by Tony Bassett
‘All right. We’ll let him stay for a short time - until he sorts himself out,’ Anne replied with a reluctant nod of agreement.
‘I promise you, if he puts a foot wrong, we dial 999,’ I assured her, convinced we had nothing to fear from his presence in the cottage. ‘I quite like the man. He doesn’t appear to have any of the characteristics of a criminal. I think we should put him up for a few days.’
Anne smiled. ‘You know, you’re a kind man, Bob. All my family keep telling me that, and I do love you, you know?’
‘I love you too, darling,’ I said, kissing her on the cheek.
We spent the next two hours unloading our belongings from the white motor-home, which I had bought for £19,000 two years earlier. I had decided it was money well spent. We had had three holidays abroad with it already.
We had gone on the trip to France partly because our beloved Labrador, Alfie, had died of cancer in May at the age of twelve. We thought a break would help us to deal with our grief.
However, we were glad to have arrived home and memories of our much-missed faithful friend now was a little more distant. We were fortunate to live in such an idyllic part of England. Our sleepy village, Chasehurst, is located just a few miles from the ancient cathedral city of Canterbury.
Hop gardens and fruit farms abound in the area and the quiet lane outside our home, ‘Fairview,’ is adorned during the summer with a host of wild flowers. These include an array of white daisies and pink foxgloves.
The red, pale yellow and white roses had flourished during our absence, although the shrubs and bushes that stood proudly at the front of our land badly needed pruning.
By now it was, I suppose, about ten in the evening. We were both racked with fatigue. After a light meal, we glanced into the living room. Yusuf was still sleeping soundly.
‘Shall we let him stay here overnight?’ I asked Anne. She looked at me for a few moments, then gave a quick nod.
‘All right,’ she replied. In silence, we went upstairs to our bedroom.
I spent a few minutes unpacking my suitcase and, as a result, Anne, whom I had married six years earlier, was in bed before me. Wisps of her blonde hair, her lily-white forehead, her slender nose and small mouth were just visible above the bedsheet. I slipped beneath the duvet, reached across and cuddled her warm, naked body.
‘It’s all quite exciting, isn’t it, darling?’ I said.
‘What d’you mean, darling?’
‘I mean having a stranger around - having a stowaway in our own home! We’ve never really had an adventure of our own, but we’re certainly having one now.’ She smiled at me in the semi-darkness.
‘Yes, darling. I see what you mean. It’s like we’re partners in crime.’
We made love passionately.
I felt the joy of our love was heightened by the thought we could be in contempt of the law. It felt as if we were sealing a covenant with each other.
‘I hope we’ve made the right decision,’ Anne said later as we both settled down to sleep.
At about four in the morning, I needed to visit the bathroom and rose from our bed. I thought I would also check on Yusuf.
But as I drew close to the bedroom door, I realised Anne had locked it from the inside. I must admit I was shocked. I felt suddenly guilty. Should I have allowed my personal suspicion of the authorities to influence my attitude towards Yusuf? Should I have used my powers of persuasion to try to convince Anne to let him stay with us? What if her misgivings were well-founded and he was some form of criminal?
My heart went out to her. It grieved me to think she might be worried about his presence with us. I felt I had to do my utmost to help Yusuf, but I certainly did not want the act of helping him to damage the relationship between Anne and me. All I could think was, if he betrayed our trust or breached our hospitality, that would mark the end of our involvement with him.
I crept down the stairs. The living-room door creaked open. Yusuf’s black curly hair was just discernible over the top of the armchair. Assured he was still slumbering, I returned to our bedroom.
After considering for a few moments whether to tackle Anne in the morning about her decision to lock the door, I resolved I would not mention it. I got back into the bed and, within a few moments, I was asleep again.
3
In the morning I at first wondered if our stowaway might have left us. Our cottage was eerily silent. I rose as the sun streamed past the beige curtains into our bedroom at the front of the cottage. Its rays flickered and danced across the varnished wooden floor.
I looked at the clock. It was just after nine. My forehead was moist with sweat. It had been a sweltering night.
Anne was still asleep. Her breathing, which sounded a little like a cat purring, was to be the only sound. I sat upright for a few minutes, watching over her and listening out for any sound from downstairs. There was none.
I pulled on a grey T-shirt and an old pair of blue jeans before descending the wide oak stairs to the hallway, half-expecting to be greeted by Yusuf. But he appeared nowhere to be found. As I opened the door to each room downstairs, I thought I might suddenly find his smiling face. But he was not there. I tried the upstairs rooms as well to no avail.
He must have upped sticks and gone.
I was disappointed. I had championed his cause. Yet it appeared he had chosen to seek his fortune elsewhere. We’d fed him, given him somewhere safe to spend the night, tended to his wounded forehead and listened to the heart-breaking tale of his flight from the harsh regime in his homeland. Yet he’d turned his back on us and gone without a word of thanks.
For a moment, I felt hurt. Despite the risks, we’d done our best to help him. So this was how he repaid us? But amid my feelings of disappointment there was also some sense of relief. I would have had to explain his presence to friends and neighbours and possibly relatives, too. If he were living with us, we might be courting trouble with the authorities. Above all, his presence risked upsetting Anne.
