8. Winter 1955-6 Wokingham Hospital

By October 1955 I was back with my parents and family in our red brick house in the middle of a Berkshire field, trying to bring an Algerian shantytown back to life in a newspaper article. By December, when the News Chronicle printed the piece, I was working as a ward orderly in Wokingham hospital. There were no work-camp openings available at that time, the job more or less conformed to my alternative service requirements. But instead of my ten shillings a week pocket money, I now got about £10.

Again, I'm not clear of the dates, but I remember working on the wards over Christmas. The hospital was a red brick building, a former work-house converted to provide maternity and geriatric services.

Perhaps I got a day off to get the train to London. Perhaps I went with my father who travelled up each day to his civil service job. I had sent my shanty-town piece to James Cameron –the one who invited me to lunch – and he passed it to features editor Tom Hopkinson who asked me to come up and talk about it..

I didn’t know it then, but Hopkinson had been editor Picture Post magazine and was later to become the UK’s first Professor of Journalism. He had me in to the Fleet Street office to go through the piece with me, and suggested a few small changes. I was grateful for the attention, but put off by the smell of his breath.

Forty years later I came across a framed copy of Picture Post in a Swansea industrial museum. It was open at a picture-spread about life in the Swansea valley, dated some time in 1943-4. Swansea was bombed, but this report was looked to a more fundamental reconstruction: how to transform the dirt and dereliction of a declining industrial valley. The pictures and extended subtitles featured all sorts of people, at home and work, in pubs and British Restaurants. It was at once democratic and ground-breaking, and the reporter in the byline was Tom Hopkinson.

Unlike young people in Olympic UK 2012, or my recent neighbours in the Algerian bidonville, I had no trouble finding work in Autumn 1955. The Wokingham hospital was on the near side of town, a two-mile cycle ride compared to the five miles that my brothers and I were used to cycling to school. Although I was now paid, I dont think it crossed my mind to offer my parents anything for my keep. The only inconvenience was occasional split-shifts: mornings and evenings, with a four hour break in the middle, (rather like our long mid-day breaks in Algeria, but without the sun and flies.)

And the hospital work was indoors, duties largely confined to a male geriatric ward. When Cal my stepson did a porter’s job at a Llanelli hospital in the ‘90s, he got neat, blue non-iron shirts and trousers with sewn-in creases. I still wear some of these, but cant remember getting any uniform in Wokingham beyond a short white coat to wear over my own clothes.

The nurses wore uniform dresses, which they sometimes slipped on over their underclothes when they got to work. Apart from doctors visits, the other staff on the ward were all women - sister, nurses and 'state-enrolled assistant nurses.' The patients were men, aged from 55 to 95  and it wasn’t always easy to tell the difference. Two thirds were long-term patients, and of these about half were mentally as well as physically deranged. Among the alert was Mr Dollery whose bed across from the door commanded the ward and, through a little glass window, the staff kitchen. I don’t remember seeing Mr Dollery out of bed. He sat erect, like a sardonic pope, propped high on pillows. As a novice, I found it helpful to seek his advice. He knew the routines and where things went.

My job was mostly to care for patients, rather than the trolley-pushing that kept Cal busy as a hospital porter in Wales. All manual work can be reduced to fetching and carrying, picking things up and putting things down, but most of mine was person-to-person. With the nurses, and then on my own, I fed, washed, changed clothes annointed bums and backs against bedsores. In the dayroom I chatted and sorted out disputes among the fractious fraternity who could get that far in their dressing gowns. Conflict often arose when people dropped or mislaid their tobacco, spectacles or papers, then picked up someone else’s. After seeing the pleasure these old men got from their pipes, I consulted them and bought a pipe of my own. I didn’t smoke on duty, but sometimes lit up for my ride home. One day my pipe fell out of my mouth and I ran over it. More often I would just forget to puff, until I heard the hiss of dribble slaking tobacco.

I enjoyed the chat and interaction with patients and nurses, didn’t much mind changing clothes and wiping bums. We washed our hands and odds and ends in deep square sinks with Niagara taps. At the other end of the line from Mr Dollery lay Jack, flat on his back. He ate heartily when food was put to his mouth but otherwise hardly moved, said nothing and showed no response when spoken to or touched. Pink face and head with a ring of white hair, a picture of health like a Toby jug.  Jack was incontinent, had no visitors and, because his condition hardly changed, was rarely examined by a doctor.

When the pressure was on, it was Jack whose bed was left unchanged. Across from Jack, at the furthest corner from the watchful Dollery was a prurient old sailor, as long and lean as Jack was short and fat. I've forgotten his name, but he may have been Scottish and mostly called me George, as in ‘George, bottle,’ when he wanted to piss. Occasionally the name would change to Fifi, when he called me to admire his super-senior erection.

I liked the daily bed-making routine with the nurses, working down the ward in pairs. Different dances for empty beds and occupied, two or three partners. It took me a while to speed up and as I did, my relations with the nurses improved. They'd waited to find what if anything lay behind my posh accent and smooth face.

When somebody died, the screens went up and a semblance of normality was maintained all round. It may have been partly to test me that in my second week I was sent in to help lay someone out. He’d been just about alive the day before, but the screens were up when I got in next morning. The man’s eyes were already shut and his body composed. The night staff must have seen to that, and I didn’t know him well. I didn't much like the nurse who took me in with her - big, and loud, though not in this little tent. As we undressed and washed the cold body between us, she was quiet and businesslike. At some point, we turned him over, she took a wodge of bandage and lint in a pair of tweezers and pushed it up his bum. She cut me another length of bandage to tie up his poor old dick in case that leaked. Some more padding went into his mouth and helped fill out his cheeks. The shroud was like a long apron with a stiff, dress-shirt front and nothing at the back but tapes to tie it with. That done, we laid the body straight. I brushed his hair, she smoothed the shirt-front round his neck then placed a sort of sandbag up against his lower jaw.

As we were leaving, she said ‘He could do with a shave.’ I fetched razor, soap and hot water, and replaced the jaw-stop with a towel to keep the shirt front clean. I was nervous about cutting the skin, though it wouldn’t hurt or bleed. I need not have worried. The shaving was easy, a familiar, almost comforting business, and we both seemed more ourselves as I turned his head this way and that, smoothing his cheeks and throat to make way for the razor head.

