About a week before the Coleses made their surprise discovery in Kent, I went to a hotel in south London to visit Samuel, a gentle-voiced man in his early thirties who came from the city of Debarwa, Eritrea, in the Horn of Africa. I had first met him in August when he was still on the French side of the Channel. Samuel told me that a few weeks after this, in late August, he had walked to a lorry park a few miles outside Calais, near the approach road to the Channel Tunnel. In the darkness, as the drivers slept, he found a suitable vehicle. It was a large container lorry, with three pairs of wheels at each end and a detachable cab; the kind you see everywhere on Europe’s roads. They are like the red blood cells of our motorways, carrying goods that keep our high-street shops full, our restaurants cooking, and our building sites building. They are also popular with stowaways, and contain several places where a person can be concealed.

Of these, the most obvious is inside the container itself, among the cargo, but this is difficult. The back doors are usually locked and breaking in is noisy. In Calais, some criminal gangs have keys that will open these doors, but they charge between €500 and €7,000 a time and often steal the migrants’ money. Some people try to run after the lorries and open the doors when the vehicle is in motion but this, too, is hard. Instead, many others try to hide on the underside of the lorries, crawling below the back section and maneuvering their bodies on top of the rear wheel axle. There is just enough space to hide here, lying above the axles and balancing with your hands and feet on top of the wheel arches on either side of the vehicle. (The young man who hid under the Coles family’s motor home probably used a similar method.) It is not easy to hold on, particularly when the vehicle is moving, and those who fall off risk being crushed to death under the wheels.

Six other Eritrean men were with Samuel that night, which meant they could push one another forward, along the narrow gap that separates the rear axle from the underside of the container above, until they reached the middle of the vehicle. Most lorries of this type have an extra storage space there, in between the two sets of wheels—a metal frame that holds a box or a spare tire—and it was on top of one of these boxes that the six men squeezed together. “You couldn’t move your arms,” Samuel recalled, “and there wasn’t much air to breathe.”

The men hid at midnight and the lorry did not move until 5 am, and in all that time they dared not move or make a sound, for fear of being discovered. Once on the motorway, the breeze allowed Samuel and his companions some fresh air, but they still had to remain concealed for another four hours as the lorry was transported by train through the tunnel and towards its destination in England. When they reached Kent, the men started banging on the container to alert the driver, but it was only when the lorry reached its depot several hours later that a staff member heard them, helped them climb out, and called the police. Samuel told officers that he was a refugee and wanted to claim asylum; they kept him in cells overnight before handing him over to immigration enforcement staff, who took him to London.