Calais is 21 miles from Britain and it's a strange place with an intriguing history. Recent notoriety, of course, came in the form of the Jungle camp of asylum seekers hoping to enter Britain (not far from the ferry port). This was closed in October 2016 after complaints from the UK that France was not doing enough to prevent people hiding on vehicles on trains through the Channel Tunnel; President Macron has since informed any would-be refugees and migrants that northern France is a 'dead end' and that attempting to cross the Channel is pointless. Nevertheless, more than 115,000 such attempts were made in the year before my journey (this is just the figure covering those caught).

  For more than 200 years Calais was part of Britain, so in the past asylum seekers would have achieved their aim simply by being here. From 1347, when Edward III of England annexed Calais after the Battle of Crécy, until 1558, when the French led by Henry II won it back, Calais was a key English port. At its peak, a third of the English government's revenue is said to have come from the port's customs duties, with wool trade being the most important source of income. At the time it was known as 'the brightest jewel in the English crown'. It was also an official parliamentary borough. Dick Whittington was mayor for a while (in 1407, while also acting as Lord Mayor of London). Upon losing the port, Mary Tudor famously said: 'When I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais lying in my heart.'

  The port played an important role in World War Two. During the Siege of Calais in May 1940, more than 3,000 British troops alongside

800 French soldiers faced a German barrage for six days. This brave resistance diverted Nazi divisions from Dunkirk, giving the evacuation there a greater chance of success.

  Julius Caesar set sail to Britain from Calais. Napoleon considered invading Britain from Calais. A lot has gone on in Calais.

It is a three-mile walk from the ferry port to the centre of Calais along a long nondescript road lined with warehouses with more high fences with barbed wire. I am the only passenger who has chosen this route into the city. The other foot passengers appear to have taken taxis or buses. Perhaps that is because it is pouring. I have put on my pac-amac – looking like a true rail enthusiast – and I am splashing through puddles following a road that leads to what I take to be the main church tower, the one I had seen from the sea.

  In this bedraggled fashion I head towards the Hôtel Première Classe Calais Centre-Gare, right opposite Gare de Calais Ville. During these journeys I am going to put up for the night as close to stations as possible to make onward trips easier the next day. I have also chosen to go cheaply, if not dirt cheap. My budget is around 40–50 euros a night. The Première Classe Calais Centre-Gare ticks all the boxes.

  The long road eventually curves round towards the 'church'. Beyond a sex shop offering 'gadgets and films', I come to this structure and find it is not, in fact, a place of worship. It is the ornate Hôtel de Ville, built in an OTT Flemish Renaissance style with a rocket-shaped bell tower rising to 75 metres. So says a little information panel. The building dates from 1925 and was damaged during World War Two but remarkably survived the worst of the bombing. Most of the city centre was razed.

  Hôtel Première Classe Calais Centre-Gare is just around the corner next to Le Klub and Les Pirates Bar.

  First impressions are not the best. It looks like a small prison with a grey concrete facade and a front door that has been permanently, one would presume, concreted up. To enter you must go to a side entrance by a car park. I am soon in a tiny red and white room complete with a bed with a beige blanket and a cereal-boxsized television on a high shelf. Not so bad after all – comfortable enough. I look outside through a grimy window. A group of furtive individuals walks past; surely asylum seekers considering how to cross the Channel, although perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions. My room, rather pleasingly, directly faces the station and the Buffet de la Gare.

  It has stopped raining. I go for a wander and soon find myself in Parc Richelieu, inspecting a statue of General de Gaulle and Winston Churchill, erected in 2017. Churchill has been captured smoking a cigar and leaning on a cane. De Gaulle, who is about a foot taller, wears a long buttoned-up mackintosh and a determined expression. Further on in this little park, I come to a plaque remembering Emma, Lady Hamilton, Lord Nelson's lover who died in Calais after falling into debt and hard times aged just 49.

  Calais has plenty of watering holes, catering no doubt to those on booze cruises, although I cannot see many Brits about. L'Hovercraft Bar, Le Buzz and Le London Bridge pub by the main square seem the most popular. There's another statue of de Gaulle here, this time with his wife, who was from Calais.