The rest of the day went normally, no comment or questions asked. I don’t know how soon I mentioned this new experience when I got home. A bit later, when I went to my room, I felt myself sob and lay on my bed until it stopped.

Most of the nurses were kind to me and the patients. The one I most liked and respected was married with a family and only worked part time. The sister in charge of this and the neighbouring women’s ward would now be called ‘old school.’ One time she gave me a mild dressing down for something unimportant. We were standing rather stiffly face to face and I remembered a trick we’d practiced at school. We must have been a bit over six feet apart and without warning I let my body fall forward in her direction, arms to my side like a wooden soldier. By the time I raised my hands to break the fall, the good sister was reaching out, but too late to catch me.

She straightened up and I got up. I don’t know who else was watching, but we looked at each other, neither of us knowing whether to laugh. She shook her head and turned away.

Certain minor abuses went unchecked. There was a B/O book - bowels open - that was filled in everyday. As with proverbial army rations, the ticks in the BO book would sometimes appear by the names when patients had moved on. Main meals were brought up from the hospital kitchen. Everyone got fed if they needed help and that was another job I quite liked. It was sometimes left to staff on the wards to make tea for the patients and themselves. That was before homogenised milk and the staff who opened the bottles would often pour the top of the milk into their own cups before the patients were served. The patients neither knew or cared and a low-fat diet was probably healthier... Before a doctor’s round, the patients to be examined would be changed, whether or not they needed it, even if that meant leaving others in their mess.

At Christmas, there was a Christmas dinner served by the Mayor. But not on Christmas day, and the patients, the more active ones who looked forward to getting up, were kept in bed. They looked tidier there, and could be served in procession down the ward. For Christmas we also got a couple of crates of beer. Patients who showed an interest would get their share, or more. And so would we, the staff.

Only one incident really upset me. A wild and wiry old farmer was admitted, not because he himself was incurably ill or incapable, but his wife had fallen ill and was no longer able to look after him. I’m not sure whether she was ever in our hospital, just a ward away, but her husband often asked after her. He had been working what was left of his farm but now, transplanted, he became confused. Perhaps the older we get, the more dependent we become on familiar cues and handholds.

The nightstaff found it difficult when the  farmer began getting up at night. Sometimes he might have been heading for the toilet, but forget where it was. Sometimes he would get there but return to the wrong bed... I once did that at prepschool, and woke up to find two of us in one bed, each thinking it was our own. What I didn’t do at school was go through other peoples' bedside lockers. This was where the old farmer got into trouble, though when stopped for questioning be mumbled about chickens.

Not seeing his wife was one of the things that most upset him. II wonder now that I didn’t pursue this further at the time, especially if she was ever in the same hospital. As a newboy, I took things as I found them, who was I to reason why?

When the midnight rambling became disruptive, two techniques were used, together or separately. Sometimes, when he went to sleep, a soft rope net would be tied over his bed to keep him there. When he would not settle, he was given a sleeping draft. At first this came mixed with orange juice, until he realised what was happening and refused the juice. Then, when I was on duty, the droplets were put in a cup of tea. I took him the tea, he thanked me and lifted it to his mouth. Then his face changed. ‘Tastes like orange juice,’ he said, and pushed the cup away. I felt ashamed.

I was off for a couple of days after that, and when I got back, the old man was bed-ridden. There had been an incident in the bathroom. I gathered he had been unwilling to go for his bath, and a nurse had said ‘What would your wife think? You wouldn’t want her to find you like this.’ Whatever she said, he must have thought he would be seeing her, and it worked. Once in the bath, something aroused his suspicions, made him realise he'd been misled. While the nurse’s back was turned, he reached for a pair of nail scissors and stabbed at her.

No serious wound, but now the old man had to be restrained and sedated in earnest and that was the beginning of the end. For all I know, his wife was already dead and they hadn’t felt able to tell him. I did not write a newspaper piece about that, but a clumsy ballad some years later: ‘We took the old couple apart / Two bodies and one broken heart...’

Often, working in that old men's ward, I wished I could see more of the other end, where people were coming into the world not leaving it. Sometimes I got across the landing, as far as the old women’s ward, but Maternity was out of bounds. I was a man, and not a doctor. Years later, in 1972, it was only a last minute change of hospitals that allowed me to be in at Sam's birth (I was made to feel useful, holding up one of my wife's legs and looking in under it to watch the head appear and report back to her). In Wokingham hospital, when one of the old women was playing up, I would sometimes be given a longer white coat and told to go in as a doctor. That sometimes had a calming effect. One woman reminded me of Mrs Faversham. I found her sitting up in bed, combing through her long white hair and wailing ‘Let me die, why dont you let me die?' I said I understood.

There was a curious little annexe I was also allowed to visit. This was for babies with outsize blotchy heads. When a normal-looking baby died, over in maternity, the body would be taken to the chapel-morgue at the back of the hospital and nurses from other wards would go down to look. When I went to the morgue, it was not for this sight-seeing. I was sent to help a porter wheel a grown-up body down. The trolley was like a wooden market trolley, with two high wheels amidships and side-bars projecting to form handles at one end. The main challenge was the ramp that led up to the chapel door. The porter warned me to be careful, since the doorway was only a fraction wider than the trolley axle and we had to take a run at it. Sure enough, one hub hit a doorpost, the trolley stopped and slewed around while the corpse continued on its way. Letting go our handles, the two of us threw ourselves forward to grab its legs before it vanished, shroud and all, down the central aisle. Saved, by the skin of its heels.

A week or so later, on a day off, I broke my ankle skating and that put paid to the hospital job. Perhaps with another article in mind, or just concerned by the ups and downs of hospital life, I wrote to a specialist to see what 'geriatric care' might mean. 'Geriatric'? It may only have been after leaving the hospital that I learned the word. Then someone gave me the name of Lord Amulree. I wrote to him and, like James Cameron before, he invited me to meet him in London. His hospital was very different, with all sorts of equipment and therapies. Senility was no longer just something to be attended and endured. I was impressed but not excited by the kindly Amulree and what I saw of his wards. Perhaps that's the trouble with old age.

Then as now my heart was not in it and there was nothing much I wanted to declare to the world on that subject. Unless, perhaps, the question raised by the old woman I was sent to shut up.

Half a century later I heard my mother talk in a similar way. My father, as his mind tacked this way and that towards the end of his life, has already asked me to help him out. I refused, knowing that he only had to refuse his medicines. Or his food, which is what my mother did when it came to her turn.

