Li Hua knew very little about England before leaving his home village in China, beyond what he’d read about and seen on television – and yet he already made of it in his imagination something magnificent and welcoming. In the early negotiations with Mr Chang, the local gang boss, Li was told the journey would take only a few weeks and that, at the end of it, he would be guaranteed work in a factory or restaurant. He would be reunited with his wife as soon as he’d found somewhere of his own to live, he was told. The gang – Li called them “snakeheads” – demanded an initial cash payment (the equivalent back then of £10,000) and it was explained to him that he would be going via Moscow, and from there he would fly direct to London. Further payments would be required in the months ahead, and the full debt would have to be repaid when he was settled in England.
To fund the first payment, Li borrowed money from his uncle, who had borrowed money from a cousin. A man who worked for Mr Chang had taken Li’s passport because, he was told, he would need a visa to enter Russia. One morning Li received a one-way train ticket to Beijing; the time of his departure was near. On the morning of his departure, Li held on to his wife for a long, silent time. She was crying and he wiped the tears from her face.
When he arrived in Beijing, Li was greeted by a sullen, officious woman who said he would stay in the city for several days until his visa was approved. He was now part of a group of 20 other workers, all from Fujian Province – “the Fujianese” as they were known – and they were all on their way to England. Within a few days, the visas arrived and the Fujianese travellers boarded the Moscow flight.
Once through immigration in Moscow they were ordered into vehicles and their passports and money were taken away. They were driven to a low-rise apartment block on a Soviet-era estate in the suburbs of Moscow, what Russians call the sleeping districts of the city. There Li would share a room with 12 others in the subdivided block where they slept on the concrete floor.
For the next several months, Li Hua remained in Moscow, in the same room, in the same block. He spent slow, empty days fantasising about escape. The residential apartment block had a shabby courtyard and they were allowed to sit in it or walk around it; sometimes the room in which they slept was locked from the outside, and Li would stare at the walls, willing his mind to empty.
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One morning Li and some other men at his breakfast table – breakfast was served in sittings of six – were told to pack their rucksacks and prepare to depart: they were going to Ukraine.
They set off in vans later that evening and Li slept fitfully. Some time the next afternoon they stopped close to a lake in what was presumably Ukraine. They were ordered to follow their guides across fields and over hills. Carrying rucksacks, they walked for several hours until they reached a road junction, where trucks were parked, apparently waiting for them. The white European drivers never looked at their faces. From there, after more hours on the road, they arrived at a derelict farmhouse, where they stayed for at least another week. Each night they slept on the floor in a small, foetid room.
The next stage of the journey required Li and another Fujianese man to get into the boot of a large car. They were covered with blankets. They were told not to make any noise or to speak because they would be crossing the border into Slovakia. Their next stop was some kind of hostel. There were no beds, however, and they slept huddled on the floor in a narrow upstairs room, where there were more Chinese men already waiting, introverted, subdued.
After so long away from home, Li felt dejected and humiliated. “I did not want to carry on, and yet I had no choice,” he said. He had no passport or identification papers, no money, and he was in debt to the gangmaster back home in China. He never knew for sure which country he was in – Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany…
As the weeks passed, he was allowed to go for short, supervised walks. He could occasionally use a mobile phone to make brief calls to his family. These were charged at $1 per minute and were strictly monitored. His wife pleaded for him to give up. And then the line went dead, as it always did after a few minutes. The next time he spoke to his wife, she said that Mr Chang wanted another payment. “I will send more money,” Li said, and his wife asked him to come home. “Why are you doing this?” she said.
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One afternoon Li and two Fujianese workers were squeezed into the back of a car; they were on their way to another hillside location, close to the German border. After another drive they were led by guides through dense woodland until, at the roadside, they saw two parked cars. “Welcome to Germany,” one of the Chinese drivers said, in English, using a faux American accent.