  I cross to the other side of the square and walk along the harbour to Fort Risban, originally built by the English to help take Calais in the fourteenth century. Rain begins to pelt down and I take shelter in Brasserie de la Mer, where I eat a delicious bubbling bouillabaisse listening to Stevie Wonder hits on a stereo before returning to my room to read Murder on the Orient Express. Poirot is about to take 'sleeping-car accommodation in the Stamboul–Calais coach'. I am at the destination of the detective with the 'upward curled moustache'.

  Back at my hotel, feeling content after the excellent bouillabaisse, I find it is not, however, easy to sleep.

  Through the thin walls of my room I hear a rather worrying domestic drama unfold.

  'Why were you talking that ****?' says the man, in Cockney-English.

  Female response, also in Cockney-English: 'No, no, no.'

  Man: 'Let's just get all this **** out and throw it all away.'

  Woman: 'No, no, no.'

  Man: 'What have I done wrong?'

  Inaudible response.

  Man: 'Your attitude makes me feel that it's all gone to pot.'

  Woman: 'No, no, no.'

  Never mind Murder on the Orient Express, for a while I'm concerned about Murder in the Hôtel Première Classe Calais Centre-Gare. Eventually I drop off, wondering: Why do people go on holiday to argue with one another? Why now? And, I must heartlessly admit: Why can't they do it somewhere else?

In the morning I meet the Eritreans, but before I do so I go to the station. My intention today is to travel to Dunkirk, as I have never been and I would like to see the famous beaches where Britain – and Europe, for that matter – was saved from the Nazis. However, there is a problem.

  'Zer is no train today,' says the almost bald station guard. He has fluffy clumps of hair, hazel eyes, glasses and an inscrutable manner.

  'What do you mean?' I ask.

  'Zer is a strike,' he replies. 'You may take a bus to Dunkirk at twelve thirty.'

  'But I don't want to take a bus.'

  'Zer is no train today,' he says.

  Damn it. I should have checked this out before setting off. The French railway people seem to be on strike. Of course they are! What a great start. I go outside and contemplate my next step. The station guard has informed me that the strike will also be on tomorrow. I am stuck in Calais, train-less, for the foreseeable future.

  Or so it would appear.

  I go back into the station and look at the bus options on the departure screen. Then I notice that the 15:39 to Lille has a little train symbol, rather than a bus symbol. I ask the station guard about this.

  'Oui, zer is a train to Lille,' he concedes.

  It is the only train of the day. One of the French train drivers, it would appear, is not on strike. Très bien! Or even, magnifique!

  So, I'm going to Lille.

  First, however, I head for the neighbourhood of Calais that was once the Jungle. My target is L'Auberge des Migrants. Even though the Jungle has officially shut down, many Channel-crossing hopefuls are still to be found on the streets of Calais.

  The route takes me through a suburb with a football ground and the local communist party headquarters. Outside the latter posters belonging to the General Confederation of Labour, the second largest trade union in France, declare: 'La régression sociale ne se négocie pas, elle se combat!' (Social regression does not negotiate, it fights). This is the biggest union within the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (SNCF), the state-owned French rail company, and its members are behind the current rail disruption. President Macron intends to cut pay and reduce retirement and benefit terms for rail employees in return for helping to bail out SNCF's debt, currently running at a staggering fifty billion euros. The union, naturally, is unhappy and there are fears that the move could be a first step towards privatisation.

  It's an intriguing scenario that some are referring to as Macron's 'Thatcher Moment'. Will he really see off the unions? French rail workers, known as cheminots and who number about 150,000, do have it rather good. The retirement age for conductors and train drivers is 52 and for those in administrative positions, 57 years old. This compares to an average retirement age in France in the private sector of 62. On top of this, pension payment is based on the previous six months' salary, not an average of the employee's salary over the previous 25 years (the norm elsewhere in France). Then add a condition of employment known as licenciement économique, a redundancy rule that some regard as a 'job for life', so long as employees do not retire, resign or get sacked for poor behaviour, a 35-hour week, 28 days of annual holiday (three more days than other French workers) and the possibility of 22 days of RTT, réduction de temps de travail, for drivers, which is effectively extra holiday for those working over 35 hours a week. Then bear in mind that spouses and children under the age of 16 can receive 16 rail fares a year for ten per cent of the full ticket price (an allowance that costs SNCF around 25 million euros a year).