.

Shortly before my father's death, my parents were also separated by illness. With my father ill and confused, my mother had been taking it in turns with a carer to look after him at home. The strain got too much, she went down with pneumonia and was taken into hospital. With none of us able or willing to look after him, my father was moved to an old people’s home. Well-recommended, but horrible. He sat hunched up by himself in a small dark room. When the carers forgot to put in his teeth, then lost them, nobody thought to sit and feed him. When I visited him, I was shocked, but determined that this time the old man should see his wife.

I had brought his wheelchair, but for some reason did not feel able to arrange things properly with the staff. Although within our rights, I felt like a thief and looked to see that the coast was clear before wheeling him out across the hall. George, my father, was rising to the occasion and  clear in mind. Outside in the sun, I helped him into the passenger seat, and folded the chair into the boot. Both of us were in high spirits as we drove through the country roads to the Wantage cottage hospital where my mother was by now recovering. Out of the car, back into the wheelchair and through more doors. It was afternoon, and Mary, my mother, was awake, sitting in a chair beside her bed. She looked grey, but as we approached her face lit up. I pushed my father towards her up the aisle between the beds. She reached out towards him and he threw himself forward, taking me by surprise. The wheelchair tipped and George fell, arms outstretched, face down into Mary's lap. Triumphant, farcical, unrestrained delight, including me.

7. Balancing misery

Of course I was proud when my first newspaper piece appeared in the News Chronicle in December 1955,  two days after my 19^th birthday. It was a good paper, left of centre and widely read, midway between broadsheet and red-top tabloids like the Mirror, Express and Sketch (in those days, before the Sun led its race for the bottom, the Mirror too could have something sensible to say).

But now I look again at the content of my piece, it makes me cringe. I cant blame James Cameron or Tom Hopkinson, the features editor who took the piece. My words were left pretty much as I sent them in, with title, captions and some more or less apposite pictures to back them up.

My unease now begins with the first paragraph  about the expression “la misere”being widely used in Algeria 'though many who use it don't know what it means.' I'm happy with the shortened don't, but not with the implication that I know better or see more clearly than others what misery may mean.

A bit further on I say that the daily wage of a labourer will buy 'three inadequate meals at a cheap Arab restaurant.'  Except that poverty-stricken workers dont spend most of their earnings in restaurants, and Arab food is not mostly inadequate.

What follows has some good graphic description and a few useful statistics, but then, in the last paragraph I remind myself of the BBC at its bland worst, falling back on 'balance' where honesty and judgement are required. Sitting on the fence is not what's needed between victim and oppressor, the many and the few.

In my assumed wisdom, I assert 'This is La Misere, and the machine guns are answering it. Who is responsible for it, government, colonists or the Arabs themselves, is disputed. What matters is that such conditions exist. Such conditions breed misunderstanding, despair and hate. Thence violence.'

But isn't government by definition responsible, and wasn't this government the voice and agent of a conquering minority? Were the Arabs were in control over their own destiny?  My dire conclusion : 'La Misere gives terrifying force to Nationalist and Communist arguments in Algeria. La Misere can warp a man until he believes in terrorism and...has nothing to lose by violence.'

How true... But wasn't the Battle of Britain also a nationalist struggle? Were the pilots of Bomber Command warped by misery when they decimated civilian populations in Dresden and Hiroshima? And didn't these brothers in arms, like all good Communists, draw courage and commitment from All-for-one and One-for-all?

When I wrote my piece, I must have already half-known some of these things. My workmates Mustafa and Jeannine were neither warped nor poverty-stricken. So why did I parrot t platitudes? At worst, I courted respectability. At best I adopted the presumed stance of my audience the better to convince them of the obvious: that poverty and deprivation are unacceptable, not just bad for the poor themselves but dangerous to all.

6. Autumn 1955 Algiers (Berardi)

At the entrance to the bidonville we were met by a group of little girls chanting ‘Rachel est morte, Rachel est morte.’ As they came running up the dirt road towards us, it was hard to know whether they were lamenting the death or simply sharing the news. The French words they used had probably been taught to them by that same Rachel, in a makeshift school she had helped set up. The self-assigned teacher had recently died, of some illness, on a visit to her family in Switzerland. Rachel, like Simone who washed our clothes in Biermandreis, had come to Algeria as a volunteer, and stayed. Now we were to build a school to replace the shed she’d used for teaching in.

That shed became our base. Berardi, or Berardi-Bousila, was a dense clutter of makeshift shacks on the side of a hill near Maison Caree, east of Algiers. Sparse services, occasional electric light, one tap to several hundred families, and shallow roadside ditches for drains. The shacks were built of scrap wood and iron sheeting. Bidon means tin can, now opened up and flattened out to make a patchwork wall or roof. Doorways and backyards were often screened off with bits of packing case fencing or woven reeds. Our team was slightly better housed. With a couple of other male volunteers, I slept in a nissen hut, an improvement on both the surrounding shacks and our tents at Biermandreis. No piped water, but a lightbulb and big tables on which we laid straw mats as mattresses. Here, as on the ferry deck, I did not find it hard to sleep. After a night or two, the tabletop felt like home. Our nearest neighbours were mules, sometimes a camel, tethered against the end of our shed. They snuffled and brayed a clap-board’s width away.

I felt better in Berardi than camped out among villas on the other side of town. Not that we were acclaimed, entertained or even acknowledged by most of our neighbours. There must have been links between our organisers in Algiers and a local Algerian leadership. These hardly extended to us on the ground, but here we were, for the moment at least, on the same unlevel ground. We joined the queue for water at the taps, or sneaked out in the night to wash. Kept our water cool in porous unglazed pots. Same sun, same evening coolness, same rain when it came. Same germs, which may have been what killed Rachel. For her, it had been months or years. For us, just a few weeks. People said that Rachel had worn herself out, perhaps a weakened immune system let in common germs. There must have been 10,000 people in that hillside settlement, and a lot of them too must have died young.

