Sometimes Ahmed hunts lions. Sometimes he prefers to be an urban sniper. And sometimes he just wants to look up the English name for a vegetable. Ahmed, 12, is showing me the apps on his ageing phone as he sits in an old British caravan in the Calais shantytown known as the Jungle.
He is one of the 95,000 unaccompanied child refugees at the heart of a row in Britain.
His caravan is one of dozens next to squalid makeshift sheds in the now largely demolished camp among the Calais sand dunes. The caravans have names redolent of a wet seaside holiday: Bailey, Elddis, Avondale. For most who live inside them, this is as close to British shores as they will get.
Ahmed, who has a photograph of his baby brother as the wallpaper on his phone, was sent alone on the perilous journey from Afghanistan to Europe because he had reached the age when the Taliban might take him to fight.
Like other Jungle boys he spends every night trying to get to Britain. He knows nobody there but “UK people good”, he says, using the English learnt during his year in Calais. Ahmed is sure that he will make plenty of friends when he goes to school.
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Once or twice the 12-year-old thought he was on his way to Britain. He hid in a lorry, only to find after a 15-hour journey that he was in Paris. Ahmed walked back. Most nights the police catch him. Sometimes he is tear-gassed.
His dream is to train as a doctor. But do we want him?
David Cameron is resisting pressure to let in 3,000 Ahmeds. The prime minister argues that helping refugees who have reached Europe only encourages others to follow.
The government is spending £2.3bn — more than any other European Union country — on Syrian refugees who stay in the Middle East and has promised to resettle 20,000 in the UK by 2020. Ministers say Britain will take in hundreds of unaccompanied children from refugee camps in countries around Syria.
However, peers have twice amended an immigration bill to demand that the UK shelters lone children fleeing war zones.
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In the Commons, Yvette Cooper, who chairs Labour’s refugee taskforce, has accused ministers of “putting this country to shame”. Some Conservative MPs are threatening to join the rebellion.
The passionate arguments are haunted by images of young bodies washed up on Europe’s southern shores. But are the arguments based more on emotion than fact?
In the Jungle it takes only a few hours to realise that the phrase “unaccompanied child refugees” — usually illustrated by a picture of a young girl in a camp — can be misleading.
The refugees are minors under 18 but lone children of primary school age are rare. The average Jungle child is about 14 years old and there are very few girls.
“You don’t really get girls unless they have been separated from their family on the journey,” said Inca Sorrell, 23, who helps to run the Jungle women’s and children’s centre out of a blue double-decker bus paid for by the actress Juliet Stevenson.
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“You wouldn’t send your girls. There are too many dangers for a 12-year-old girl to send them on their own.”
“You don’t get girls unless they have been separated from their family
Most are like Ahmed. Or Zafar, an 11-year-old in a caravan, its windows shattered after someone broke in to steal the gas. He travelled for a month from Afghanistan, where his parents were killed and his school was bombed.
A would-be engineer, he loves cricket but has no time to play in the camp. All he does is sleep, eat and try to get on to trains. He misses school, his family and friends and after eight months in Calais is showing signs of depression.
Ali, 13, is another Afghan and, unlike Ahmed, he has relatives in Britain. “Family lost, presumed dead, in the sea crossing to Europe,” says his entry in a list of 157 unaccompanied minors in Calais who have UK links.
Muhammad, 17, fled Syria with his neighbours after his house was hit by three bombs. His parents were not in the group: the family became separated and Muhammad left without them. His aunts, cousins and brother all died. Asked how he came to be a lone teenage refugee, Muhammad says simply: “How can I explain to you? It’s a big war. If I stay I will die.”
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He crossed from Turkey to Greece in an unstable boat. The sea crossing was the worst part, he says — that and the Jungle. But he is one of the lucky few: he will be allowed into Britain this week to join relatives and start a claim for asylum.
“The smugglers have horrible methods of controlling these kids,” said Annie Gavrilescu, 24, a volunteer in Calais for the British charity Help Refugees. “Sometimes they are drugged. They’re beaten. They reach us in such a state they don’t trust any adult.”
Volunteers have reported that some teenage boys need treatment after being raped.
In theory, any child with links to Britain has a right to be reunited with family, regardless of how they entered the EU. But the process takes months even for well documented cases supported by DNA tests.
The camp is unmanaged and only the volunteers know who is there. In a court ruling in January one group, Citizens UK, forced the Home Office to allow four vulnerable asylum seekers in the Jungle to join relatives in Britain.
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“Every day these children are there is a day too long,” said Jess Mills of Help Refugees. “Can you imagine even spending one night in that place?”
Mills, a musician, is alarmed that children in Calais have gone missing since bulldozers started flattening shelters two months ago.
In February there were 423 unaccompanied minors. Now, of the 514 under-18s in the camp — one in 10 of the population — 294 are unaccompanied. “We lost 129 kids,” she says.
Europol estimates the number of unaccompanied children who went missing in Europe last year, even after being registered with the authorities, at 10,000. Some 75% of child refugees stranded on their own in Greece are thought to be sleeping rough.
For Stevenson, the prime minister’s talk of a “pull factor” is a mistake. It is a push factor, she said. “Aleppo as we speak is being bombed . . . What has to happen before we help these desperate children?
“They’re not being put on boats by parents who think, oh, this is a good way of getting to the UK. The parents are absolutely desperate.”
Others are less certain, pointing out that only one in seven unaccompanied minors who registered with European authorities last year were Syrian. About half were from Afghanistan, with others from countries such as Eritrea, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran and Sudan.
A few are not even “children”, presenting themselves as orphans when they are probably in their early twenties. Partly this is their culture, as Afghans do not always count birthdays.
I witnessed this during a meeting with two young refugees in the Jungle. One looked 12 and was overwhelmed by shyness. The other, trying to coax him, had confidence and a broken voice. Each claimed to be 10.
“They are not lying,” said Sorrell, who knows both. “Their ages change day to day, even with us.”
Stevenson and her fellow campaigners aim to maintain pressure on the government.
“If the doorbell rings in your house and there’s a child there who has lost their parents, they’re dirty and cold, they’ve been sexually abused and they’re asking for your help, do you close the door and say I’m sorry, I can’t help you because if I do others will come up and ring my doorbell?” she asked. “I don’t think so.”