Bordeaux Housewives. Daisy Waugh

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       FINDING THE WAY

      It was surprisingly easy. Maude and Horatio searched the Internet.

      They found books for sale on Amazon with titles like DIY Documents and How to Make a Passport on your Home Computer. They even found a training course: ‘WANT A NEW IDENTITY? CLICK HERE!’ After that, they upgraded their computers and their printers, exchanged their sheet-fed scanner for a flatbed, downloaded the necessary computer programmes, mostly illegally, and set to work. Every evening for about a month, after putting the children to bed, they climbed up to the office in the loft and honed their skills.

      The copies they made, after numerous false starts, were good. Five British passports; five birth certificates; two new National Insurance cards. The minicab driver, Doctor Ahmed Hussein Mohammed Islam, and his wife Fawzia might never quite work as medical professionals inside Europe – the documents couldn’t help them do that. But at least they could work. At least they could be allowed to exist again.

      In fact they did more than exist. The doctor started his own driving school, which has grown steadily ever since. His instructors’ cars, with their distinctive logos (incidentally designed by the Haunts), are hard to miss around London nowadays, and he’s considering opening another school in Manchester. Meanwhile his wife volunteered as an unpaid ‘Listener’ for a large private charity, offering tea, soup, ping pong and advice to asylum seekers from all over the world.

      A happy ending. Or beginning. These days, of course, the Haunt counterfeiting rescue system is much more streamlined. They act less on conversations with random minicab drivers, more on specific, well-planned and highly secretive commissions from Fawzia, the wife. Fawzia, as a Listener, hears hundreds of immigrants’ tales every day; many of them truly tragic, some less so, some very obviously made-up. She only refers the most desperate, hopeless, unjust cases to Maude and Horatio. And even then, occasionally – very occasionally – Maude and Horatio will hear a person’s story and decline to help. It’s a small, compassionate and, on the whole, an efficient operation. Even Fawzia’s bosses at the charity have no idea what goes on.

      Maude and Horatio, it’s important to realise, are not political people. They simply understand that whatever bureaucratic system for immigration is in place – be it too harsh or not harsh enough, or corrupt or simply incompetent – there will always be individuals in genuine, desperate need of help. Help which, for the time being at least, Maude and Horatio are willing and able to provide.

      The Haunts refused to accept payment for that first good deed – and they still do, for similar assignments. But often, when the people they’ve helped are back on their feet, they send them money anyway. Sometimes quite a lot of it. Fawzia’s husband sent them £100,000 two years ago. They opened a numbered bank account in the Cayman Islands where they now have a back-up Family Fund, which grows in ungainly fits and starts, and which has recently topped £130,000. Much less than the value of a terraced house in Brixton, or a long, white cottage with a swimming pool in southwest France, but enough, at least, to start again, should the need arise. The Haunt parents understand the nature of their work means that one day they and their children will probably have to disappear themselves. Drop everything and go. But they have the money saved. They have alternative IDs ready and waiting. Actually, they have several of them.