As a writer one of my biggest preoccupations is the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives we invent in order to feel good about ourselves, or at least, in order to survive. The human mind is a narrative driven machine, it looks for meaning, it is hardwired to find narrative structure. It is one of the reasons storytellers have held such sway over us for all this time, and why the media is such a powerful force in society. Control the narrative, and you control the masses.

It’s also one of the reasons why I was so drawn to Horatio Clare’s new book, We came by sea.

To call Horatio Clare a polymath is to miss that what he is good at is immersion, a true writer in the sense that whatever he might choose to write about, he promises always a deeply empathic, personal deep-dive into the subject. Be that container ships, curlews or children’s stories. His book on his own struggle with mental health was as deeply personal as his book on swallows, and this latest is no exception.

In We Came By Sea, Clare describes his quest to find and get to know the people who are giving up everything to help those trying to come to the UK in small boats. I have met some of those people, and reading this book I was reminded again of the hope that exists in the dark, as Rebecca Solnit calls it. How the collective ‘goodness’, if you want to call it that, of people who will risk their own comfort and security to stand up for what they believe is right, gives us all hope. All is not lost, we can tell ourselves, if we are still willing to do the right thing for others.

I went to Calais, to help at a refugee kitchen on the outskirts of what was then called ‘the jungle’, in 2016, when I was going through a pretty horrendous divorce. In the holidays when my daughters were not with me, I had to find something to fill the void, and when I wasn’t volunteering to help out on school trips (I was a teacher at the time) I went out to Calais.

Just like Clare, I felt that ‘deep disquiet’, a sense that if I did nothing, I was as bad as the rest of them, bemoaning the problem while I quietly allowed it to continue.

I knew of Refugee Community Kitchen because the founders were the people I’d looked up to twenty years before, the DJs and sound engineers who ran free party Soundsystems at the raves I went to as a 16 year old. The same people who’d fought for the right to party, in the name of the true intentions of anarchy, a desire to dance under an open night sky, were the people now making over 2000 hot meals a day for the many refugees from all over the world camping out in the jungle, desperate to cross the channel and reach what they believed to be the ‘free world’, a place where they would be treated well.

I just watched Free Party: A Folk History, by Aaron Trinder this weekend. A documentary pieced together with unique archival footage, music and interviews, spanning the beginning of the free party scene in the field just next to the main Glastonbury festival, and culminating in the CJB of 1994, the criminalisation of repetitive beats amongst other things, driving many of those Soundsystems across the channel to France.

Some of those same people are now running a massive operation, cooking curries and fresh breads and delicious, nutritious hot food and delivering it to various sites across Calais to the homeless refugees, many of whom are in desperate need, and have endured unimaginable hardship to get there. They have since set up outposts across London, to feed the homeless, and their reach is further than ever. The demand is not going away. And while I only managed to go out twice, I am endlessly in awe of Refugee Community kitchen, and the enormous good that they do.

I thought of them while reading this book, and while reading about all the different people Clare meets while writing it. The broad spectrum of people who are called to help, to give up their lives to do better. After watching the documentary, I was again pushed towards the feeling that I could, and should, be doing more.

Whatever you might think of the ‘refugee crisis’, as Clare says, ‘there is no room for good news in this dark binary, or much hope of more balanced news,’ and whatever you might think is the answer, this book is a wonderful, positive call to something akin to arms, a demand that we celebrate the things that make this island what it is: a radical, positive, kind place, whose official values of “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance” are lived and breathed, often by the very people whom the state regards as a ‘nuisance’. How ‘the quiet and mighty goodness of the best of us’, as Clare so beautifully puts it, might be the light in the dark we all need.

Now, how do we make sure our people in government get a copy? And while you’re at it, invite them to a screening of Free Party at the same time. You can find out more about Refugee Community kitchen here, and the film Free Party: A Folk History, here. Horatio Clare’s wonderful book is out from today, published by Little Toller.