Algiers in May 1944, By John Alldridge

The stout proprietor of the Cafe de la Liberte across the street was tugging down the yellow and red striped awning as I passed him this morning. In the lounge of the Aletti Hotel they were giving the giant electric fan a trial run.

The hard-working ladies who drive the Y.M.C.A. mobile canteens have changed into cool summer frocks. And the anti-malaria posters are already pinned up in the Field Cashier’s office.

All these are signs that the hot season is on top of us, and the wise ones who have already suffered the blazing, sticky heat of a summer in Algiers are laying in supplies of khaki drill. You need at least six complete changes of shirts and shorts if you are to be at all comfortable, say these old-timers. I’m not concerned so much about my wardrobe. Like most innocents I brought out a trunkful of quite useless kit last autumn, and I ought to be able to find something appropriate to wear. But I’m writing home for a pair of sunglasses. Even in this early April sunshine the reflected glare from the dazzling white walls is trying to the eyes.

I wondered when I first arrived in Algiers why these nineteenth-century town planners had designed their streets as tall, narrow stone canyons; why the living rooms were all dark little cells. Now I know. You are thankful for those shaded streets, for those back-rooms deep in shadow, when you stumble out of the glare of the sun.

Of course, Algiers these days is really two cities (three — if you like to include the squalid little square mile of the native quarter downtown, which they call the Casbah and which is ferociously marked “Out of Bounds” and ” Off Limits” to British and American troops).

There is the Algiers of the Aletti bars and clubs — the Anglo-Saxon Algiers with its American Red Cross cinema, where films straight from their Hollywood previews are shown thrice weekly; with its canteens and gift shops and ENSA hostels and British Officers’ Tea-room (where you get tea and cakes and a string quartette that specialises in Mozart and Herman Finck for a modest shilling). Some American wit dubbed all this caustically “The Silver Fox-hole.” And the name has stuck to it.

You can go round this self-centred little city within a city and never hear a word of French spoken. Here British and American are inextricably mixed up. If you are a resident here you will probably feed in an American mess where the lunch has become a “plate dinner” and dinner “supper.” You will eat strange New World delicacies like hominy (coarsely ground maize boiled in water or milk) and cheese-and-pineapple salad and Spanish beans and creole pork chops and sauerkraut and frankfurters and ice cream. You will even get accustomed to cocoa with your “plate dinner.” And you’ll probably finish your meal with a Chesterfield cigarette or a Robbie Burns cigar.

Once a month we British return the hospitality and throw parties where thirsty palate-jaded Americans can share our treasured bottle of genuine Scotch.

Life here is about as personal as a railway waiting room. You make a friend. You plan a party for him. There’s a hurried apologetic ‘phone message. He’s off on a draft at last or homeward bound. And that is the last you see of him.

When I first arrived I used to make bets with myself on how many old friends I should meet in the Aletti lounge between four and five any afternoon. But I have long ceased to be surprised. One day the whole world seems to be in town. Then we all hurry down to the Aletti to see what fate has brought us this time.

I remember one red-letter day last month when I lunched with Richard (“How Green Was My Valley”) Llewellyn, now Captain Richard Lloyd, Welsh Guards, had tea with Petty Officer Jean Gabin and Humphrey Bogart, and finished off the day with a wild, mad dinner-party at which three old colleagues from Cross Street joined hands and clinked many glasses.

Then a convoy sails. And Algiers is an empty desert. Of course, the old-timers remain. War correspondents, base-bound staff officers, welfare workers and the faithful little band of middle-age unemployed officers who have almost despaired of getting another job. They call themselves “The Beachcombers’ Club.”

But there is another Algiers. This is the Algiers of De Gaulle, the Committee of Liberation, and the Assembly. It is the capital of Fighting France. This is Algiers in battle dress, a city of fierce, bitter French men and women who keep to themselves and resent “interference.”

Few of them are natives of Algiers. Ask any one you meet where he comes from, and he’ll tell you, abruptly, Marseilles, or Lyons, or Paris. France is a country of hometowners. No town in the world was quite like Chartres or Rheims or Toulouse, they would tell you. But the French in Algiers don’t talk much these days.

Across the water, only 800 short kilometres distant, is France. And France to these exiles means more nowadays than any hometown loyalty. Maybe the women wear little ornamental shields in their buttonholes embroidered with the arms of Calais or Paris. But that is all.

It is the change in the women of France that is the most remarkable thing about Algiers this spring of 1944. For so many of them are in uniform. To those who know France and the careful, cloistered life which the Frenchwoman normally leads this is quite extraordinary.

These women seem to have suddenly obtained their emancipation. They go about their business unchaperoned, virile, standing up to their men-folk in conversation and accepted by them as equals. It would be hard to rob a Frenchwoman of her “chic.” But these clumsy ill-fitting uniforms, hastily made-over, are not elegant. Many of them must go about barelegged these days. And yet there is an animation about them, an eagerness that would have been quite foreign in the soignee Mam’selle of 1940.

I heard an elderly general say to his adjutant the other day after a young lieutenant of the Corps Feminin had left them, “She is a good soldier.” That is the kind of compliment one pays the women of France these days.

“The Generals,” as everybody calls them here, live among palm trees, surrounded by scarlet-burnoused Spahis, in a white villa above the city. Once in a while they come down to the city and then, for a little, Algiers brightens up. There are brass bands and gorgeous plumed outriders, and a waving sea of little tricolour flags, and ceremonial hand-shakings and the flashing of swords.

But they have other heroes, too, these exiled French. And there are no bands playing when they come to town. They are the quiet, hot-eyed men who come to Algiers, make their reports, receive their orders, and disappear again into the jungle of Occupied France. Few know their real names. But there is a stir and an excited ripple in the French corner of the Aletti lounge when someone mentions that Monsieur X has been in town.

Not all these exiles are soldiers. There are journalists, artists, musicians among them. And they contribute what they can to the fight. And so today there are almost as many little “reviews” published in Algiers as there used to be in a Paris of happy memory. You can listen on a Sunday afternoon to a celebrated string quartette playing Debussy. And you can wander round a dozen “expositions ” of exiled French art.

And the cinema, too. Heaven alone knows where they found all those old Duvivier and Renoir classics. But there they are. And there on the screen the tall tenements of Paris and the long, straight roads of France and the voice of Charles Boyer. And if you are French and are suddenly uncontrollably homesick nobody can see your tears in the kind obscurity of the cinema.

This article first appeared in the Manchester Evening News on May 3 1944 – Jerry F
 

Reproduced with permission
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Jerry F 2024