkshire – not far from us – arrived home from France to find a 17-year-old hiding in their roof box.
They spoke at the time of their shock at the discovery and for us it was exactly the same.
I immediately dialled 999 and my main concern was whoever it was might die in there. The call handler said to keep in contact with the person until the officers arrived. He couldn’t speak any English but every now and then we would exchange a few words plus keep knocking to each other so we knew he was okay.
Two Thames Police officers arrived after about 30 minutes and we opened up the box. This young man in his early 20s, with trendy jeans and a black hoodie, climbed out.
I don’t know how he fitted in there because I had rammed it full with rock climbing gear, my wife’s massive suitcase and other holiday detritus.
He was obviously pretty dazed and the police were calm with him. At first he was handcuffed while they searched through his meagre possessions: an MP3 player, headphones, and no papers from what I could see.
He said he was from Sudan and then the police led him away. They wouldn’t tell me what would happen to him but I will try and find out.
I have worked for The Telegraph as a photo and video journalist in Syria, Iraq, Libya and covered the mass exodus of refugees across the Balkans
‘I’ve had a lot more exposure to this kind of thing than most, but experiencing it was a real shock’
in 2015. I have actually been to the detention centres in Libya where African migrants and refugees are often held after crossing the Sahara Desert en route to Europe and seen for myself the appalling conditions they are subjected to.
Following my work in Syria, I also set up a charity – the Syrian Refugee Relief Fund – which looks after orphans and children with prosthetic limbs in Syria and Turkey.
I’ve had a lot more exposure to this kind of thing than most people but regardless of what I have done in a professional capacity, experiencing it was a real shock.
I’ve got huge sympathy for anybody forced to leave their country and embark on the sort of journey he would have done from Sudan. That four hours in my roof box would probably have been the most pleasant part of his whole trip.
It shows to me how desperate these people are and makes me think what on earth is he fleeing in the first place to risk everything.
There is a difference between an asylum seeker and economic migrant. I really feel for people who have to risk so much just to be able to have a normal life.
As told to Joe Shute