Some days we bought breakfast on our way to work, bread and grapes, or deep-fried doughnuts strung on a reed. Later I wrote an outraged newspaper article about la Misere, an expression I heard used among Europeans more or less concerned with the poverty, unemployment, deracination, ignorance, dirt and demoralisation of a subjugated Arab majority. During the Algerian war, as in other colonial wars, military repression was offset by forlorn efforts to win back hearts and minds. We didn’t know it then, but a campaigning French sociologist Germaine Tillion, was to make Berardi the pilot for a network of centres sociaux across Algeria, combining education, medical and family care. In my writing, I simply tagged the word misere to mental images of flies round babies’ eyes, toddlers and ducks dabbling in drains. In autumn when it rained, the dust roads and drains merged in sluggish streams. Our canvas shoes and tyre-sole sandals were no use in the mud, it was more comfortable to go barefoot. I liked the squelch between my toes, and we kept a bucket of water outside our shed to wash off the mud before stepping in.

On days off, we could still bus into Algiers, the city centre, casbah or beach. In a mixed suburb nearby, Maison Caree or Hussein Dey, some of us went to an old bain maure, or Turkish bath. Algiers had been an Ottoman outpost before the French, so it may really have been a Turkish bath. As with the Moorish Grande Poste, I remarked the tiles and oriental arches, but didn’t know the difference between Moorish and Mauresque, as the French colonial style picked up on the one that went before. I was not thinking such complicated thoughts as I inhaled the cloistered steam. We were ready for a deep clean and for once I revelled in the ritual, wooden clogs on heated tiles, splash of cold water from a raised pool, and a cooling off on couches round the walls of a neighbouring room. There was some conversation, but mostly an amicable silence, as between blood-donors or members of a layed-back Quaker meeting. Back in the world, and what struck me first was the spicy stink of a nearby river, al-Harache. In 1967 when I got off the plane to take up a Reuters job in Algiers, I knew the smell immediately.

I don’t remember much about my workmates or everyday life during my month or two at Berardi, not even who shared to nissen hut with me at night. Perhaps the team and routine was largely unchanged from Biermandreis; so I reserved my consciousness and memory for what I was not yet familiar with, visitors, outings and unforeseen events.

The workplace was a space not much bigger than a tennis court, a patch of waste ground between shacks and alleyways. To one side was a big fig tree, welcome shade beneath its dusty leaves, to the other an untidy midden. Our job was to build a schoolroom, but I don’t remember plans, much in the way of materials, nor anyone competent in charge. An outline was staked out, between fig tree and rubbish, but that required much of the rubbish to be moved before we could reach the topsoil and dig through it to clay or rock. Back to the famous pelle et pioche – shovel and pick – with a barrow brouette or two. We took our smoke- and snack-breaks under the fig tree and kept a clay water jar on a wall to catch any breeze.

The bit of building I remember was a coffer wall, a mix of mud and lime or cement built up between wooden shuttering, sandwiched like icecream between two wafers. We worked one section at a time, moving the shutters along as soon as the mixture set firm enough to stay put. The walls were quite thick, about 40cms, and the mix included rubbish from the heap. Later there would be an overhanging roof to keep the rain from washing the mud wall away.

We got some interest and help from teenager boys who lived around and from time to time our team was reinforced by local volunteers - liberal , communist, Christian or nationalist. As in apartheid South Africa, and Israel today, a small minority of incomers and dissident colonists worked in support of the poor majority, even if the poor were not inclined to help themselves, at least in the ways agreed for them. This Berardi effort had the support of a Catholic bishop, and I heard later that supporters of SCI in Algeria included Albert Camus and his Algerian fellow-writer, Mohammed Feraoun.

These two friends, at least early in the war, shared the vision of an inter-racial partnership in Algeria. But many Algerians, like my workmate Mustapha, had already given up on that. For them, Algeria, with its population 90% Arab Muslim, could not be both democratic and French. Mustapha was happy to work with us, he wanted Arabs and Muslims, French and Algerians, to meet and mix on equal terms. But just as the French had France, there had to be an Algeria for Algerians. Not Algerie Francaise but Algerie algerienne.

One of our visitors was a French army officer. He was a lieutenant, doing his national service. Soon most of the French army would be in Algeria and I don’t remember this man’s name, or what action he’d seen. He seemed quite relaxed about dropping in to visit us in uniform, though he took most of it off to work with us on site. In him I saw in him what I might have been if I’d gone the other way and done my military service. I enjoyed his visits and remember him talking about Charlie Parker. He was amazed I hadn’t heard of Bird, and sand little bebop riffs to illustrate. One of my first record purchases was a French EP 45 recording of Charlie Parker’s Lover Man. Perhaps I got it in Paris on the way home.

The low point for me in Berardi was one day when some children emerged from a yard adjoining our site. They were playing, or trying out, a new clay drum - skin stretched over a miniature cooling tower. We were having our break and they brought it over to show us. We took it in turns with them to tap out a few beats until a voice called out from a hidden yard. Rather crossly it seemed to me. The children ran off and we heard what sounded like a scolding from behind the reed screen. We went back to work and a few minutes later, one of the children ran out, passing behind us to add some rubbish to the heap. He didn't look our way. Heart sinking, I waited till he went back into the yard and went to look, to find what I'd feared, some broken earthenware and torn skin.

Perhaps I made too much of that, perhaps the drum had been dropped by mistake. But for me, it was ominous, gulf between us now unbridgeable.

I was  less bothered by an encounter with police or gendarmes. They had set up what might now be called a flying checkpoint at the bottom of the shanty town. A couple of the teenagers told us the flics were out in force and led us down to have a look. Half a dozen men in uniform, one or two with guns, were stopping and checking cars on the road that ran along the bottom of the camp. Between us and the road was a deep dry ditch and bank. On our side, a straggle of people stood watching what was still an unfamiliar spectacle. Some cars were stopped, others waved through. Some drivers were asked for their papers, or to open their boots. Most of those stopped seemed to be Arab, though I couldn’t always tell the difference. Some pied noirs were as dark as the name sounds, some Arabs, or Berbers, were very light. The Mediterranean’s a marvellous melting pot, and I suppose that when the police first noticed me, in my shabby working clothes, they would not have singled me out from the other teenagers. After a while some my companions ventured across the ditch and onto the verge for a better view.

I followed. After a few minutes, the policeman in charge seemed to notice us. He waved, shouted, then ran towards us to shoo us back across the ditch. One of the boys I knew was slowest to turn and run and the policeman launched him down the bank with a kick in the pants. Affronted, I turned back to address the kick-ass cop. Not quite ‘What do you think you’re doing, my man? More likely ‘Eh alors...'