  Yes, the cheminots do have it extremely good, which is why they are on strike: they want to keep it extremely good. Yet to understand the stand-off, the outsider must also appreciate that the French railway, nationalised since the 1930s, is a much-loved part of the nation's welfare state. The French take pride in their railway, especially its grands projets such as the Ligne à Grande Vitesse Sud-Est between Paris and Lyons that opened in 1983, Europe's first fully-fledged high-speed railway. Do not underestimate the power of your driver or conductor in France. This is a country where strikes still work – if that is not a contradiction in terms – although SNCF is considering a radical option to get round the stalemate: driverless trains. With no drivers, there can be no driver strikes. That's the idea, anyway. Téléconducteurs at control centres may soon oversee 'drone trains'. Welcome to the future! Let's hope the computers don't crash, causing the trains to do the same.

  Pondering this I plod on past a retail estate and a Japanese Wok restaurant in the direction of the former Jungle.

  I'm drawn here as I want to lay eyes on this key neighbourhood in Britain's recent history. The threat of a 'flood' of migrants and refugees to the UK was, after all, one of the main reasons Britain voted out of Europe in June 2016. Leavers wanted to 'take back control' and the Jungle was, if you like, the symbolic epicentre of their worst fears.

  Down Boulevard de l'Égalité I go, eventually turning left at a Lidl supermarket into Rue Clément Ader.

  This is where I meet the Eritreans. Fikru and Girma are idling along Rue Clément Ader and I ask if they have a moment to talk. They do. They probably have a lot of moments while waiting around homeless and stateless in Calais.

  Fikru wears a leather jacket, ripped jeans and a green headscarf. He has a wide smile with a prominent broken front tooth. Girma is clothed in jeans, a green jacket and a hooded top. They say they are 18 years old, brothers and that they left Eritrea three years ago via Sudan, Libya and a ship to Italy that took four days across the Mediterranean Sea.

  I am with people who have risked all to reach Calais.

  Fikru is despondent. 'We have no life,' he says. 'Problem with polis.'

  He pauses.

  'We have no working. Three years, no working. Three years we are not calling Eritrea.'

  Girma cuts in. 'It is problem. We have no one.'

  Fikru tells me: 'This polis cracked my tooth.'

  He grins to reveal the full damage to his ruined smile.

  Then he clutches his leg.

  'Seven days ago, stick on leg.'

  The police, he says, attacked him.

  We talk a little longer. I can sense they are nervous about drawing attention to themselves (too much publicity could be painful). So I wish them luck, offer Fikru ten euros – which he gladly accepts – and ask if I can take their picture.

  Both quickly shake their heads.

  Then they shuffle and limp along Rue Clément Ader. Not far from the Lidl they sit on old plastic crates beneath a litter-strewn hedge.

  For now, at least, this seems to be home.

L'Auberge des Migrants is across the way. It is not, as the name suggests, an inn. It is a depot offering support to the 400 or so asylum seekers still in Calais despite the dismantling of the Jungle (probably many more, 400 is an official figure). The outfit is run by 30 volunteers. Food, clothing, free mobile phone charging and legal information on asylum rules are offered from vans that circulate in the city.

  At first I talk to Luke, a bushy-bearded British man, who cagily tells me: 'All across Europe there is hostility towards refugees. France is not exempt from that. We are trying to show humanity to refugees.'

  Luke is sitting in a hut by a chalkboard upon which figures are scrawled referring to the number of sleeping bags, duvets and emergency foil blankets that have been distributed in the previous month. Another board reports that 1,200 meals have been delivered in the past day. A sign says: 'À coeurs vaillants, rien d'impossible' (With valiant hearts, nothing is impossible).

  Across from this hut is a van with a small table at the back.

