Linda and Yves Aubry gave Syrian refugee food and shelter as he spent each night trying to make the dangerous journey across to the UK

Sayid was hungry, thirsty and desperate when he started knocking on strangers’ doors in Calais. The 20-year-old Syrian, like thousands of other migrants in the town, had been living rough and couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a shower. He wasn’t surprised when the majority of people he asked for water simply shut the door in his face. That was until he knocked on Linda Aubry’s door. Without asking any questions, the primary school teacher told him to wait, went back inside the house and made a sandwich and drink for him – and so an unlikely friendship began.



“He said in English he was hungry,” explains the 57-year-old, sitting in the front room of her three-storey house on an unremarkable street near the centre of town. “As I didn’t know him, I said, ‘Give me two minutes and I’ll make you something.’ I closed the door, because I was a little bit afraid – I didn’t know him,” she says. “But I didn’t ask myself any questions, I just responded to his need. I don’t know why I did it – I just did. It was the natural thing to do.”



Sayid [not his real name] was 20, a Syrian refugee who had fled his war-torn home country and arrived in Calais in the summer of 2014, one of thousands who have made the dangerous pilgrimage to this unlovely northern port town. He came, like them, for one purpose – to traverse the short yet infamously difficult 20-mile stretch to British soil.



The influx of migrants over more than a decade has put an unquestionable strain on Calais. The deputy mayor has talked of the town – one of the most deprived in France – being “sacrificed”. It is not difficult to find anti-migrant sentiments openly expressed in the most radical terms by the town’s small but vocal anti-migrant group, Sauvons Calais.

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But there is another side to the town: the volunteers who, like Linda, teach French in the makeshift school in the camp, provide first aid in the Doctors of the World field hospital, like her pharmacist husband Yves, or help dole out much needed food packages. Many others are tolerant of the migrants, who inspire as much pity as opprobrium.



But few have gone as far as Linda and her family, who, after feeding Sayid for months, first on the street and then at their table, finally invited him to live in their home.



“We went on holiday at the end of October and we decided that if it was cold, we would invite him into the house,” she says, sitting among the friendly jumble of family photographs, well-thumbed novels and chewed antique furniture in her home, her handicapped rescue dog, Vito, gently whining for more attention at her feet.

“We came to the decision together as a family, and decided that he has to stay [and that] we would take care of him,” she says. “Then one day, he came to the door. He looked really desperate – he’d become really thin and he was crying. He told me he couldn’t do it any more.”



And so Sayid – who had left Syria after the start of the war, fleeing first to Egypt before setting off in a small fishing vessel for Lampedusa and making his way through Italy to France – moved into the spare room. Night after night, he continued to try to join his brother in the UK, telling the family that he had to pay a trafficker every week just for the right to chase after lorries there was little chance of breaking into.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Linda and and Yves Aubry with Sayid, the migrant they took in to their home. Photograph: Linda Aubry

Pictures of the family show the couple with Sayid, smiling while walking the dogs on the beach. Linda recalls that Sayid would borrow her laptop and put on Syrian pop music, and they would dance in the living room. Sometimes they would cook together.



But it wasn’t a fairy tale. Life under the same roof as a young man from a very different culture sometimes pushed their tolerance to the brink. He would occasionally criticise their 20-year-old daughter, telling her she should be married or cover her hair. “We had to explain to him that in France women and men have the same rights, that here we are a secular country. He would say yes, but I think it was difficult for him to understand,” says Linda.



Wasn’t that quite an extraordinary thing to do, to invite a complete stranger to share their lives? Yves, a quiet, soft-spoken heavy metal fan with a penchant for band T-shirts and political protest, gives what can only be described as a Gallic shrug.



“My Polish grandmother was sent to Auschwitz,” explains the 57-year-old. “She left my mother behind in Paris and she was kept hidden by her old nurse.” Linda, a Catholic of Italian heritage, adds that her penniless grandparents arrived in Paris from Italy in the 1930s, because they couldn’t find work. “We had that in mind,” said Yves. “Our backgrounds aren’t so different. But really I don’t really know why we did it. Perhaps it was a sense of guilt, that we had this home, this life and we didn’t deserve it more or less than he did.”



“It was difficult because we were from such totally different cultures,” he continues. “But if the same situation came up, I don’t know if we’d say no. If my daughter found herself in need on the other side of the world, there would be a family that welcomed her. Who would also be willing to go through this challenge.” He stops, and adds with a smile: “And I heard that our neighbours were scandalised that we had taken in a migrant. When we see each other now, they cross the road … and that pleases me.”



And then, after nearly two months of sharing their house with a stranger, he was gone as unexpectedly as he had arrived. A few days before Christmas he left the house to try his luck after dark – and didn’t return. Two days later he called to let them know he had made it to the UK. He had been arrested, been sent to a sorting centre and, after applying for asylum, been put in a bed and breakfast, says Linda.



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“When he left, it hurt – I was scared for him,” she says. “I’m like an Italian mamma. Even if it wasn’t easy, I was attached to him ... And him too, I think.”



Sayid is now living with a friend in Wakefield, dealing with the disappointment of arriving in the UK only to find that the brother he hadn’t seen since he was 16 – who he thought had just changed his number – had in fact recently left for Canada. Speaking by telephone, Sayid says he applied for asylum but was refused and now gets no support from the British government. Because he wasn’t sure of the procedure, he missed the deadline to appeal, and now has no idea what will happen to him.

“I have no family, no house in Syria. I would do anything not to go back,” he says. He now has to report regularly to immigration officials. “I just wanted to be safe, but I don’t know what will happen next. But I won’t hide. If you hide, you are scared your whole life.”

He speaks about his adopted French family with affection. “They looked after me, they took me into their house – they were so kind,” he says. “I feel like I owe them so much. I hope one day to be in a better situation so I can pay them back.”

Linda says she is proud of the way the family reacted after taking in their unusual house guest, who she hopes to see again one day. “He told me I was a good person. He said I was like a mother to him,” she says. “But I’m just normal. I’m just doing what I had to do. He was hungry, he was cold, he couldn’t carry on – what else could we do?” She stops for a second, and leans down to caress Vito at her feet. “If I found myself in the same position … I would do the same thing again. I wouldn’t even hesitate.”

Sayid’s name has been changed to protect his identity.