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This article continues from Mail from England - Joy and Grief in Algiers.

'Abroad is awful'

I must emphasise that for we British soldiers in Algiers 60 years ago, the phrase 'race relations' would have meant little. Few of us had seen a black or brown face in our cities. Our ideas about 'coloured' people had been formed by films (mostly American) in which blacks were shown as comic servants, or - as in Birth of a Nation - rapists defeated by the heroic Ku Klux Klan. As for 'native Americans' we would not have recognised what we called 'Red Indians' under this title. We would have thought this another name for 'Yanks'. Apart from professional soldiers few working-class or lower middle-class people had travelled outside the British Isles. We drew our conceptions about 'abroad' from comics, popular fiction and the cinema. We tended to divide the outside world into 'niggers', 'daigos', 'wops' and 'wogs' [Note from moderator: Because of the context these words have been allowed to remain on the site]. There was a phrase 'wogs begin at Calais' Even King George the Fifth was reputed to have declared 'abroad is awful'. Racial prejudice within Britain was largely confined to Jews as the rise of Oswald Mosley's Fascist Blackshirts indicated.

I was in a more fortunate position. As a schoolboy I had twice travelled with my parents to Belgium and Holland. As a young man I had visited Germany, Austria, Italy, France (where I had seen Algerian carpet-sellers) and Denmark. I had married Minna, a Danish girl who loved English literature and poetry. She was her professor's star pupil in the English language. As an adolescent she and a few friends had formed a club based on Kipling's Stalky and Co, in which she was 'Stalky'. Minna joined the A.T.S. long before the outbreak of war - wishing to serve her adopted country - only to become a suspected 'planted enemy agent' when Denmark was invaded by the Germans.

First meetings with the French - and the Arabs

In what follows I have been careful to distinguish between what I saw and what was told to me. For a few days after our landing in Algiers we soldiers were stopped in the street by French people who wished to shake our hands. We were invited to share meals with them (as I have described in earlier accounts on this site) but they rarely used the word 'Arab' without the prefix 'dirty'. Most Arabs (we did not know that most of them were, strictly, Berbers) did not shake our hands but sought to profit by our presence. There were exceptions. Walking in the hills behind the city I entered a small village and began chatting (in French) with a delightful old man who invited me into his house and fed me cous-cous prepared by his (invisible) wife. On the basic human level, discounting race and religion, we had much in common.

The Senegalese

Arabs and Algerian French swarmed in the streets and markets. I soon observed that in addition to the police, French Senegalese troops were keepers of - if not law - then of order. These immensely tall, thin, fez-wearing blacks were equipped with huge hobnailed boots which were used on the bodies of their co-religionists without much excuse. French shoppers - men and woman - sometimes shoved aside Arab customers.

Children of the street

I had never understood the word 'street-arab' until now. Arab street-children were everywhere - offering 'Shoeshine Johnny?'(all soldiers were 'Johnny') for our immaculately polished boots and not averse to kicking up dust in order to drum up business. They offered a shrewd price for our soap and cigarettes as well as for the temporary use of their 'sisters' Many of these kids - at an age when British children had hardly left their kindergartens - were little hives of commercial activity. There was a price for everything and they knew it, to a centime. Strangely, there seemed a cut-off point for these activities. I noticed that many of the adolescents seemed lethargic and dull-eyed. I suspected drugs - hashish, maybe.

Votaries of the Black Madonna

Outside the town, to the west, an enormous white church stood upon a promontory. This had been built by the missionary order of the White Fathers and contained an image of the Virgin Mary, carved from some black substance, ebony perhaps. When I visited it I found a few Arab men idling outside. Within were two or three heavily-veiled women. As I watched they lay down in the central aisle and crawled, on their bellies, towards this image, seen as a powerful aid to fertility.

Plague and pestilence

A suspected case of bubonic plague in the dock area brought a flurry of military and medical activity which translated itself into a flurry of 'orders' from H.Q. setting certain areas as 'off-limits'. I never discovered whether the threat was real. Another order warned against 'close contact with the native population' on the ground of 'vermin' (fleas) carrying the typhus bacillus, though we had been inoculated against this. Fleas, those Olympic jumpers, might make an inter-racial leap. The gulf between Islam and Christianity was emphasised with the arrival of Ramadan. Orders from on high warned that due to the Muslim law of fasting between dawn and sunset, friction with the native work-force must be avoided. Sergeant Challenor translated this as meaning 'buggers with empty bellies get bloody-minded.' During Ramadan we were kept awake by the sound of finger-drumming and piping from the Kasbah as bellies were filled.

The rate for the job

These things I saw. Among the things told to me was that the Americans and the British were competing for Arab labourers in the docks. There was a temporary crisis when the Americans offered the Arabs double the British daily wage and they deserted us en masse. Our allies had a lot to learn. Doubling the rate meant that the labourers preferred to work one day and sleep in the sun on the next.

It would be wrong to suggest that all Algeria's Arabs were labourers. There was an elite. My Brigadier Rabino took me - with my shorthand notebook - to meet a high official in one of Algier's banks. I was to take notes of this meeting with a Mr. Benbachir, a Muslim whose English was as precise as his French.

Crime and punishment

Outside the city among our tented camps and storehouses theft by Arabs was endemic, sometimes with tragi-comic results. I was told of a group of Arab men and women approaching an Army medical post pleasing on behalf of a stricken companion. The M.O. discovered a man with a belly so distended that he resembled a woman approaching labour. Questions were asked and, reluctantly, it emerged that a sack had been stolen from a camp. It contained dehydrated potatoes which the victim had eaten 'raw'' with a predictable effect. Our medical units were not permitted to treat 'natives' though I believe this rule was sometimes ignored by kindly medics. I do not know whether the man was given a 'Caesarian'.

I would discover that my view of the Muslims was shallow in the extreme. I had seen only 'city-Arabs' debased by contact with western values. When I travelled to the borders of the Sahara via Biskra and Touggourt I would meet 'natives' of a very different calibre. But that is another story.

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