Welcome to the Calais Jungle where an Irish volunteer fights the urge to run

I’m having a drink with some friends in a lively bar in a seaside town in northern France. The atmosphere is the type I’m familiar with, having grown up a couple of hours away in Brussels: people of a variety of nationalities getting to know each other over a few beers. The difference here is that in about an hour one of us will head off to the port and risk his life trying to stowaway on a lorry bound for Folkestone.

His name is X, he’s a Syrian pharmacist. He reminds me of my Italian friends from school – quiet, intelligent, interesting to talk to. He’s explaining how smuggling works: a third party back in Syria holds the money. If and when X makes it to the UK, the money is paid into the smuggler’s bank account. If he doesn’t make it, the money doesn’t transfer. It sounds like a good system. Can he trust the third party? He can. Is the smuggler an evil man? Not necessarily.

Contrary to what some of the press would have us believe, there are good smugglers and bad smugglers, as in any walk of life. X has been in Calais since the autumn, having come across the Mediterranean from Turkey during the summer. He has left his wife and daughter back in the northern part of Syria, a Kurdish area which so far is comparatively safe. ISIS have not reached it. But in the occasional silences you can read an anxiety which is unbearable. Repeated attempts to get across to the UK have proved unsuccessful and time is running out.

The following evening we hear that a 16-year-old Sudanese kid, just a couple of days arrived in Calais, has been hit and killed by a lorry on one of the roads around the port. It’s said that the lorry driver didn’t stop and the police didn’t question him. The kid was one of hundreds you see every night on the roads around Calais, making their way through the dark to the port. I’m told by others there that they travel in groups, because if you’re alone and caught by the police you risk being badly beaten – or, worse, taken to the other side of France and dumped on a road in the middle of nowhere, for the hell of it.

Of course, very few make it across the Channel. Most return in the early hours, often cut from razor wire or with eyes swollen and red from pepper spray. They then sleep until midday, mooch around for a few hours until night falls before making their way once more to the port. For many it’s been months of this and you can see the hope dying in their eyes. It’s like a ghastly version of Waiting for Godot. The limbo that they are living in is a sprawling area of filthy wasteland on which stands a makeshift camp known as The Jungle. There are 6,000 people here, from, variously, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Afghanistan.

Your first instinct on entering the Jungle is to turn around and run. Imagine Electric Picnic without the bands and having gone on for a year with no-one changing the portable toilets or clearing the rubbish. Throw in a bit of asbestos for good measure and surround it with riot police and you begin to get a sense of life here. Thick mud with an ooze of slime over the top runs through the camp, forming a kind of main strip. On either side are flattened and tattered tents or cabins wrapped in tarpaulin. You peer into dark, burrow-like interiors. No light anywhere. No windows on the cabins. Everything blanketed with bin bags and held together with string to provide some protection from the elements. You feel suffocated within seconds, and yet you’re afraid to breathe properly for fear of inhaling something toxic.

We arrive mid-morning – me and a small gang of volunteers from Ireland, nervous and shouting “hello” with wild good cheer to everyone we can see. I’m not exactly sure why I’m here. I’m an actor. In other words: qualified for sweet FA. I can’t administer medicine or help people fill out asylum papers. An amazing girl called Elaine Mernagh is building a library for the women and children and I’ve signed up to help construct it, though I can’t really build, and, like most actors, I’m shy of hard work.

I think I’m here because I can no longer bear to continue to turn away from what’s going on. I was on holiday in Greece in August, sunning myself on a beach while families were dying trying to make it to the adjacent island. People drowning in the Mediterranean and suffocating in lorries was a bitter blow to the European ideals I was brought up with. Fences and barbed wire going up while politicians expressed deep concern but did nothing was crushing. When Merkel announced she would admit 800,000 refugees and I watched scenes of ordinary Germans and Austrians welcoming arrivals with banners and smiles I broke down in tears because some humanity and dignity had been restored.

I live in London. Cameron has offered to admit 20,000 to the UK. They are yet to arrive, and they will come from refugee camps along the Turkish border – expressly, and almost sadistically, not from the festering camp on his doorstep. Britain’s contribution to the Jungle is £18 million of white fencing topped with razor wire.

