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.

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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.
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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.