Affronted in his turn, the policeman called for support. ‘Prends-le,’ he said, and while one man seized my arm another prodded me gently in the back with his sten-gun mitraillette. ‘La dedans,’ he said when we got to their van, a box-like Citroen (like a Transit made from corrugated iron). The back doors were opened and I was hustled in. Long wooden benches on either side, at the far end sat two Arab women in grubby white robes. After one look at me they kept themselves to themselves and I had nothing to say. Bonjour would not have been fitting.

After half an hour or so, the police packed up their checkpoint. With two or three across the seat in front of us, we headed back to their police station. There we were let out, the women taken off in one direction, me in another. They seemed resigned, I was taken to a holding-room or cell. Another longish wait, then policeman came for me and led me to his boss's office. An officer was sitting behind a desk and I was set some way in front of it, while the officer, after glancing up, went back to his paperwork. Almost beside me was a chair. After standing for a minute or three, I sat down in it. My guard, still standing, pulled me to my feet. After another few seconds, when he let go of my arm,I sat down again. Again he pulled me to my feet, more roughly. The third time I sat down, the guard cuffed me round the head, and the officer decided it was time to look up.

He asked me what I was doing in Berardi, and what I was doing by the road. I explained, as best I could in French, about the Berardi worcamp, and it being agreed by the Algiers authorities. But my passport was back at the camp and I had nothing to back up what I said. The Inspector picked up the phone and I was put back in the cell for an hour or two until someone arrived with passport and confirmation of my tale. The details were all taken down, including my visa expiry date. The officer, who clearly disapproved of the whole business, let me go, with a warning: 'You've got three more weeks. Make sure you're gone by then, or you wont get off so lightly.'

I felt partly proud of myself as I went back to camp, partly ashamed of the alarm and inconvenience I’d caused, and I left the day before my visa ran out. Next day, I was told, the police turned up to check. What I don’t know is whether that school was ever finished. I know that our efforts were picked up as part of a wider social-centre project, also that Emile, Simone and others were arrested from time to time, and that worse was to come for everyone.

Algeria got its independence, but no happy ending. With the European exodus, the economy collapsed, great plans for workers’ co-operatives proved unworkable, Islamists, military and mopdernisers fought each other to a standstill. Meanwhile, before independence, three of the people I knew were killed. When Algiers was locked down, Emile and Simone set up a training workshop for apprentices in the country not far away. It was an isolated spot and they were easy targets for so called ‘last day militants’ - Algerian collaborators perhaps – who were eager to show they had done their bit. Emile and Simone were abducted, their bodies never found. The FLN command disowned the killing and expressed regret. Mustapha was also killed, by the French, after joining FLN forces guerrillas in his native Kabylie. I remember him talking of a coastal town, Delys, as home, and some years later I went there to see if I could find his family. People seemed to recognise the name Sabeur, and nodded when I said I thought he had been killed. But nobody wanted or was able to tell me much.

Mouloud Feraoun, the novelist and diarist whose work I came to admire, was shot by the OAS (Secret Army Organisation) in their murderous coda to the French withdrawal. In 1962, a few months after independence, I arrived early for a meeting of relief agencies. The meeting was being held at a community centre near Algiers. As I waited outside in the sun I noticed a line of bullet-holes in the stucco not far from the door. This, I was told, was where Feraoun had been taken out and shot...

For a sensitive close-up on war-in-the-community, I recommend Feraoun’s Journal for the years 1955-62. The English translation I've got is lousy, but the content is important, for the English especially: for several hundred years, we’ve fought all our wars abroad.

Jeannine, the co-leader of our camp at Biermandries, was a woman I respected but did not get to know or understand. I heard that she went on to work for the FLN network in France.

Mohammed Sahnoun, the young Algerian who had acted as SCI secretary for a while before Emil, also joined the FLN, and then the Algerian government. After rising through the Algerian Foreign Service, he helped run the Organisation of African Unity. I met up with him in1967, when I was back in Algiers for Reuters. Things were tense over the 1967 Arab-Israel war. Western journalists were often, sometimes rightly, suspected of spying, so I was grateful that he should find time and not mind being seen with me. It may have been Sahnoun who gave me the term militants du dernier jour - those last-day militants - as we talked one evening at the Club des Pins, looking out across the sea.

In 1955, on the ferry back to Marseilles, none of this was on my mind. Most of it hadn’t happened yet, the war drums off stage, the characters still alive. Besides, I was not a reflective young man, more like some of my fellow-passengers, the legionaires still in their desert uniforms. Going home on leave, they were mostly Germans, still at a loss after the devastation of Hitler's defeat. The Legion had a ferocious reputation but there was nothing fearsome or Beau Geste about these men. Easy-come-easy-go and anxious to please, they seemed to me. We talked in our varieties of pigeon French, they sang to a harmonica and made free with drinks and cigarettes. I had already come across the tobacco they used for rolling their cigarettes: very dry in paper-packets rather like the water-bomb containers we made at school. It was hard to imagine them bayonetting men, women and children.

In the same boat, I met a young Frenchwoman, a girl a bit older than me, also travelling alone. With so many soldiers around, she may have been glad of an escort and we thought we might share the patch I'd staked out on deck. Then she said she’d found a single cabin for the night so we went our separate ways. I was woken from my wine-dark sleep by a nudge on my sleeping bag. The same girl, but in tears. Her cabin turned out to be a crewman's berth, and he had come in for his reward. She was shivering as well as sobbing so I got out of my sleeping bag and she got in. When she fell asleep, I went off to join the singsong round the sad harmonica. As daylight dawned, she got up and I took my turn in the sleeping bag.

We met for breakfast in the restaurant. Sharing our table was a young businessman on his way back to France. An Algerian Jew, he and had decided to leave while the going was good. When he heard we were hitching, he said we could come to Paris with him in his car, if we didn't mind being cramped.

It was an open sports car, with two proper seats in front and a narrow bench across the back. On the drive north, she and I took it in turns between front seat and back. By the time we got out of Marseilles dock it was late morning so we didn’t make it to Paris that night. Our driver insisted on booking us a hotel room as well as one for himself. He took us to be a couple, and our room had a double bed, but after her let down on the boat I was anxious not to impose. It all seemed light and relaxed as we washed and changed for bed. At one point, in what I took to be a playful sisterly gesture, she flicked at my bare legs with a towel. Then we got into bed, I kept to my side and we and slept like babes.