The pillow, sheet and duvet Anne had given him were piled neatly on the armchair where he had slept. He could have simply discarded them loosely on the settee, I thought. At least, he had had the consideration to leave them folded up.
Anne had meanwhile been disturbed by the sound of my footsteps going about the cottage. She was lying quietly in our bed, considering the prospect of getting up. Her first thoughts, she told me later, were about Yusuf. She remembered she had locked the bedroom door. She realised now I must have unlocked it at some point. It was a sign to me she was still uneasy about Yusuf remaining in our home.
She cried out to me: ‘Darling!’ I looked in on her.
‘Yusuf seems to have gone,’ I said. ‘I can’t see him anywhere in the cottage. But there’s no note - nothing. His bedding’s piled up neatly in the living-room.’
‘That’s very strange,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it’s for the best.’ Then she added: ’I don’t like saying this, but is anything missing at all?’
‘I never thought of that,’ I replied. ‘But I’ve been in every room now except the bathroom. Everything seems in order.’
‘Darling, how d’you feel about him leaving without a word?’ she asked.
‘Well, it seems rather ungrateful,’ I admitted. ‘I mean, after all we’ve done. I suppose I feel sad, but part of me’s a little relieved as well, I suppose. How d’you feel about it?’
“I think it might be for the best, although he seems a pleasant enough guy,’ she confessed. ‘Anyway, I’m going to get dressed now and I’ll be down in a moment.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll go downstairs and make some tea.’
I had just gone down the stairs and was about to enter the kitchen when I thought I could hear a faint clicking noise coming from somewhere outside.
I unlocked the back door and stepped into the
rear garden. It was a bright morning without a cloud in the sky. To my surprise, I then noticed the two loose wooden boards on the side of our shed had been nailed back. Whoever had carried out the repair work had possibly entered the shed and used some nails and one of my hammers, I told myself. Had one of the neighbours carried out the job as a favour while we had been away?
But I was more perplexed by the clicking noise that had first lured me outdoors. It was coming from the front garden.
I edged past our old Ford Mondeo and the motorhome to reach the front drive. It was then I realised Yusuf had not left us after all.
As I walked past our flower beds and unkempt front lawn, I could see his right arm moving about energetically. I reached the bottom of the gravel drive and could see he was standing in the lane, clipping the overgrown shrubs. I was surprised to find him there. But I was also delighted.
I realised he must have risen before me, fixed the shed and then found my garden shears at the back of the house and set himself to work in the lane. He was toiling away, unaware of my presence, still wearing the grubby red check shirt and torn black trousers he had arrived in.
‘Hello!’ I said. ‘You’re working hard.’
He turned in surprise. ‘Hello, Bob!’ he said. Then, evidently unsure of what else to say, he returned to his task. He had found some black refuse sacks and was filling them with the cuttings.
Later that morning, after Anne had got up, we provided Yusuf with a towel and suggested he was free to have a bath if he wanted.
He readily agreed to the idea. I had an old white shirt I had worn at school some years before. Luckily it fitted him. I also found a pair of blue jeans he could wear. Anne shortened each trouser leg by two inches with pins while he was in the bathroom.
She also put his old clothes in the washing machine. As she was doing this, she found a passport and birth certificate in his pockets, which she handed to him when he came downstairs into the kitchen.
Afterwards we made Yusuf tea and buttered toast before sitting down round the table to discuss his future.
He appeared frightened when I mentioned we could drive him to the police station if he wanted us to.
‘No police. I’m good man,’ he said. ‘I want work.’ He picked up his passport from the window sill where he had placed it before breakfast.
‘Look - passport,’ he said excitedly, handing it to me.
The blue passport, issued by Eritrea’s Department of Immigration and Nationality, gave his name as Yusuf Osman. His place of birth was stated to be Asmara and his date of birth given as August the sixth 1993.
‘I’m not illegal,’ he insisted. I smiled faintly.
‘Yusuf, Yusuf, your passport doesn’t give you the right to be in Britain, but don’t worry,’ I told him. ‘You can stay with us for a few days - until you’ve fully recovered from your journey.’ Turning to Anne, I added: ‘I agree with you the best thing would be for us to let Yusuf stay in the motor-home. We can give it a good clean and make it very comfortable for him. It’s fortunate we have it. It means he can stay there and be self-contained while we work out what to do in the long term.’
‘All right. If that’s what you want,’ she said.
‘Is that all right with you, Yusuf?’ I asked.
‘Thank you, Bob. You good man,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Anne. You good man.’
She quickly corrected him with a terse: ‘Woman.’
‘Woman,’ he repeated.
Over the next few hours, the pair of us cleaned out the Swift diesel motor-home and found some spare bedding for Yusuf.
My blue Ford Mondeo was parked behind the Swift Lifestyle vehicle, which was inconvenient. We needed it for a trip to the shops the next day, so I drove both vehicles out into the lane and re-parked them so the Mondeo was at the front.
