“I keep asking myself, that didn’t really happen, did it?” Maureen Lum said after her arrival in Hobart yesterday following  her deportation from the United Kingdom. But it did.

Amazingly, given her ordeal, she is plans to fly back next week, thanks to a community whip-around for her fare — and with the paperwork now required for entry for an amateur singer.

As Crikey first revealed yesterday — and British tabloid Daily Mirror followed up overnight — Lum was refused entry because she was going to sing for an hour, unpaid, in a one-off performance by The Tasmanian Grassroots Union Choir at the Tolpuddle Festival, during a four-week holiday in the UK.

As she tells it, she arrived at London’s Stansted Airport at 9pm local time on Sunday July 3 and presented her Australian passport to the immigration officer for an entry permit — effectively, a tourist visa.

The immigration officer asked her what she was going to do — see London, walk in the Outer Hebrides and sing in a community choir at the  Tolpuddle Festival. The officer said she would check to see if the festival was “on the list.” It wasn’t. Lum had no idea what it meant.

Her husband Lum Kok-ye  was given entry but she had to go to a secure holding area. She was fingerprinted, body-searched and questioned further. Her mobile was taken, but she was given another so she could ring her husband, telling him to go to the hotel they had booked because she was sure the problem could be sorted. It wasn’t.

Later, she rang former Unions Tasmania secretary and choir founder Simon Cocker in Hobart  to tell him she was going to be deported.

Lum was told she should have applied for an entertainer’s visa in advance under new regulations that came into effect in the UK on May 1. This was news to her: she had checked the relevant website on entry requirements before leaving and says the new regulations had not been uploaded.

The Lums had arrived from Kuala Lumpur, where they had stayed for a few days en route from Australia,  on an Air Asia flight and the next available Air Asia flight back to KL was 5pm the next day.

At 4am  — seven hours after being detained — immigration officials confiscated her passport and said she could join her husband. The airport is 45 miles out of London and exhausted and with limited public transport at that hour, she took a £112  taxi ride.

Mr Lum had been overnighting in London only, as he was flying to St Petersburg the next day, but he decided to cancel everything and fly home with his wife. They had booked their Air Asia tickets 12 months in advance, and had to pay the difference on more expensive fares home.

Their holiday was ruined and all up, it has cost them a lot of money but Maureen remains remarkably sanguine about her ordeal: “I really find it hard to believe that it ever happened.”

Simon Cocker spent much of yesterday talking to staff at the British High Commission in Canberra about what had happened.

Cocker this morning said he was told that the new immigration regulations are ambiguous, that the decision to deport Lum was harsh, but the officer had the statutory authority to do so.

The UK’s Daily Mirror also thought the decision was harsh if not absurd.

In a story under the heading “Ban on singing gran is off-key,”  it warns  “Oz backpackers not to hum Waltzing Matilda after a few pints of Foster’s in a Walkabout bar or they’ll be hauled off.”

Meanwhile, Cocker engaged an immigration agent yesterday, who organised for the required tier 5 sponsorship certificates to be issued within 24 hours for all choir members who will be flying to London this weekend — and one for Lum.

“There has been so much sympathy for Maureen’s awful experience that people have offered enough money to pay for her to go twice,” Cocker said. “She is coming to see me this later morning to book a ticket for Tuesday.”