  Inside I find another Brit: Rowan Farrell, co-founder of the Refugee Info Bus. This UK-registered charity helps immigrants seeking asylum understand the intricacies of asylum laws. The van has a generator and Wi-Fi antennae that allows up to 80 people to use the internet for free. Leaflets are in seven languages including Pashto (spoken in Afghanistan). The majority of those in Calais are from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq and Syria.

  'If someone's in Calais, they're trying to get to the UK, obviously,' says Rowan. 'They must prove that they are in fear of recrimination in their country. It's individual. Food and shelter are important but so is the bigger view. Often refugees just don't know anything regarding their rights.'

  The whole point of the Refugee Info Bus is to fill this void. Rowan founded the charity after coming to work on behalf of refugees in the Jungle and realising that a lack of legal know-how was a major problem. Previously he had worked as a photographer.

  He asks about my trip, and I explain what I'm up to.

  It turns out Rowan loves trains, too, and he is soon telling me that he once went on the overnight sleeper train between Lviv and Odessa in Ukraine. Lviv, he says, is a beautiful city that feels strongly part of Europe without being within the European Union (which gives me ideas about the route ahead). He had gone there for a photography project soon after Russia, breaking international law, invaded Ukraine to 'take back' Crimea in 2014.

  There seems to be a lot of 'taking back' going on at the moment.

  My eye is caught by a pile of cricket bats in a corner of the yard.

  'Afghanis love cricket,' Rowan explains matter-of-factly.

  After an appeal, a team in the UK has kindly donated their spares so Afghani asylum seekers in Calais can practise their favourite game while waiting for their paperwork (should it be forthcoming).

  We say goodbye and I return along Boulevard de L'Égalité.

  I have two pit stops to make before the train to Lille.

  The first is just along the boulevard at Ville de Calais Cimetière Sud, where I pay homage to the Britons who defended the city against the Germans in May 1940. Row upon row of Commonwealth War Graves are surrounded by neat box hedges. Each inscription on the gravestones is a reminder of the great debt owed to the soldiers of World War Two.

  'P. W Amos. The King's Royal Rifle Corps. 26/5/40. Aged 24,' reads one stone, 'H. J. Dungay. The Rifle Brigade. 24/5/40. Aged 29,' says another. 'A soldier of the 1939–1945 war. The King's Royal Rifle Corps. Known Unto God,' says yet another. Not all bodies were identified. About 300 British troops were killed in the heroic, bloody siege.

  Afterwards I go to the Musée Mémoir 39–45 Calais in Parc SaintPierre, right by the station. The museum is in an eerie former Nazi bunker that stretches almost 200 metres. Inside, displays cover the terrifying events of May 1940 as well as the outcome of the war, when Canadian units freed the port in 1944. An original poster dated 13 July 1940 catches my eye: 'Every English People [sic] who lives in Calais as well as every English person who is staying here for some time and who is more than eighteen years old, is obliged to come immediately to the ORTSKOMMANDANTUR in the Town Hall of Calais. Every English people, who will not come immediately, will be considered as a spy and judged accordingly.'

  Spine-chilling words, just 21 miles from Dover.

  Churchill's 'frightful nationalistic quarrels' came very close to our shores.

Before boarding the 15:39 to Lille, I check out the cosy little Buffet de la Gare. How could any train lover not poke their nose in the cosy little Buffet de la Gare in Calais?

  Inside are faux leather booths, a copper-topped bar, a flashing pinball machine and a drinker who has slumped his head on the table while clutching his mobile phone (perhaps he's been here all day waiting for the only train out of Calais). A lovely old railway poster bears a picture of the Calais town hall and the words: CHEMIN DE FER DU NORD. CALAIS: SON PORT, SA PLAGE, SES DENTELLES (NORTHERN RAILWAY. CALAIS: ITS PORT, ITS BEACH, ITS LACE).

  Calais has long been famous for its lace. In the nineteenth century many English manufacturers moved from Nottingham to Calais to take advantage of cheaper working conditions. Apparently, the Duchess of Cambridge and Amal Clooney, no less, wore dentelles de Calais dresses at their weddings.

