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| The grounds of the Maillot hospital, Bab El Oued |
The children all settled down to life in
Algeria in time, each according to his or her personality and age. We had to leave my eldest daughter in England
to finish her studies in the English curriculum, and so I had an 11 year old
son, 8 year old daughter, 5 year old son and a 2 year old son. The two youngest were outside with the rest
of the hoi polloi within a very short time of our arrival, and I remember
looking out the kitchen window one day to see my 5 year old standing watching
something with the arm of a newly acquired friend draped across his shoulders
very nonchalantly. This was something
that really struck me immediately in Algeria… how very touchy feely the
children were with each other. It’s very
common to see women, young and old, or young men and boys walking along
arm in arm, or even holding hands, in the most innocent manner. But for my 8 year old and 5 year old,
sometimes this got to be too much when it came to the older
generation. It was rather overwhelming
for them, having come from a quiet, nuclear unit, to having aunts, uncles,
cousins and neighbours constantly bombarding them with hugs, kisses and
questions. They often retreated to the
safety of our apartment to try and find some quiet time to recoup their equilibrium. I remember once having to coax my 5 year old
to come out from the bedroom in my mother-in-law’s home to meet my husband’s
cousin, his wife and his son who was around the same age. He eventually only came out as long as I
promised to hold his hand, and that he could go back into the bedroom as soon
as he had kissed the cousin and his wife. He
sat beside me for a little while, and before too long he was sitting in the
corner with the other little boy giggling and playing away quite happily. A few
months after our arrival our 8 year old daughter contracted chicken pox and had
to stay indoors for some time until she had recovered. The first day that she ventured out after her
illness, I heard a lot of screaming and when I rushed to the window it was to
find all her friends gathered around her in excitement and happiness to have
her out playing again.
The children picked up the language very
quickly especially as my husband had spoken to them in derja from when they were born, and they
had mixed with a lot of his friends who had also had spoken it with them. One of my most amusing memories was from the
days before my children had started school, lying in bed and listening to the
neighbourhood children passing by the window on their way to school, singing ‘eenie,
meanie, minee, mo,….’ with the ‘catch a tiger by the toe’ totally lost in their
own made up mumbo jumbo! So nice, I
thought smugly to myself, to see my children having an influence on the local
children instead of the other way round!
It took a while to become accustomed to the
seasonal fruit and vegetables in the market, to the fact that the butcher sold
only meat and not chicken (you had to go to a separate shop to buy chicken and
eggs, and often couscous and richta also), and that the local shops sold some
items, normally found in packets in the UK, individually e.g. you could buy a
tray of 30 eggs or just one, or one sweet or 10, one roll of toilet paper or a
pack of two or more, not to mention all the foods you couldn’t buy, important
foods like Cadbury’s Chocolate for instance (!) and of course...... the money. For me the local currency was, and in many
ways still is, a total minefield. My son
and I went to buy a jar of instant coffee and I had to tell him to tell the
shopkeeper that I just didn’t have enough money when he said that it cost 1,500
dinars, while silently screaming at the high price. The shopkeeper then took out a 100 dinars
note and 50 dinar coin and said this was the price. Why couldn’t he have said that in the first
place? The French may well have left Algeria
40 years previously but they had left their legacy of the centimes in place so
when a person quoted one price, he or she actually meant another….. for me it epitomized
the Algerian society as a whole!
I also discovered that my husband’s family
didn’t always know where I could find some of the foods to which I was
accustomed. I was told that you couldn’t
buy cheddar cheese, and, when I found it in a small supermarket not too far
from my mother-in-law’s I realized that it was up to myself to look around and
see what I could find. To be honest, if
someone in England asked me where they could find the proper couscous (not the
pathetic imitation boil-in-a-bag that no self respecting Algerian woman would
allow to cross the threshold of her home), I would not have been able to help
them as I only cooked it rarely and when I did it was whatever I had brought
back from Algeria with me. So if they
didn’t cook with or use it they would not necessarily know where to find it. But you had to love these people who thought
nothing of days and days of torrential rain, but just rolled up their trouser
legs and walked in the pools of water in their flip-flops, and how could you
not love them when you saw children walking to the shops in the morning in
their pyjamas, and young men who thought nothing of popping out to the shops in
their sister’s neon pink flip-flops.
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| A street in Bab El Oued, Algiers |
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