The Calais Jungle in 2015 [Nicolas Pinault]

THE little girl had been sleeping under canvas in freezing conditions. She begged Nicola Garrard, who had delivered food to refugees in the Calais camp known as The Jungle, to take her to England.

Nicola, a former Islington teacher, describes desperately wanting to help the girl and fearing for her safety. But she didn’t agree to take her.

“People smuggling is against the law; I might have lost my career, been fined and sent to prison.” As a mother, she couldn’t risk that.

She told Review that the 13-year-old Eritrean girl – “very, very small. I thought she was 10 or 11” – alone in Calais, inspired her new young adult novel, 21 Miles.

“We swapped phone numbers and communicated for a bit. But her line went dead and I have no idea what happened to her. She should not have been sleeping in a tent. It was minus six degrees.”

Although she didn’t take the girl with her, Nicola said: “If I was a teenager I would have made a different decision.”

Donny, the 17-year-old hero of 21 Miles, takes a decision that sparks trouble and adventure.

When he and his posh friend Zoe are on a day trip to Calais – with the new car she got for her 17th birthday – they meet teenager Amin, who pleads with them to take him to England.
Amin says his family was killed by Nigerian Islamic group Boko Haram. He’s crossed the Med in a dinghy, walked through France and slept in woods.

“We can’t leave him,” says Donny.

He and Amin swap clothes and Zoe drives the refugee, with Donny’s passport – the boys have the same brown skin, black hair and dark hazel eyes – to the Eurotunnel terminal, aiming to take him to Folkestone.

Awaiting Zoe’s return, Donny is involved in a kerfuffle with French police and goes on the run.

The book packs a punch of excitement and Donny is a brave, principled, likeable character – who says “innit” a lot.

His gritty background makes him particularly empathetic to young refugees. He’s spent time in children’s homes and been exploited by a criminal gang. His best friend was fatally stabbed.

Donny’s mum, who used to take him to school on the bus “with her needle scars showing”, is now methadone clean and has a supported living place in Camden.

They used to eat pastries and bread that cafés left by the bins round the back of Islington’s Chapel Street Market.

Nicola Garrard

Amin reminds Donny of himself at 15.

Adrift on the French coast, Donny is helped by young refugees living rough.

He meets multi-lingual Afghan Ishmael, who looks after Ahmed, a seven-year-old who left Syria with his mother after his father and brother were killed in the war.

Ahmed’s mother drowned a week before he turned four, and he “believes she lives in the waves”.

Donny is introduced to brilliant girl footballer Taz and would-be doctor Raheem.

There’s friendship, heartbreak, football, some funny moments and a white-knuckle sea crossing.

Nicola taught English at Islington’s Highbury Grove School for 15 years, and has also been a teacher at Duncombe Primary School.

Now, as well as writing, she works for charity Minority Matters, which is based on Holloway’s Andover estate.

Reading a 2014 article about separated child refugees in Calais prompted her to cram her small campervan with donated food and clothing and head onto the Eurotunnel car-train.

She writes: “I found it shameful that just 21 miles from the coast of Britain there were children living in tents and makeshift shelters in the cold, filth and disease of an unauthorised refugee camp called The Jungle.”

Nicola thought about perhaps smuggling the little Eritrean girl, who had family in England, on the Eurotunnel “in one of the many hiding places my children loved in our campervan”.

Just as well she didn’t. She was a known volunteer in Calais, and border authorities searched the vehicle thoroughly on the return home.

She wishes she could find out what happened to the girl.

“We need to think about what we would like to happen if it was our children in that situation,” she said.

A mother of three children, aged from 11 to 15, Nicola was left with the “what if” of the Eritrean girl’s request “and it became this story”.

She said she hopes the novel will help us “see people as individuals – as children as opposed to skin colour and labels, politics and debates – just living their lives and being teenagers”.

Nicola formerly lived at the Angel, and Finsbury Park, but now she and her family live in Sussex, where she grew up.

She returns to Islington regularly for Minority Matters, which promotes social inclusion and child safeguarding, and provides opportunities, including extra curricular activities and trips away for young people.

Nicola’s first novel, 29 Locks, also featured Donny and Zoe. That book was inspired by and dedicated to Mahad Ali, one of her former students at Duncombe and Highbury Grove, who was stabbed to death by a gang in 2017. “He was a wonderful young man who was never involved in crime, didn’t carry a knife and had a loving family,” said Nicola, who donated royalties from the book to Minority Matters.

Her next novel will chart a new phase in Donny’s life, including his quest to get in contact with his dad, who was exiled to St Lucia in the Windrush scandal.

• 21 Miles. By Nicola Garrard, HopeRoad, £8.99