Qaifa was bravely attempting to fend off a boy who was taunting and bullying both herself and the small girl crying and hiding behind her. Qaifa Nejem was defiantly pushing the taller older boy away every time he advanced towards them while a second boy poked the little girl in the chest with a stick. She cried out and clung to her sister’s leg.
The two pretty Syrian girls looked starved in their thin, dirty, dull clothes and headscarves around their heads but there was still fire and determination in Qaifa’s face as she defended her sister.
Antonia surprised the smaller boy by knocking the stick out of his hand. Then she placed herself between Qaifa and the boy. She told him to leave them alone in Arabic. Antonia shoved him back away from the girls so hard he fell backwards and landed in the muddy walkway between the rows of tents. He stood up quickly full of anger cursing at her. He produced a penknife from his pocket and flicked it open. He came towards her, his intention to knife her.
Antonia remembered feeling her heart thud like an express train and her chest tighten as she prepared to wrestle the knife away from the boy. She acted fast turning to the side to avoid the thrust of the blade and tightly grabbed his wrist. The journalist painfully twisted his wrist around and put her hand on the top of his arm threatening to break it if he didn’t let go of the knife. As she waited for the boy to capitulate she was conscious of a group of women crowding around watching and whispering. None of them did anything to help and there were no men to shout to in the walkway. They had left early in the morning to find work in the nearby fields with the farmers. She was on her own.
She gritted her teeth together and twisted harder, thankful she remembered enough of the move from the self-defence classes she took with her friend at the end of the previous year. The boy yelped and growled falling down on his knees. When she increased the pressure just a touch more, he finally gave up and dropped the knife. She let go and quickly picked up the knife putting it in the pocket of the long skirt she wore under the Burqa.
“Didn’t your mother tell you not to play with knives and bully little girls!” she told him.
The boy stood up and spat at her. She stepped back to avoid it hitting her face and clothes. Antonia prepared herself for more of the boy’s violence but his brother pushed him and urged him to leave.
Antonia turned and smiled at the girls. The eldest returned a shaky smile. When she questioned them about the whereabouts of their parents Qaifa told her they were alone. She was reluctant to tell the journalist any more. Antonia took them to her tent and vowed to look after them. Women and children on their own in the camp in Calais and in Marzello were prone to being sexually abused and attacked. She’d known the risk when she entered The Hole and on the first day she discovered the reality.
Dangerously, Antonia had taken a walk around the camp alone at night. Undetected a man came up behind her and tried to drag her into his tent. She’d fought him with all her strength trying to remove his arm from around her neck as he pulled her backwards. He’d thrown her on the floor of the tent. A jagged stone underneath the ground sheet poked into her back and between her ribs making her cry out. But the man paid her cry no attention. When she tried to sit up he punched her face. Dazed she fell backwards. The man lowered himself down on top of her, his trousers gaping open. That was when she brought her knee up into his groin as hard and as fast as she could.
The man gave a high-pitched wail and rolled off her. Hurriedly, Antonia scrabbled to her feet and rushed out of the tent. The experience made her run back to her tent and vomit.
The thought of this fate befalling the girls terrified the young journalist and she insisted they reside in the tent with her and made sure they were accompanied by her wherever they went. If she could not be there she made sure the girls barricaded themselves in the tent and did not venture out.
Antonia was unable to keep up the pretence of being a Syrian woman and was forced to reveal her identity and age to the girls. To her relief the girls appeared to relax more and were willing to keep it secret. Qaifa opened up and revealed that she and her sister had made the treacherous journey from Syria to Marzello on their own to avoid being given as child brides to men twice their age.
Escaping from their home at night with a little money stolen from their parents while they slept, Qaifa and her small sister had travelled from their small village in Syria on foot and by train on their own to Cairo. From Cairo, they had made their way to Alexandria and had enough money left to pay the smugglers for a place on one of the boats travelling to Marzello in Italy.
They had been abused and threatened on their perilous journey but had made it to the refugee camp. Their heart-rending story had provided the backdrop to her article and prompted her to find out more about the disappearances of the girls in the camp.
Antonia continued walking with the girls. They made the same route every day and it involved going past the fundamentalist’s tent. The women had talked about him while they cooked outside around the fire. He had made a hazardous journey from
