The CRS are often called riot police but in fact they exist to maintain crowd control. They don’t smile much. This one glanced at the dozens of winter coats stuffed into the back of the car then gave me my licence back and stepped away without a word.

The drive had taken us just over three hours. Through the grey of south London, then the bleak winter fields of southern England, through the Eurotunnel and then on to the A16 motorway that runs along the north coast of France. Just over 160 miles. Dunkirk felt very close. But as we got closer, the camp at Grand-Synthe felt like it was on another planet still reeling from a war that nobody had won.

The motorway became a road, and then the road became a country lane that led to the camp at Grande-Synthe and we saw the trash piled in ditches, and then the bright colours of the tents showing through the sparse winter trees. As we drove closer we saw that the tents were all wrong for this place in this season. They were thin tents for camping out under summer skies, not for living in, not in freezing mid-winter. They were the kind of tents that are abandoned after a music festival.

Then we saw the men.

They watched us drive slowly by, all these ragged figures with impassive eyes that stared through me and settled on Edie.

They stared at Edie and I was suddenly aware of my breathing.

And then we saw the mud. The mud went on forever. The mud was what the camp was built on. It was a sea of mud, a world of mud, and I had never seen anything like it outside of black-and-white photographs of the First World War.

In places the mud was full of frozen water, and in others some scrap of tarpaulin was stomped into the mud, and thin strips of corrugated metal traversed the mud in a parody of streets, pavements and civilisation.

It was like a camping site in hell.

Beyond the tents there were prefabricated cabins being built, wooden structures that looked like a village of portable toilets. Slogans were written on the side.

NO BORDERS – NO NATIONS and AIN’T NO BORDER HIGH ENOUGH and KILL THE BANKERS NOT THE POOR and WE ARE ALL EARTHLINGS and THE KING OF NOWHERE.

But what you noticed most was the mud and the men.

There were children playing outside tents and women with their heads covered by scarves. Smoke rose from their fires, leaving a low bank of fog drifting across the camp, as the women cooked and huddled for warmth.

But mostly this was a place of men.