Abu Hani and Yalda tell us about the border crossing into Jordan, how they tried to leave their town without bribing a checkpoint officer, and how Abu Hani was taken into the office by the official and punched, kicked and jumped on in front of his wife and children for an hour and a half. All their money was taken from them. They left that checkpoint with him covered in blood, concussed, barely able to move and penniless.

“We woke up every morning glad we were alive, and went to sleep every night knowing we might not wake in the morning. There are so many ways to die in Syria now,” says Yalda. Their relatives have been imprisoned, gone missing, been murdered and killed in explosions.

The couple borrowed money from friends and the next time they went through the checkpoint, the same now-heavily-bribed officer saluted them. They reached the Jordanian border with nothing.

“I was scared of the Jordanian army on the border,” Yalda says. “I thought, If the uniforms on the Syrian side were so brutal . . . But when we crossed, the Jordanian army helped us, and welcomed us with a smile.” She tells us they were given cookies and water and blankets by the army, provided by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). “I got to the camp, and I felt like a child being welcomed by its mother,” she tells me.

I have not thought of Azraq camp as welcoming until now. A ghost town that opened at the end of April, it currently holds around 4,000 people but is designed to accommodate 130,000 in its square white metal huts. It feels like the least welcoming place in the world, the only sign of life or color or individuality is the washing we see fluttering between buildings.

Abu Hani and Yalda now both have jobs in the camp. She greets new arrivals and he works as a porter for them (although people know he has back injuries and they give him light work). They want to save enough in the camp to replace broken hearing aids for two of their four children, both of whom are deaf. They worry that if she does not hear anything, their five-year-old daughter will forget the words she already knows how to speak.

We walk to the water supply to refill the family’s jerry cans and make up for what we spilled, but no water comes out. They are waiting for the supply trucks to arrive. Jordan is the fourth-driest country in the world, and every drop of water in the camps is driven there from outside boreholes.

The crisis in Syria, the unrest that became a civil war that became a nightmare, created, as all wars have created since human beings started living in villages, refugees. They left their houses, if their houses were still standing, and they went somewhere else, somewhere they might at least be safe.

More than two and a half million people have fled the country in the past two years, and more than six hundred thousand of them have gone to Jordan. The Jordanian people and government have shown exceptional generosity. There are six million people in Jordan: the Syrian refugees make up 10 percent of the population. If Britain were to do the same proportionally, it would mean accepting about six and a half million refugees.