When we awoke next morning I had second thoughts, she looked and smelled nice and nothing seemed more natural than to reach and roll her way. For a moment she seemed about to respond, but then stopped and smiled. 'We have not time enough,' she said. 'You should have thought of it last night.' As if I hadn’t, but we enjoyed our coffee and croissants, the three of us, and went our separate ways. By then, after so much travelling around and meeting people, I had given up taking addresses and making promises to meet again.

 

                                                                                                     Nicolas Tikhomiroff / Magnum 1960

For a long time, Mouloud Feraoun, like Camus, believed that partnership was possible in Algeria. He wrote in French and worked until his death in government Social Centres. Yet in his Journal, in a passage addressed to Camus and Emmanuel Robles (another liberal writer), Feraoun says ‘Are you Algerians, my friends? You must stand with those who fight. Tell the French that this country does not belong to them, that they took it by force and that they intend to remain here by force. Anything else is a lie and in bad faith.’

To Robles, to whom he passed his journal before his death, Feraoun wrote ‘All that matters is understanding why there is such unanimity in favour of rebellion and why the divorce is so definitive and brutal. The truth is that there has never been a marriage. No, the French have remained scornfully aloof...We have co-existed for a century without the slightest curiosity.’

5.Summer 1955 Algiers (Biermandreis)

Algiers, and it’s mid-morning as our big Trans-At(lantique) ferry gets in sight. The city tips towards the sea like a cockle shell, ridges and valleys converging on the port. Over to the right, the barnacle-buildings of the Casbah are already white hot.

So it appears now in the painting of my mind, as our boat drew in and I gathered my things together after a night on deck. In those colonial times, before cheap flight, a multinational fleet of ferries criss-crossed the Mediterranean. There were three classes of passengers, as there had been on British trains. The third class – Arabs, poor whites, student-types like me – were the ‘deck passengers'.

In summer this was fine, the deck transformed into a camp or picnic site. I felt quite at home on the patch defined by my rucksack, sleeping bag and provisions – bread, wine, watermelon. Wherever you sleep becomes a cocoon. When the rising sun got over the rail, I shut my eyes against it.

By the time I looked out, Algiers was not far away. When we docked, the heat was already beating back off concrete quays and buildings. The roadway from port to city was up a long ramp. For foot passengers there were steps that seemed to rise up the face of a cliff. Half way up, when I felt like turning back, I’d already got too far. At the top, across the road, was the blessed shade of a high arcade, a sort of cloister at the foot of imposing buildings.

The way to the SCI office was across a wide square that seemed to me the heart and soul of the city, like Manger Square in Bethlehem. In Algiers, instead of the Nativity Church there stood the Moorish facade of the French Grande Poste. Almost opposite, as in Bethlehem now, stood the Mosque, la Grande Mosquee.

This was the first time I’d been out of Europe. Apart from that mosque and the casbah up a western ridge, Algiers seemed to me a Europe-Plus, and, officially, Algeria was still a trio of French departments. In that big square, as on the ferry deck, the majority may have been Arab, but their presence was as extras, accessories, occasionally ornaments, to colonial Europe.

In the middle of that same square was the mother of open-air fast food-stalls. I often came back to it, an amphitheatre of shelves and dishes, salads, spicy meats and fish, couscous, pasta, rice. You pointed to what you wanted and sat on a bench below to eat. Tasty, cheap and avoided like the plague by most Europeans. As was the Arab casbah, now that trouble was brewing.

We were summer visitors, insouciant volunteers with no prior training. We didn’t know the war had already begun. All we knew was that in Algeria, as in Kenya where some of my relations still farmed, the whites were mostly rich and ran the place while the blacks, the Arabs, were mostly poor and not yet entitled to vote.

I did not know how recent and ruthless the colonisation of North Africa had been (Algiers was taken by the French in 1830, the hinterland nibbled away in the years that followed). I did not know that while Europe was celebrating peace in 1945, thousands of Algerians were massacred after demonstrating for their own liberation.  In Setif, inland to the East of Algiers, a march turned into a riot turned into a pogrom. Petainists and Communists combined on this ratissage and the official bodycount was into the thousands when the old general in charge of the enquiry was recalled.

All this was only ten years before this first visit of mine to Algeria, but I heard no mention of it until later when I began to read the history.  Nor was there talk of what became known as the Algerian war of independence, although it had already begun: seven years of attrition, repression and excess that ended in the flight of a million Europeans. On our little camps, out of the way and out of touch with most of our neighbours, whether French or Algerian, we didn’t get much news. Only the occasional rumour of a burnt-out post offices, fellagha bandits in the hills slitting the throats of farmers and 'loyal' village mayors.

The SCI office in Algiers was at the side of a house, through a gate and up some steps overhung with citrus and bougainvillea. Blessed shade. Emile Tanner, the secretary, was Swiss German but spoke French and some English. In his 40s he had a bony face and lean, muscular legs. Like most Europeans in Algeria – from butchers and bakers to businessmen – he wore shorts and sandals in summer. After pouring me a glass of home-made lemonade, he told me a bit about what to expect.

Under a deal reached with the French administration, our SCI team were to work for a couple of months on a self-build Castors (Beavers) housing project in a modest white suburb called Biermandreis. Then, having demonstrated goodwill – equality between unequals - we would move to an Arab bidonville (shantytown), Berardi, to help build a school.

At Biermandreis, we camped, beside the building site where we worked. The estate under construction included perhaps 20 little villas – hollow concrete blocks covered with stucco and orange tiles. Some were complete, others in the course of construction. We were about a dozen volunteers, mostly male Europeans, with two or three women (European) and two or three Algerians (male). We lived in tents, with an outdoor table and mats in the shade of some scrawny trees. Our job was to dig septic tanks (puits perdus), one deep round hole for each house. Water came by hose, the women cooked our food and we timed our working hours to avoid the mid-day sun. Pick and shovel (pioche et pelle) it was, though we could have done with pneumatic drills: holes about 2.5m deep by 1.50m across, through layer after layer of crumbly tufa rock.

This was supposed to be self-build housing, but I don’t remember our poor white beavers working with us (even now, in our post colonial world, people often say ‘We built our house’ when they mean is ‘we had it built for us’: words stand in for deeds.) Perhaps these residents had been working before we got there, or still worked on indoor jobs while we sweated down those bloody holes. I was sceptical from the start about working for relatively well-off whites to qualify for a stint in a destitute Arab shantytown. After hacking away in the sun for a week or so, any justification for that wore thin. We would work in pairs from 6am to 11am and from 3 pm to 6pm. We took turns, one digging, the other picking up the spoil.

