Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny
The landing of migrant-filled boats on my local beach raised a moral dilemma for people living on the Channel coast, says Mary Kenny
Just before the start of 2019, migrants who had crossed the English Channel in a small boat were found on the beach at Walmer (near my home in Deal) – the same spot where Julius Caesar landed in England in 55 BC.
If I were a proper Christian, I reflected, I would hasten to the location and offer shelter and hospitality to those who had made the perilous journey across that busy strip of water. But I didn’t. And I’d be worried about the responsibilities of becoming a marine Good Samaritan.
Deal is only eight miles from Dover, but it has seldom been a destination for migrants crossing the Channel in such frail vessels. Because of unusually mild weather and calm seas, my boating expert, Colin Matley, tells me it was relatively easy to travel across that 21 miles of water in a small craft.
Two hundred years ago, small Deal boats sailed and rowed across the Channel to smuggle back brandy and lace, braving the treacherous Goodwin Sands which lie off the coast of Deal. There’s a terrifying naval drawing of the very many shipwrecked vessels that came to grief on those sandbanks.
Today, the hazards of the world’s busiest sea passage, awash with huge container ships and multiple ferries, probably pose more of a danger.
The moral dilemma of what a resident should do if a migrant appears on the shore remains. Channelside residents say, like the local tweeter Bob Frost, ‘Let’s keep Deal recognisably part of England.’ ‘Send them back to where they came from!’ says another. ‘When I went to work in America I had to prove to US immigration that I deserved to enter. It wasn’t easy.’
But Jennifer Davis, who has worked with migrants at Dover, says she feels angry that some local response to immigrants is negative: ‘We have a lot to learn from people who have had a different and less cosy experience of life.’
In practice, migrants who appear on the seashore are whisked away and dispersed to various centres around the country to be ‘processed’. The moral dilemma of whether to give shelter, personally, doesn’t actually arise. But it’s something I feel we should ask ourselves.
In all the focus on ‘Deal or No Deal’ in the febrile Brexit conversation, our town of Deal rather missed a marketing trick. Surely it could have changed the town motto from Adjuvate Advenas (which means ‘Help Strangers’) to ‘Deal, not No Deal’, and rebranded the railway station and the road signs accordingly?
It would be such a stroke of serendipity if Meghan and Harry’s baby were to be born in Brexit week, at the end of March. Such an uplifting omen! And such a boost for the continental magazines, which are fascinated by the Duchess of Sussex.
Italian mass mags such as Oggi are notably smitten with Meghan, especially since it was announced that there was a bambino on the way. Italians love babies, particularly since they nowadays have so few: Italian women have the lowest fertility rate in Europe (1.35 babies per woman) and, because of that, the oldest population in the EU. It’s not that they don’t want kids – ISTAT, the Italian statistics institute, says Italian women want at least two children. But the dodgy economic and employment situation is often hostile to starting a family.
So the royal families of Europe have once again been the source of dynastic reproduction: four growing children for the monarchs of Belgium, three for the Dutch, four for the Danish Crown Princess (Mary of Tasmania) and her Crown Prince, and the younger Swedish royals are currently procreating merrily away. The Monégasques, proxy royal family to both France and Italy, are also commendably philoprocreative (Princess Caroline of Monaco now has seven grandchildren) and still they’re breeding fast. Good for them.
I’ve been reprimanded for my pro-natalist views, but babies are essential to the continuation of any civilisation. And it’s jolly unfair that women and couples often find circumstances so unfriendly to begetting bambini these days (as the grandparent generation well appreciates). Anyway, the royals, both British and continental, are doing splendidly in popping sprogs, and Meghan’s baby will be the one uniting force all over Europe this spring.
Under the original Code Napoléon, children born in France were supposed to be given French first names – preferably Christian names. This has been relaxed, but there’s been a suggestion – by the conservative commentator Éric Zemmour – that this tradition should be revived, to enhance integration. This could even apply to Brits living in France. I’d be delighted to be rechristened with a French first name, since the French seldom baptise a child Marie without adding a more interesting suffix: Marie-christine, Marie-laure, Marie-thérèse. So I’d choose to rename myself Marie-antoinette.