  So it must be pretty good.

  I pick up a copy of Nord Littoral, a local paper that runs a story headlined: '4 MOIS DE PRISON POUR AVOIR FRAPPÉ UN POLICIER' (FOUR MONTHS JAIL FOR HITTING A POLICE OFFICER). A man named Jamal Khurchach from Morocco, who has been in the country since 2007, has been found guilty of an attack on La Police Aux Frontières after crying 'Allahu akbar'. The court decision is: ' Il a l'obligation de quitter le territoire français.'

  Goodbye and good riddance, more or less.

The only train out of Calais is a sleek double-decker due to call at Audruicq, Watten-Éperlecques, Saint-Omer, Hazebrouck, Strazeele, Bailleul and Armentières. It is to arrive in Lille at 16:59. This is, as it happens, exactly the same journey time (80 minutes) for the Eurostar service from London's St Pancras Station to Lille.

  A group of refugees huddles by the platform. They must have imagined that this would be a quiet place to rest for a while in the city centre. When they see the passengers of the day's only train heading for them en masse they nervously leap up and scurry to the exit.

  Calais is such an unusual, transitory place. Amid the booze cruisers and transport lorries refugees float like ghosts. Sit still for a while on a public bench just about anywhere in the port and the apparitions will come and go, each with a story of a long journey behind them and an uncertain future ahead. The city feels like a frontier where lives hang in the balance and business is done; as it has for centuries past. Ghosts of the past mingle with the ghosts of today. It is the perfect place to begin a continental train ride. From one famous frontier the tracks stretch ahead, with many more to come.

  On board the 15:39 I settle into a blue-grey seat on the top deck. The train departs on time and we pass a terrace of redbrick houses and sidings occupied by locomotives and carriages; out of action due to the strike, no doubt. Street art and graffiti of the sort found in ghettoes in American cities covers the walls along the track before the train rattles across a canal and countryside opens up. The horn blows. A startled pheasant flaps across a field. Tan-coloured cows raise their heads at this unusual interruption to their afternoon: a train in France that is actually moving.

  The toilets, I discover, are locked; part of the cheminots' strike. Small towns and villages come and go. At Audruicq we cross a muddy brown river. At Watten-Éperlecques a conductor with a flat cap enters the carriage but does not check tickets (yet another act of protest?). At Hazebrouck we pull in by a Skoda dealership and a church with a tall steeple. At Saint-Omer a caravan park and a series of enormous glasshouses materialise. Bailleul is home to a Lidl and a musical instrument shop. Armentières is notable for its large number of rusty disused train tracks with broken electricity cables hanging above. Maybe Armentières was once a much bigger deal than today. Something seems to have gone wrong in Armentières.

  We continue beneath a mushroom-coloured sky. The countryside between stations is moss-green with wispy poplar trees lining lanes leading to remote villages in folds of undulating land. The dreamy feeling of escape that I enjoyed in Kent returns. Trains soon deliver you from the reality of everyday life... if you let them. Just sit back and follow the tracks.

  In the dim light of this overcast day the carriage lights flicker as though considering going on strike themselves. We depart the countryside and enter a suburb of terraced houses. Shiny apartments rise next to cranes on building sites with the skeletons of more shiny apartments to come. The train pulls into platform 15 of Gare de Lille Flandres. We are bang on time.

  I gather my backpack. This bag is small but heavy. Inside are several books: Murder on the Orient Express (of course), The Lady Vanishes (a thriller by Ethel Lina White published in 1936 and later turned into a film by Alfred Hitchcock), A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré, From Russia, With Love by Ian Fleming (which includes train scenes), the European Rail Timetable, produced by the former compilers of the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable, and a copy of Europe By Rail: The Definitive Guide by Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries.

  The latter makes essential reading. The authors clearly understand the freedom of train travel without much of a plan. 'Serendipity' is key and rail travellers such as myself should be 'led by a whim', they say. J. R. R. Tolkien is their hero. 'Not all those who wander are lost,' as he writes in The Lord of the Rings.

  With this in mind – having had no idea this morning that I would go to Lille – I step onto platform 15.

  grève