‘I know the adrenaline of escape’: Henry Cockburn on turning his time on the run into a rap epic for refugees

asylum. It is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, ‘the protection afforded by a state to a person who has left his native country as a political refugee’ or ‘an institution for the care of the mentally ill’. Both definitions play a role in Ahmed’s remarkable and original story, written in verse and illustrated by Henry Cockburn. Tale of Ahmed is a fictional account of how a 14-year-old Afghan boy leaves Kabul after his father is murdered by a warlord, with the aim of seeking asylum in Britain. By land and sea, through Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy and France, Ahmed and an ever-changing crew of fellow refugees experience all the dangers and disappointments of the road, but also the highs of optimism and camaraderie.

Cockburn has had his own very personal experience: being on the run, unsure of what might happen next and where his journey would take him. His previous book – co-written with his father, the journalist Patrick Cockburn – was Henry’s Demons: Living With Schizophrenia. It cataloged what happened in the years after February 2002, when Cockburn, as a 20-year-old “spurred on by brambles, trees and wild animals”, plunged fully clothed into an icy estuary outside Brighton.

Published in 2011 and nominated for a Costa Prize, the book recounted the experiences of both father and son in the ensuing years, as Cockburn was divided up and incarcerated in a series of psychiatric hospitals – the ‘asylums’ of the past – from which he would continually flee. “I was about 20% successful in my attempts to run away and about 80% of the time they would catch me,” he writes in the introduction to Tale of Ahmed. “As distressing as it was to be locked up, my main reason for escaping was that the trees were calling me and I had to do it.”

Cockburn, now 42, lives in Canterbury, Kent, and shares a small studio near the station with another artist. He went to King’s School Canterbury and then Wimbledon College of Art, and had just started studying fine arts at the University of Brighton when he took that dangerous plunge into the sea. I had met him once very briefly, at the launch of the previous book, and his father is a friend.

Kent is of course one of the main arrival points for those crossing the Channel in small boats, and Cockburn has met and befriended a number of young Afghans who have made that sometimes fatal journey. He was already working on illustrations and paintings of refugees – in boats, in hiding, in camps around a fire – when he came up with the idea of ​​a rap about someone making the journey from Afghanistan. He has previously recorded a rap CD, Verbal Impact, with other musicians and the new book is written in that style.

Sitting in the sunshine outside his studio, Cockburn explains that he was very inspired by The Lightless Sky, by Gulwali Passarlay. Published in 2015, it is an account of Passarlay’s remarkable escape from Afghanistan as a 12-year-old after his father was murdered and he felt trapped between the Taliban and the authorities. He was eventually granted asylum in Britain, graduated in politics from Manchester University and campaigned for other refugees.

“When I started, it was going to be a two-page rap,” says Cockburn. “I stayed up all night writing and it just kept getting bigger and bigger.” He read it at a small gathering of refugees and their supporters in Canterbury, and was encouraged by their response to turn it into a book. As he completed it – a process that took almost four years – then Home Secretary Suella Braverman flew over the Kent coast in a Chinook to inspect what she described as the “invasion” of, as Cockburn it states, the “cold, wet, scared refugees below”.

He adds: “The main premise of the book was that these people have a great story to tell and not enough people are hearing it.” The cast of characters includes Ahmed’s fellow refugees Hazrat, Aisha, Mullah and a Syrian named Johan; a variety of devious traffickers of different nationalities; a very talkative documentary filmmaker, Emmanuel; and countless police and border officials, as his journey takes him through Istanbul and Lesbos, Patras and Athens, the Mont Blanc Tunnel, Paris and finally Calais. But he loses contact with some of his traveling companions when they are separated by human traffickers or tragedies.

“When you’re on the run, people come and go,” says Cockburn, who remembers evading police, hungry and homeless. “I would make really good friends in the hospital and then never see them again. But I know that adrenaline of escaping, and that feeling of constantly looking over your shoulder. And there is a spiritual element to it – whether something is real or a vision. Ahmed has spiritual experiences and they define him in a way.”

One of Ahmed’s lines in the book is: “I remember my father once told me / You should treat fear like a friend and not an enemy!” Does Cockburn himself believe that? “Yes, I do. And I think there are many other different emotions – anger, envy, boredom – that can also be friends. Ahmed doesn’t think about what he’s going to do when he gets to England. He thinks: ‘How am I getting there?’ It takes up all his energy. I think that’s part of the reason he’s so determined. You have a goal and you won’t be happy until you reach that goal.”

Why is Ahmed going to Britain? “That’s a big question. I asked Nelofer about it.’ That’s Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, the Afghan-Canadian director and writer who wrote the book’s introduction. ‘She feels like if they make it to Britain, they’ve made it. It’s something imperial. Moreover, many of them already know the English language, so that makes Britain more attractive than Berlin or France.”

He shows me the original artwork for the book. Artists he admires, he says, range from Basquiat to Lee Krasner, Matisse and Van Gogh. He also enjoys the illustrative work of Ronald Searle, Quentin Blake and Willie Rushton. And on the way back to the station he takes me through St Dunstan’s underpass where his previous artwork about Canterbury can be seen in “the Art Gallery in an Underpass”. The first and most striking painting is of Henry II doing penance in bare feet for the murder of Thomas Becket. Like his royal namesake, Cockburn spent much of his time on the run barefoot. As we look at the painting, a young woman rushing through the underpass is clearly surprised to see him. “Oh, Hendrik!” she exclaims. “I just read your book – and it’s great!” It’s the kind of moment a shy author might dream of.

The day after we met, one of the top news stories was that flights to Rwanda were being prepared to take refugees who have been denied asylum in Britain to an uncertain future in Africa. That may sound like the opening of another book about Ahmed, but Cockburn’s next project will actually be to travel around various parts of Britain to create illustrations for a series on the state ahead of the general election of the nation his father will write.

In the final chapter of Henry’s Demons, Cockburn wrote that “it has been a long road for me, but I think I am entering the final straight”. Aside from the month-long return to the hospital a few years ago, that prediction has proven correct. Like Ahmed, Cockburn managed to reach the final straight.