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.’