While swapping the two vehicles round, I had expected to find some rope. I was thinking he must have secured himself to the chassis in some way. All the doors of our motor-home had been kept locked throughout the time we had been in Calais on the advice - or rather really instructions -- of police, so he could not have gained entry to the van and travelled inside at any time during the journey.
It would seem he had secured himself to the underside of the vehicle. My first thought was he might have used rope or cord to tie himself on. He would then have had to untie it in order to free himself at the end of his perilous ride.
However, there was no sign of any rope. Out of curiosity, I got the most powerful torch I owned from the garden shed, walked to the side of our motor-home and manoeuvred my way beneath it.
By doing so, I finally solved the mystery of how Yusuf had gained his passage to England. He had not tied himself to the chassis after all. There were two steel crossmembers beneath the vehicle, a short distance apart from each other. They held the lower part of the vehicle together. Each one was five or six feet in length.
Although there was a space of only about sixteen inches (forty centimetres) between the top of each joist and the van’s floor, Yusuf had managed to wedge himself into that gap and used the two struts to support his body. Just one slip could have been fatal.
I was sure he must have been endowed with the luck of the devil during his flight from France. He could have burnt himself on the exhaust system, but that would have been the least of his worries.
Whenever the van lurched or braked suddenly, he could have been hurled onto the road - and then perhaps mown down by a vehicle behind. When the road became bumpy, again his life would have been on the line. It was miraculous he had survived.
I later passed on details of my discovery to Anne, but for some reason we decided not to discuss the issue with Yusuf.
4
Yusuf soon made himself a comfortable retreat inside the motor-home. He quickly learned how the bed should be lowered at night and how the cooker and toilet worked. I wondered about giving him a front door key but decided I would need to talk to Anne about this first.
Anne was still not totally convinced we were acting for the best. While Yusuf was eating some food in the kitchen, she drew me into the living-room.
‘He’s an illegal immigrant. I keep thinking he should be applying for asylum,’ she said.
‘But he’s such a nice guy,’ I said. ‘He’s been toiling away in the garden since daybreak. You saw yourself he was terrified when we mentioned taking him to the police. As far as we’re concerned, he’s gone through the right channels. He’s got some sort of right to be here.’
Anne held her hands up to her face. ‘If it’s a genuine passport, yes. But why travel here, clinging onto a motor-home, if he’s got the right to be here?’
I had to admit the rights and wrongs of the situation were unclear.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘He’s been working so hard. You saw yourself he seemed terrified when we mentioned taking him to the police.’
I had to admit the rights and wrongs of the situation were unclear, but Anne had, until being made redundant a year earlier, been working as a librarian - and this gave me an idea.
‘Why don’t you go to the library and look into the facts about claiming asylum?’ I suggested. ‘They must have loads of books on the subject and you can also do some online research.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That sounds sensible. I’ll go over there early next week.’
Later that day, as Anne was working on the till at the Village Stores, Yusuf knocked on the back door.
‘Mister Bob,’ he said. ‘I work.’
Our visitor’s work ethic was impressive. He now stood there, bristling with energy and eager to impress us further. Our back garden had become overgrown over the previous two months. We had lost interest in tending it since the death of Alfie. I at once handed him the shears and let him prune the trees and bushes. At the same time, I made a mental note I would later giv
e him a small sum of money for his trouble.
After leaving him to his own devices, I happened to notice our amiable next-door neighbour, seventy-two-year-old Stephen Rigden, was putting his refuse bins out.
‘How was France?’ he asked.
‘Great. Weather was terrific, the scenery in Burgundy was wonderful and we sampled some fantastic wines. Only drawback was it was a bit expensive. Dijon with its ancient houses and palace was magnificent. We worked it out that we must’ve covered two hundred and fifty miles on the bikes.’
‘Aren’t you whacked after all that cycling?’
‘We did sleep rather well last night!’
‘I expect I shall be holidaying in the Med.’
‘What part?’ I said. ‘France, Italy, Greece?’
‘No, Gillingham,’ he replied. ‘I’ll be stopping with my son in the Medway towns.’
I smiled and then he became more serious.
‘Bob,’ said the tall, grey-haired former builder. ‘I noticed a guy in a red shirt cutting your bushes this morning. Have you got yourselves a gardener?’
There was a pause as I wondered what to say. I could have pretended Yusuf was being employed as a gardener - but then Stephen might notice our guest coming and going from the motor-home.
‘He’s our new lodger,’ I explained. ‘You know Anne lost her job with the library? Well, to be honest we’ve been having a bit of a struggle financially - even though she’s got a part-time job at the shop. Don’t spread it around, of course.’
‘Of course not,’ said Ridgen.
‘We just need that little bit of extra money coming in. It helps with the bills,’ I said.
‘Don’t blame you,’ he said.
Before it became dark, I glanced through the kitchen window. Yusuf’s work-rate was phenomenal. He had virtually transformed the rear garden in a single afternoon, filling more than a dozen black refuse sacks with cuttings from trees, shrubs and bushes. Each bag was neatly tied and they were stacked tidily at the side of the house.