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They were taken to a house on a residential estate; inevitably, it was full of more Chinese workers. One of the men beat his fists against the door when he heard it being locked from outside, demanding to be let out. And perhaps he was heard because not long afterwards police officers arrived at the house. It seemed a trap had been set for them. The workers were rounded up and transported in groups to a detention centre, and so began another period of idleness and drift. Once a week he was allowed to call his wife. Some mornings he woke early and forgot where he was or what had happened, and then he remembered.
Li’s debts were accumulating. How safe were his family in the village? If he escaped, or tried to escape, if he did not pay or could not pay, or never returned, or even died, would they be hurt – or, worse, killed?
During a meeting with a German official, Li was told he would be released the next day but must leave Germany immediately. The official did not care where he went as long as he left the country. He was given a number to call, euros and identification papers. That same day Li received a call at the centre and was told he would be collected early the next morning by a Chinese-speaking driver. Li was driven to a bus station. He was instructed to take a long-distance bus to the Netherlands; someone would collect him on the other side of the border.
Li was in western Europe now, the man said; people could move freely and borders could be crossed easily, no questions asked. He would be all right.
In the Netherlands he was taken to another house, where he was greeted by more Chinese men just like him, lost, emaciated, some of them stinking and sick. At the end of each day, the gang boss in the house would tell them what to do next and what they should expect. From Holland they moved to Belgium and then to France. He’d been travelling for a year, perhaps longer, and though he prayed dutifully, as his mother would have wished, Li was spiritually exhausted and profoundly alone. The journey will only take a few weeks, he had been told back in China.
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One evening he and a group of Chinese men from the house in France where they’d been staying – 15 of them – were waiting by the side of the road close to a port. In his pocket, Li carried a piece of paper he’d been given by the gang boss, on which was written an address in London’s Chinatown, his final destination.
As they waited at the roadside, a large canvas-covered truck pulled up. A ladder was dropped down from inside and a Chinese man jumped down and urged Li and the others to climb in, quickly, without hesitation. As the last of them was ascending the ladder, the truck abruptly shunted forward; the last man clung on to the ladder, his legs dangling like a trapeze artist’s, before he fell. As the truck pulled away, Li peered at the forlorn figure in the road. He was on his knees, beating the road with gloved hands.
Inside the truck, amid the crates and wooden pallets, Li felt something like relief. The men had been told to huddle together beneath the blankets. “Quiet now,” one of them whispered, as the canvas covering was pulled partially open from outside; torchlight pierced the darkness and Li closed his eyes and held his breath. Soon they were moving again, the throb of the engine keeping Li awake as they travelled through the night. It was getting colder inside the truck – the men huddled together for warmth – and he imagined ice forming on the walls.
Did the driver know the cargo he carried?
It was light outside the next time the canvas covering was pulled back. Someone shouted, “Run!” – and they did, chaotically, in different directions. It was another trap. Li had been told to look out for the white cliffs and green fields of England. There were no white cliffs or green fields. The men were rounded up and taken by uniformed officials to a nearby detention centre. Li stayed there for two days and nights, and, when he wasn’t being ignored or fed, he was asked, through a translator, where he was from and what he planned to do in England. Li kept saying the same thing: he wanted to work and had a job in London.
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On the third day, Li was released, with new British identification papers. He was given a phone card and a permit that allowed him to travel on a train to London. The address he’d been given turned out to be the location of a supermarket in Chinatown. A Chinese man received him warmly, introducing himself as Mr Wei. “I’ve been expecting you,” he said. He was given a coach ticket to Liverpool, the address of a house in the city and some money so that he could pay for a taxi when he arrived. Perhaps for the first time since leaving the farm, Li felt something close to happiness.
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The room in the terraced house in the Kensington area of Liverpool was like all the others: cold and damp, foul-smelling, locked windows, frayed carpets, rotten floorboards, everyone sleeping on the floor. The workers shared one putrid-reeking bathroom in which the lavatory water ran black.
Some of the workers in the house were also from Fujian province but there were other men from the north of China. The next day, February 5, 2004, Li was driven from the house to Morecambe Bay on the Lancashire coast. “Welcome to the office,” the foreman said as the minivan pulled up in the village of Hest Bank. By now, it had been explained to Li exactly what was required of him in his role as a cockle picker and that it would take most of the day, from morning light to early evening darkness, to fill just one of the orange nylon bags he’d been given with cockles.