Until the hole deepened, the top man had less to do and more chance of a cooling breeze. After the first metre or so, the one underground could sit out of sight. As we hacked, chips of rock would hit our legs. It was too hot for long boots or thick trousers, even if we’d had them. Sweat, dirt and flies got into the scratches on our legs. Sticking plasters wouldn’t stick and bandages slipped off.

When we stopped for meals and rest, we still had no protection against flies. Lunch would be bread or pasta, tomato and onion, egg, cheese, fruit (including one called nefle with several stones like little conkers). We ate on the ground or at a wooden table made by Marcel, the camp-leader and a carpenter. Then we would try to sleep.  Rush mats outside were cooler than tents but no protection against flies. I used a short-sleaved shirt to make a sort of snorkel, covering my face, with the arm serving as airway. After work, we’d take turns at an improvised shower, an oil can with nail-holes rigged up on a tripod. First in got their water hot, from the sun on the can and hose.

Sometimes we showered in our clothes, as drying things was no problem. One day, Simone, Emil Tanner’s partner from Algiers, came and did all our washing for us. I remember her standing over a big tub, bare arms and open neck. Soaked with suds and sweat, she shone with the sun and high spirits. I never got to know her well and her part is now played in my mind’s eye by Simone Signoret, with a tragedy in store.

.

I wish I had got on better with some of my fellow volunteers. Three were Swiss Germans. Marcel, the camp leader, a straightforward man who believed in working as assigned; Fritz, a cheerful enthusiast, who followed suit; and a buxom but prudish young woman whose name I have forgotten. Jeannine, the French co-leader, was also for discipline, but on other grounds I felt. She had thick black wavy hair and wore thick-lensed spectacles. She might have been part Algerian, but that did not occur to me then. I felt that these four disapproved of me and got on more easily with the Algerian students on the team. The two I remember best were Mohammed Nabi, tall and layed-back with a wide, derisive smile, and Mustapha Sabeur, more serious, political and challenging. He had his hair cut en brosse and, like Jeannine, wore thick spectacles. When either of these two took of their specs, it came as a shock, the depth of their

 big dark eyes.

                                           Fritz left, Libby and Jeannine, their backs, Marcel, topright, Mustafpha right

Libby, by contrast, seemed equable, calm and untroubled, the best sort of WASP who got on well with everyone and served as bridge. We kept in touch for some years. I don’t remember her maiden name but the diplomat she married was called Chauncey Parker. Libby and Jeannine made a fine pair when they worked together, slightly larger than life, one fair, the other dark.

At weekends,some of us would take the bus into town. I knew my way to the stall of a thousand dishes by the Grande Poste. Mohammed and Mustapha took me to a fruit-juice bar in the Casbah. Oriental Milk? With Mohammed, I might have shared a beer, but not with Mustapha. Between Mustapha’s righteous anger and Mohammed’s cheerful cynicism I found my own uncertain space.

Algeria was famous for its beaches.Better than the burning sand, I liked the rocky headlands, finding little platforms from which to drop straight down into that clear tideless sea.  In diving, I  treasured the brief quietness, suspended between rush of entry and all-too-soon resurfacing. Along the roads behind the beach there were cafes and brochette (kebab) stalls with bicycle spokes for skewers and grilled sardines. Two spokes each, on our money. There was something else that got served on tusk-like thorns. Snails? I saw similar thorns still growing on trees, but no snails there in Algeria (In Wales, on the dunes by the sea to the west of here, much smaller snails sometimes cluster on buckthorn thorns).

Fritz found himself a kitten, which he adored and we all became fond of. Fritz fed his kitten on leftovers and an occasional sardine. One day, the kitten took ill, shrank away from people, even Fritz. It bared its little sharp teeth when approached, ears back, and hissed. The kitten found refuge in a thicket to thick and thorny for Fritz to reach it, even with a stick. Someone thought they'd seen foam round the kitten's mouth. Rabies? Our neighbours feared the worst, not  willing to live with the risk. One of them lent Fritz a revolver and showed him how to use it. He shot the kitten in the thicket, retrieved the body somehow and buried it.

The atmosphere was lightened slightly by the arrival of a Danish comedian, comical because he only knew Danish and made do with improvised signs. To hold your nose and pull an imaginary chain may not have been original, but he wore a solar topee and did it with panache. I was disappointed to get quite another impression of him later from someone who served at a camp he led in his native Denmark. Humourless, authoritarian...

There was a third Algerian student, smaller and softer than the other two. Within a week or two, he won the heart of the woman I described as prude. Now they would hold hands, or sit side by side in the sunset, their bodies joined in silhouette... Before sunset, as our well-digging neared its end, I remember another figure against the light. One of the residents  had come to see how we were getting on. He looked down on me, a glass of cloudy anisette in hand. ‘Ca va, la bas?’.

Then every thing changed. From one of the beavers was heard a Racist Remark.  The pieds noirs colonists had quite a lexicon from melons or pasteques, to ratons or sales Arabes. Now, with reports of killings in the bled, the niceties were flaking off. If the residents had shown little warmth to us, this may have been because we had Arabs in our team. Now the racism was voiced, a camp meeting was called. Marcel and Jeannine, as camp-leaders, were for downing tools: how could we work for such people? Fritz and most of the others agreed. I cant remember what Libby thought. But Mohammed, Mustapha and I were unconvinced. So, we probably thought, 'what's new'? I dont know the French or Arabic for 'par for the course'.

Cynics, or realists, won the day, and - rather than risk the next phase, the work in the shantytown -  Marcel, Jeannine and the others resigned themselves to carrying on. But their morale, on which we had all depended, even as we chipped away at it, was gone. From now on, we were all just serving our time in Biermandreis.

Around the middle of that summer in Algeria, I took a day or two out and headed away from the city, along the coast to the west. My father’s ship had docked at Oran during the war, but that was too far to hitch-hike in a day or two. I had no guide or map, but knew which way along the coast was west. I could get advice from drivers who picked me up and pick up names from signposts on the way. I’d never found it so easy getting lifts. The people who stopped for me were Europeans, colons or pieds noirs. They were generous to me, though less so in some of the things they said about Arabs, I was offered meals, drinks, cigarettes. Bastos, the local brand, came in blue packets like Gauloises but darker blue. The countryside was France writ-large, and over-lit. Vineyards stretched across plains and over hills. The wine presses were not the hand-cranked wooden cages I’d seen in France but gleaming silos with press-button controls and labs to monitor fermentation. In the Rhone valley a few years earlier, I had picked grapes into wooden tubs. Here the grapes arrived in tipper trucks.

