One city, two lives. It is hard to imagine other circumstances in which they might have crossed over: one young man sunbathing in his London garden, another desperate enough to try to flee Kenya by clinging to the wheels of a plane. They can have had little in common, save perhaps their ages, yet that did not stop them being brought together in the most brutal fashion this week. One frozen body, falling helplessly through the sky to crash at the feet of a living one.
The man who narrowly escaped colliding with a corpse is said to be understandably traumatised, yet of course the trauma must be a thousand times worse for the family of the unnamed stowaway. There was rightly criticism of a crass headline in the Times, that identified the shocked bystander into whose garden the body fell as “an Oxford graduate”, as if somehow that was what mattered. It feels like the worst kind of pampered western myopia to focus on the living, and not the dead, in this story.
Nonetheless, it is possible to see what the headline writer was clumsily reaching for, which is the shocking incongruity of it all; the sense of two worlds colliding, with its distant echo of another summer day in London that ended in tragedy and in a shocked sense of responsibility for our fellow humans. Two years ago, the well-heeled residents of Kensington woke to a burning Grenfell Tower and a new understanding of the injustice they had been living alongside. The unnamed stowaway crashed to earth in Clapham, home to bankers and lawyers and the sort of young families who can afford to spend well over a million buying into life in so-called Nappy Valley. Both events are reminders that in the unique ecosystem of big cities, where extreme wealth lives – sometimes awkwardly and sometimes blindly – cheek by jowl with extreme poverty, it is never completely possible to shut yourself away.
For even in the most gentrified of neighbourhoods, periodically there will be something – a stabbing at the end of a middle-class street, rough sleepers in a park – to break through the paper walls. Lives running on distant, parallel tracks do not always stay that way. And when the lines cross over, it is primarily the reaction of the privileged when confronted with what was happening unseen around them that determines how society responds. If we focus on the living, not the dead, it is because they have the power to act.
When public consciousness is jolted like this, those who start by hoping it will be the wake-up call to change everything usually end by despondently concluding it has changed nothing. But the truth is usually somewhere unsatisfactorily in between. Last week, I was at a housing conference where the ramifications of Grenfell were still very strongly felt. People simply weren’t talking in the same way as before – not just about building social housing but about amplifying the voices of people who live in it and whose warnings have not always been heard. Good will undeniably come of that, if only in small ways, but lives have not been transformed as we might have hoped. The same tends to be true of those migration stories that emerge periodically to trouble western consciences, before fading into the background. But that does not mean we should stop telling them.
Little is known about the stowaway except that he may have been an airport worker, enabling him to breach security and reach the runway. If so, he may well have known enough about planes to know this was probably a suicide mission. If a stowaway escapes being crushed when the wheels are retracted after takeoff, the next mortal threat is the cold, with temperatures plummeting to -60C at altitude. Survive that, and you will be starved of oxygen. The tiny number of stowaways who have emerged alive from journeys at the limit of human endurance are medical miracles, a puzzle to doctors. Imagine how desperate a man’s life would have to be, for him to think it worth the risk.
Yet so long as there is such vast disparity between the fortunes of a child born in parts of the developing world and one born in Nappy Valley, people will risk death to move themselves and their children from one to another. The more hyperconnected the world becomes, pulled together not only by systems of mass transportation but by the internet and TV and social media pouring forth sometimes rose-tinted views of life in the rich west, arguably the more it will happen. Where they can, people will come by legal means. But where they can’t, there is no wall high enough, no border security tight enough, no detention regime callous enough to stop the desperate from trying.
People will swim rivers, and some will drown doing it. They will set out to sea in leaky dinghies, risk suffocating in the back of lorries or getting shot forcing their way through hostile borders; they will hand over life savings to unscrupulous people traffickers. The moral dilemma created for the countries they are trying to reach is so enormous, the political choices emerging so difficult, that most of us would rather not think about it most of the time.
But there can be few more powerful metaphors for a global crisis building unseen over our heads than a body falling out of a clear blue sky; few clearer reminders that it is simply not possible to shut ourselves off completely from the world, no matter how much some Brexiters might like there to be.
No man is an island, even in his own back garden. No two lives are so far apart that they cannot, even for one split second, sometimes come together.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