Li was given a pay-as-you-go mobile, waterproofs, a black beanie hat with an LED light attached, as useful in the winter darkness as a miner’s Davy lamp was underground, and boots. He pulled the beanie down tight over his ears against the ripping winds, squally showers and the oppressive cold. Each worker was given a short-handled rake and Li was shown how to use it to sift the sands, extracting the cockles when he could find them. But mostly he found it easier to dig in the dirt with his bare hands.
By mid-afternoon, it was already getting dark, and yet they were being urged further out across the monotonous flatness of the wet sands, following the retreating tide. Chinese workers had started appearing on the sands the previous year. Local fishermen received them with suspicion and controlled certain key sites, forcing the despised Chinese pickers further out into the bay in search of more distant cockle beds. What was peculiar, in retrospect, was that local people had seen the cockle pickers come and go, but the authorities chose not to see them. They were just shadows on the sands.
Morecambe Bay has the largest expanse of intertidal mudflats and sandflats in the UK and is the confluence of four principal estuaries: Leven, Kent, Lune and Wyre. The sands are submerged at high tide, and when the sea is out in the bay they are crosscut with continuously shifting river channels. These channels, combined with treacherous quicksands, deep hollows and fast-moving incoming tides, are why there has been an official Queen’s Guide to the Sands since the 16th century. Every 12 hours and 25 minutes the tide comes in at a rate swifter than a galloping horse, as the locals say.
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They had stayed too long on the sands. Now the tide was rushing in and Li was being ordered back to the minivan. Water was surging along deep channels, isolating the cockle pickers and cutting them off from the foreshore. They hurried towards the van as the driver was attempting to start the engine. He turned the ignition but it did not move: the wheels spun and churned in the mud. The water was rising fast as they clambered in; the foreman, sitting beside the driver in the front passenger seat, started shouting obscenities, his panic palpable. The driver thrust the gears into reverse and pressed down hard. The engine roared but the wheels did not turn.
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Li could see nothing because of the darkness but he could feel the pressure of the rising water outside. Someone opened the doors and seawater surged into the vehicle. Li forced his way out and attempted to climb with some of the others onto the roof. But he fell back into the water and tried to wade against the currents. They were too strong. Salty water flooded into his mouth and lungs. He resurfaced, gasping. He found he could stand again, his head and shoulders above the waterline. People were screaming and one man was desperately shouting in English: “Sinking water…. Many, many sinking water…”
Li removed the waterproofs that were weighing him down, and the clothes beneath. He had no idea in which direction to go. He tried to swim, but was hit by a wave, turned on his back, and swept along in a channel of rushing water. This was it… He came to rest on a raised bank and, with incredulity and relief, felt the ground beneath his feet again. He stumbled, waded and then simply stood still, the water seething all around.
He couldn’t see the vehicle, nor hear human voices. He thought about his mother and how she used to pray every day. He prayed, but he felt forsaken. He’d been in England for only a few days. And this was his first day as a cockle picker.
The hope he had carried in his heart like fire all the way on the trans-European journey was dissipating. The near-naked man sank to his knees in the freezing water… But hold on… there was brightness, a radiance that lifted him. In the black sky above, he heard a loud disturbance, the thwack-thwack-thwack of what he realised was a low-flying helicopter, its searchlights probing the waters. He waved his hands and shouted out but he could not be heard above the wind and the noise of the engine. The helicopter circled above, pulled away, but returned, its searchlights scanning the water in a restless arc.
Li jumped up and down, his arms outstretched, as if in manic celebration. There was a golden halo of light – he was saturated in this light – and he felt a sudden, all-enveloping warmth, as if a safety blanket, or heatsheet, had been wrapped around his bare shoulders. “I thought I saw God in the water. The feeling at that moment is very hard for me to explain. I was alive again.”