By late afternoon on my first day out I found myself on the edge of a little fishing port signed Tipasa. After driving, smoking and eating all day, I needed a walk and set off up a headland above the town. It was still hot, the scrub on the ground was mostly dried up, brown, flowers gone, but the air still smelt of herbs and honey. Later I would go down to the harbour, swim in the sea, but now it was fine to just look around. A year or two later I came across a description by Albert Camus of this same place. An ecstatic outpouring, from a time that must have been early in the summer, the day, his life. Or the very first day.

In his Outsider book, L’Etranger, Camus also recorded the stupefying dazzle of high noon, but for my walk above Tipasa, in the early evening, I faced the kindlier light of a setting sun. I walked a mile or two along goat paths through the scrub, letting my thoughts trail off. At some point I felt the ground change underfoot, stones smooth then loose, prodding through the soles of my thin shoes. With one toe, I scuffed away some grass and twigs. What I’d felt were little chunks, cubes of shiny stone or tile, mostly still in place. I had been scuffing my way across a mosaic floor or pavement. I knew it must have been a Roman place, but had not heard about it. I wondered at my find and at my ignorance. The next thing I stumbled on I might have stumbled into. An open tomb. Not ghostly but washed clean by winter rains and still warm from the sun of the day. Who was laid to rest in it, and when? How long had it lain open? I tried it on, lay down and felt quite comfortable. If thought I could do worse than come back here if I found nowhere better to stay that night.

On my feet again, I felt lonely and turned back toward town. On the way in, through a pleasant little European suburb, I noticed what I’d missed on my way out earlier. Fragments of carved stonework set into gateposts, porches and garden walls, fluting and foliage, details of nostril or claw. I walked down to the port, along the little jetty and back to find somewhere to eat. I settled on a small Arab restaurant with scrubbed tables, tiles and whitewashed walls. It looked homely, with several other men eating their evening meals or chatting over coffee and mint tea. I was hungry, the couscous cheap and good.

When I had eaten I got talking to a man at the next table. He asked me where I came from, and where bound. When he asked where I was staying, I said I’d thought about the tomb. ‘Better not,’ he said. I asked him what he did and he said he had a fishing boat. As we prepared to leave, he said ‘You’d better come with me.’ We settled up and he walked back with me onto the jetty and stopped at a shed I’d noticed earlier. It was dark now, but he opened the door and lit a lamp inside. Most of the shed was taken up by a big table, covered with nets. I helped him flatten them out to make a sort of mattress, and I had my sleeping bag on my rucksack.

My host said he’d be going out before dawn, and I asked if I could go with him. He seemed doubtful. ‘Depends on the weather,’ he said. I asked him to wake me up but he said ‘You can sleep as long as you like.’ He bid me goodnight and left. When I woke, it was broad daylight, and he and his boat were obviously long gone. I thought about waiting for his boat to come in, to help bring up his catch. But I didn't know how long he would be. I didn't wait and we didn't meet again.

Another break, another passing friend. This time it was a tall, black railway guard who may have been called Ibrahim. I cant remember how we met, only that he took me on his train to Oran, and that his uniform was topped with a red fez. He was a friendly companion with a ready laugh. I dont know what he saw in me, but I  was glad of a free ride, to a place I h ad thought would be out of reach.  Perhaps I was as much a curiosity to him as he was to me. He seemed glad to show a stranger round his country, and ask about mine. Extending his duties as guard to guide. I’m not sure whether our Oran trip was on his day off or in working hours, or whether he had to pay for me.
.

The station at Oran was near the port, and from there we walked west, out of town and up a mountain that overlooked the town and port. We followed a winding path up to what I later learned was the chapel of Santa Cruz. From there we could look down across the port and I wondered if my father had come up this way 12 years before. As a child I had known the name of his ship, Adventure. It was an overloaded old mine-laying cruiser, and somehow he had managed to pack us a big box of fruit and get it home. My own exploit in Oran was to swim across the harbour entrance, from the tip of the breakwater to the land.

Ibrahim must have been worried that I would get run down, and irritated at having to walk back round to meet me with my clothes. I would have been more worried about stepping on a sea urchin oursin as I climbed up the rocks to get out. I had learned about them and picked the spines from my knee. Ibrahim got his revenge on another little walk. We passed a clump of prickly pear - figues berberes - and he suggested I go and pick us some  The fruit sat in line like little hand grenades on the edges of flattish fleshy leaves. What I didn’t allow for was the little tufts of hair that dotted leaves and fruit.  These fruits were land urchins, the spikes finer,
more irritating than painful. Ibrahim was already laughing when I emerged and the fruit bland, not worth the itch. Later I saw how they should be picked, with tin cans tied on sticks.

This is another story I may have got wrong. There was definitely a black railway guard, who wore a fez and took me to Oran. I’m not sure his name was Ibrahim, but I know we walked up the mountain path and that he sent me in to pick the prickly pears. But I’m having second thoughts about the swim across the port. I  did that swim, but was it really then? At that time, years before independence, the port was busy and oursin could be harvested and sold to restaurants. If I swam that day, it would probably have been after, not before, our hot walk up the mountainside.

It is more likely that I swam across that port entrance seven years later after the war. By then, in 1962, nearly a million pieds noirs had gone and the port of Oran was desolate. But, if I had not caused Ibrahim to worry and walk the long way round, why would he have sent me into the cactus stand? One other thing I  remember about him, apart from his laughter and curiosity about England and my family, is that he remarked on my intelligence. He was particularly impressed by my use of long words in French. It was often easier for me to use long Latinate words – intelligence, imagination, irritation – because these were the same in French and English. More difficult for me was the idiomatic vocabulary of everyday French that came most easily to him. For him, coming to French from Arabic, there were no impressive short cuts.

This big noir from the south - and Arabs too can be racist - must have had to work for his second language, just as he’d worked for his railway job and the means to play host to me. For all his goodwill, he may have had mixed feelings about his favoured  foreign guest. If I was irritated by his cactus hairs, he may have been irritated, if not by my intelligence, then my insouciance. A word he might have known.