Calais - Are they real refugees?
Like most of us here in the United Kingdom I see the pictures of the Calais migrants and have that feeling that somehow they are not real refugees. And then, again like most British people, I have that stab of regret, am I being unfair to these people? So why am I still uneasy? Are they real refugees? So those are the questions that I have pondered. I was born in 1937 so grew up being bombed, seriously being blitzed in Plymouth where over a thousand died, well over four thousand were injured, and thousands moved away from the city. I remember seeing many photographs in the daily papers of the 60 million refugees in Europe resulting from that terrible conflict. When the war was over, and we were then living in Bath, my family participated in that city's temporary adoption of Dutch children from Alkmaar, a town that had been ravaged by the Nazis. There were still hundreds of thousands of refugees in 1953 when I became a merchant navy cadet and then I actually visited many of t