A hovercraft searched the sands the next day and, eventually, what was described as a “sea of bodies” was discovered. Twenty-three Chinese workers drowned or died from hypothermia that night. The last man alive in the water was 30-year-old Li Hua, and he was rescued after being located by a search helicopter’s thermal imaging camera. He was standing in water on Priest Skear, an expanse of raised land, covered at high tide. Skear: from the old Norse sker, meaning rock in the sea. Li Hua’s survival was described as the “miracle” of the sands. “The Devil’s beach” was how one Chinese newspaper described Morecambe Bay in the aftermath.
The inquiry into the tragedy was the largest ever undertaken by Lancashire Constabulary. DNA samples were collected and taken by police to southern China so that they could be matched with relatives of the dead. The cockle pickers were paid in monthly cash payments which were deposited in high-street bank accounts. Most of the money was transferred to accounts in China as debt repayment. The workers were left with very little for themselves and their families, which forced them to work even longer hours, sometimes at night.
Lin Liang Ren, the gangmaster, was convicted of multiple counts of manslaughter and served six years of his sentence before being deported to China. Li, the last survivor, gave evidence at the trial. He spoke in court from behind a screen so that he could not be identified.
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Li Hua still lives in the UK, runs a restaurant and owns a house in which he lives with his wife, two grown-up children and one grandchild. His dreams of England have been fulfilled, but not in ways that he could have ever imagined. He speaks little English. We speak on a Zoom call, with help from Irene, a translator, and Paul Francis, a retired police officer who’d organised Li’s witness protection and created a new identity for him.
Li has returned to Fujian province once since 2004. It was only in 2012 that he finally repaid the outstanding debt to the gangmaster in China. He tells me he dreams often about that night in the water – the terror he experienced and the hopelessness. He has panic attacks and night sweats.
“The horror is imprinted on my mind,” Li says. “I have many, many nightmares. I’m trying my best to forget. I try every day not to let it bother me, to bother my work. But the shadow is always there: it keeps bothering me.
“We were not warned about the tides, never once,” Li explains. “We were exploited by the snakeheads. I understand they wanted to make their money, but they should have shown humanity. We have our families too. We were promised proper legal work. We never expected to end up on the seashore picking cockles. When one is desperate, hungry, lack of sleep, you will take any job to escape from hunger and a restless mind.”
After a long pause, he talks about what he had hoped for.
“In my dreams England was beautiful and big,” he says. “Peaceful and friendly.”
He had thought about little else but the forthcoming journey as he worked on the farm in China. It wasn’t escape he sought from the drab, repetitive tasks in the fields or from his family – his parents, three siblings, his wife and their young child – but rather a more secure future for all of them. “I knew England is a democratic system,” Li says, speaking through Irene. “People are protected to live in a peaceful and respectful environment, citizens have freedom to speak. Police will catch the bad guys. Everyone can find a job they can do. Or wish to do. My wish was to live in a country like England. I was determined to make that wish come true. Our village was so poor, finding work to survive was nearly impossible. I was told by snakeheads I would have a job if I worked hard. If I’d stayed in China, been stuck in China all those years, we would be a bunch of miserable, unhappy people depending on a tiny farming income to feed our unhappy, miserable family.”
But perhaps he had suffered too much.
“Had I known I’d be in that horrible accident in Morecambe Bay, would I have left? No. I would not have come. But now I feel blessed. Fate brought me to England and kept me alive. When I was picking cockles, before the water came in, I promised myself I would one day find my own job, without a link to snakeheads.”
He looks directly into the camera, leaning forward just a little.
“And, you know, I did that.”
Li Hua often thinks about other victims trafficked into slavery, suffering in plain sight as the cockle pickers did. He mourns the dead whose stories briefly become news whenever their bodies are discovered in lorry parks or in sealed containers, or when they fall from the undercarriage of an aircraft, or when they drown while trying, in small boats, to cross the English Channel. He thinks of those he slept alongside in the room in Moscow and the room in Liverpool – the people who died on the sands. Even at his most despondent, Li believed he would reach England and would one day be free – until that night, when everything seemed lost.
Extracted from Who Are We Now? Stories of Modern England by Jason Cowley, published by Picador on March 31 (£20)
