Periodically I leave this sceptered isle for lands less prosaic. East
Africa, America, France: I lived in them for years, left them, then came back
to what I supposed to be home. Last time I returned it was not quite as
desperate a venture as that of clinging to the underside of a lorry for the
entire crossing. I financed my, nevertheless, refugee like return from Paris to
the uk with a job for my Paris Production Services film facility: it contributed
the bulk of what I nicknamed "The Colditz Tunnel Escape Fund."
That was because returning from France was more complicated than my
escapes from Africa and America. Those latter flights to my London homes of
those days were accompanied merely by personal baggage. When I moved to Paris however,
I left no home in the uk and embarked for what I thought might be forever
taking all my furniture, files and treasures. Most of those now rest in a friend's
chateau in Burgundy but I had some pieces in Paris that I wanted to bring
with me and all of this requires organisation, packing, shipping, and funding.
After several months hard work I found shippers and a haven to which my stuff,
including a 1912 Bechstein I inherited from my mother, could be carted.
I was a sort of refugee fleeing from the jelly bellied Francois Hollande
and coming hard times in France after his election. The problem began when my
landlady's husband died and she decided to sell my apartment where I had lived
for 13 years. I had paid a total of some €150,000 to her in that time but I had
no rights under the law to either buy the place as a sitting tenant or keep on
renting it with a new owner. Moving had become a difficult option. I had been
living in a privileged location, poised above the Place des Pyramides on the
corner of the Louvre and Tuileries Gardens. The only blight to my southerly
view was the wretched Tour Montparnasse. The other blights were related to my
discomfort under the legal regime that favoured the landlady's over my own rights
and which, due to demand, made it by now virtually impossible to find a
substitute central Paris apartment. I did not think I could stand being a
foreigner any longer.
I left a great love behind me, but it was a great relief to reach Angleterre. Alas, I found it greatly
changed but still very civilized with sensible common laws for property rentals.
Now I am watching with some horror, those others, less blessed than
myself and without a British birthright, trying with intense
desperation to come to the uk.
Recently, a photograph appeared in the Telegraph of a 22 year old
Sudanese whose words "Britain is good" touched my heart. He was
pictured sitting at the Toddington Service Station on the M1. I could not but
chuckle. Never had such a banal place seemed so much like Paradise, it seemed.
He had crossed to the UK clinging to the underside of a lorry. Now he hoped to
study for a degree. I was moved. I cannot bear to think of him, after his brave
enterprise, languishing in a prison cell.
I can also be moved by the plight of thousands who, whether political or
economic refugees and with only the clothes they are wearing, are trying to
enter the country by force, even with their children? Desperation to reach a
country where welfare will help them and indeed where there are many lower
level jobs: surely our compassion cannot refuse them? But, we can't let them
blackmail us, can we? Legal immigration procedures must be enforced. We must
have the immigrants we choose, not those forced upon us.
This is a terrible harvest reaped by the great success of the English
language and by the equally great success of the British economy which can
provide the jobs that are unavailable in the Social Chapter strapped EU. And the freedom of movement allowed
within the EU is also our great handicap. Italy, Hungary, France, just wave
them through.
We are besieged and must man the battlements.
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