- Among the first visitors to the UK from the new Europe
were a group of young Latvians on a cross-channel ferry.
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- Rolands is exhausted. He has been travelling for 38 hours,
his legs squashed up against a coach seat, his shoulders stiff with sleeplessness.
"But it could have been worse," he says cheerfully. "It
could have been 58 hours and it still would have been worth it."
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- It has been the longest and most important journey of
25-year-old Rolands Loqins's life. The coach has driven him and 50 other
young Latvians from their homes in Riga across the borders of Europe all
the way to Calais. They are gathered now on the deck of a cross-channel
ferry, a disparate crowd of students in tracksuit tops and fake Nike trainers.
Their cameras hang, unused, from their wrists as they look out to sea with
dark-circled eyes, unsure of what future they will find. Here, in the drizzle
and early-morning mist, is the uncertain threshold of a new Europe.
-
- Rolands is one of the first new Europeans. He is heading
for a job as a fruit-picker in Canterbury and hopes to earn enough money
to pay for his university degree in economics.
-
- "You have to pay a big price for study in Latvia,"
he says in halting, but fluent English. "In England I can earn very
much money in a small time. In six months, I can get £650 from picking
apples and strawberries. In Latvia, I would only get £120. I will
miss my family, of course, but it will be OK.
-
- "I am living in a caravan with four others and we
will have gas and a shower. I will eat lots of bread and sausages like
the British," he adds, grinning. "Maybe I will even get them
to try our Latvian black rye bread."
-
- The British, one cannot help feeling, will never be quite
the same again. With the enlargement of Europe to a 450 million-population
trading bloc on May 1, the port authorities at Dover were bracing themselves
for an influx of economic migrants. Ten countries - Poland, Slovakia, the
Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Malta and
Cyprus - joined the EU yesterday, giving their citizens the right to live
and work in Britain.
-
- Up to 100,000 migrants are expected over the next year,
but the volume of newcomers in the immediate hours after midnight exceeded
most expectations.
-
- The first busloads arrived in Dover at 1am and 100 more
were expected by the end of the day. Our ferry, which left Calais at 8am,
was filled with jovial Eastern Europeans, who made up about 70 per cent
of the passengers. They walked around the ferry corridors in jumpers and
anoraks, clutching crumpled cigarette packets and trying to decipher the
English menus. One woman, 24-year-old Dina Nosenko, wore a matching maroon
and white shell-suit with "Latvia" emblazoned across the chest.
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- The car deck, too, was lined with beige and brown-striped
coaches, with windscreen signs to London written in Latvian or Polish script.
As the ferry docked in Dover, the white cliffs barely visible underneath
a sheet of fog, the coaches sailed through passport control under the blue
and yellow-starred signs for EU countries.
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- "For the first time, we were able to see Dover and
Calais not as places of fear," said Mario, a 29-year-old Pole who
hopes to become a barman in London, "but as part of our Europe. It
was very exciting, very moving. Before, it was always so difficult to get
through passport control. It was awful, but today there was no problem
at all. Britain can promise a better life."
-
- It was this promise that lured Supera Mavek, a 43-year-old
Pole from Warsaw. He has worked as a builder in Britain once before, but
this time, he will have a legal work permit.
-
- "It is much better now, I don't have to worry,"
he says, lighting up a cigarette on the deck of the ferry. "I have
a six-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son and I send money back for
them."
-
- For Supera, and for his friend, 44-year-old Czeseaw Romaniuk,
going to an engineer's job in Southampton, Britain remains a place to work
and not a full-time home.
-
- "I wouldn't want to bring my family over,"
says Supera. "They have a big house in Poland and they like it there.
Plus," he adds, winking, "the food is not so good for us in Britain.
I cannot afford nice food like you get in Tesco, so I have to buy cheap."
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- For others, however, the journey to Britain is a one-way
ticket. The younger migrants, especially, have an ingrained optimism that
they can make their lives in the new Europe. Many have no first-hand experience
of the UK, but have grown up with Westernised television and music and
have a firmly held admiration for Britain and its people.
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- "The British are very nice and very kind,"
says Inga Ivbule, a skinny, high-cheekboned 24-year-old Latvian economics
student with quiet certainty. "People aren't as kind in Latvia."
-
- "There is a special atmosphere in Britain,"
agrees Rolands. "I want to come here for the money, of course, but
also for the experience."
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- In the arrivals forecourt of Dover port, the coaches
are revving their engines and the new European experience is beginning.
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- A group of Polish men are standing in a circle, shoulders
hunched against the early morning cold. A few of them light up cigarettes
before boarding the bus. A man walks over and taps one of them on the shoulder.
"Excuse me mate," he says in an east London accent. "Do
you have a light?" The Poles turn round and offer a match. The man
walks away, appreciative. It is a small incident, but there are broad smiles
on the Polish men's faces. Perhaps, after all, the journey will have been
worth it.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/05/02/weu02.
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