Within a couple of hours of entering the Jungle I find a way to make myself useful. In a small cabin where they have set up an improvised schoolroom, about ten young men are waiting for an English class. The teacher hasn’t arrived so I decide to put my old TEFL cert to good use. My students are engineers, pharmacists, IT programmers. There is a very charming and stylish Sudanese actor who shows me a Youtube clip of himself on a TV show from back home.

Suddenly my physical revulsion at the squalor of the Jungle disappears – I find myself at the whiteboard barely able to speak, inspired by the courage of these people, so reviled, hounded everywhere they go, with barely any English, yet still waiting patiently and good-naturedly for their English class, determined to make something of themselves, of their lives, despite the appalling circumstances they find themselves in.

Every volunteer who steps in here is on a wild emotional rollercoaster from the word go. Colin, a rugged Scot from near Glasgow, who has become the de facto foreman of our library building team, has to keep disappearing, overcome by emotion. Two Syrian carpenters have joined in the construction. Over the course of the day they get chatting with Colin about their families and children back in Syria. Colin, who has two kids himself, just can’t take it.

For my own part, I was most affected by the two young men I met outside my hotel in Calais town. I didn’t at first spot them as refugees. They were well dressed and one of them stopped me to politely inquire whether I knew of cheap hotels in the area. It was only the strain in his face that alerted me to the possibility they weren’t here on business or pleasure. Calais votes National Front and the streets here are not welcoming to refugees. When the men saw I was not hostile they broke into relieved smiles. I learned they were from Iraq and that they were looking for a room for six people for “10 or 20 days”. The man’s sister was among the six – and having three sisters myself my heart went out to him immediately. The thought of your sister having to stay in the Jungle was a horror. The Jungle is 70 per cent men, and women and children are not safe at night.

In the centre of the Jungle is a big downturned bowl of a tent called ‘the Dome’ where a theatre organisation from England has set up. I attended a drama workshop where the class were invited to express themselves to an imaginary French policeman. The results were surprising. Instead of the expected outburst of fury, there was apology: “I am sorry I do not have a passport, that I am here, that I have nothing . . . but I am a human being like you.”

After five days our prefab is built, and our Irish Syrian team pose proudly for photographs. Elaine has decided it’s now more of a cinema than a library. The important thing is that it’s for women and children. One of the very few spaces specifically for them at the camp. An Afghan “restaurant” – a shack that serves food – treats us to a slap-up feed as a reward: chicken, beans, rice; it’s delicious.

Sitting at the table beside us are three young men. They are very striking, lean and dark, from Iran. I ask if I can sketch them. After some hesitation they agree. Soon there is a crowd peering over my shoulder. Sketching is such a great way of properly taking someone in, much better I think than a photo (which anyway they don’t like much here as they do not want to be snapped at their lowest ebb). I show the sketch, very nervous lest they should take offense at how I’ve represented them. But they are thrilled and take photos on their mobiles.

Next day I take the train to Brussels to see my brother who lives there. The journey fills me with an odd sense of dislocation. Outside the windows, kilometres and kilometres of the newly built white fence with razor wire speed by. At Lille, two heavily armed policemen step on and work their way slowly down the aisle. In the next carriage I see them stop where some dark-skinned young men are curled up on the seats and begin to question them. I crane to see. I wonder what I will do if the young men are asked to accompany the officers off the train – will I remonstrate and ask what their crime is, Burke’s phrase ringing in my ears – ‘all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’?

Of course I won’t. Since the Paris attacks, France is in the grip of a massive security scare. The gendarmes would dispatch me with a sneer and a threat before I could open my mouth. But the image gives me a nasty jolt. It seems to represent something new, and at the same time is sickeningly familiar from Europe’s not too distant past.

At the station in Brussels, soldiers stand with loaded guns and people look at each other suspiciously. The city is just coming out of lockdown following a maximum security alert. For a week the streets have been completely deserted. It seems like the perfect analogy: the heart of Europe shutting up its doors and leaving everything to the security services.