TUNIS IS PLEASANT – If You Have Money

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 204, 21 May 1943, Page 8

TUNIS IS PLEASANT – If You Have Money

But Not The Place Vo Bring Up Your Daughter

Italians, English, Moroccans; cheap fruit and vegetables, but little water; the primus stove versus costly gas or electricity; constant wariness against thieves; smooth sandy beaches; the open market; the bathless apartments and houses; the absence of sky-scrapers; veiled women and the beggars; omnipresent Mohammedanism; the Bey’s palace; flowering shrubs; the olive groves and the vineries; marble courtyards; merciless sun — and Cafthage. There is a rapid picture of ‘Tunis as it was before the bombers came. What has happened to it during the past few weeks it is impossible yet to say. But this is how it appeared to Mrs. Virginia Chadraba, a New Zealand woman who married in Tunis and lived there for six years, returning to New Zealand in 1939, just before Britain entered the war, with her Czech husband and their ‘flaxen-haired five-year-old daughter. A Maltese, French, Jews, War was already in the air and preparations were being made; the casually frequent riots, mainly religious in nature, were finished with, and feeling was strong and disturbed all along the coast; this was 1939, before the invasion of

Poland, before the invasion of Czechoslovakia. War was on the way and everyone knew it in Tunis where the French commanded, where the Jews sold in the shops, where the Italians and the Arabs sold in the markets, and the Maltese were the drivers of carriages. "Tunis spreads as much as Auckland does and approaches it in size," Mrs. Chadraba told us. "It is divided fairly rigidly into national districts -- the Medina which is the Arab quarter, the Hara which is the Jewish quarter, the European district, and a pocket in which the Maltese live. My husband worked as an electrician for the tramways which served suburbs four or five miles distant and had as well a system encircling the whole city, the old part as well as the new. But the city as a whole is a rambling, old, hand-worked place, the furthest possible from a modern manufacturing city. "The curious thing is that the various nationalities stick fairly closely to the same occupations. The Arabs make car-

pets and cloths and shoes, practically all by hand; the Jews have most of the shops-you don’t perhaps notice this until it comes to a Jewish holiday and you suddenly find that almost every shop is closed for the day; the French and the English and Dutch and a sprinkling of other Europeans have the professional and administrative work; the Italians are tailors, small farmers, market gardeners; the Maltese drive the carriages; and the Moroccans are the guardians. Some of each nationality, of course, will be found in professions." "What are guardians? Policemen?" g The Arabs Are Nimble "Not officially. They are employed by shopkeepers to stay on guard outside the shops all night long. No shop such as a jewel shop would ever be left unguarded. It would certainly be broken into. Believe me, the Arabs are nimble; they will have made big money during the German occupation and now they will be making big money again out of our men. They never miss a chance of making or

taking money; and they are on all sides at once." In Tunis all the year round there are cheap vegetables, eggs at never more than a penny each, fish, poultry and rabbits, all kinds of fruits, and all kinds of flowers to be bought at the open markets, Fresh cow’s milk could be bought by those peculiar English and other foreigners who demanded it. "My little girl was ill and I called in a Maltese doctor; ‘What a pity,’ he moaned, ‘to give such a lovely baby cow’s milk to drink.’ The Plunket people would be interested and perhaps horrified to hear that only condensed milk was approved of. There was very little butter made locally and what there was was mostly bad when we bought it. So we used imported butter, Danish, French, Dutch and Russian." "And how were the rents and where did you live?" "Well, in the Arab quarter, where we lived for a long time, rents were low compared with Auckland rents-30/- a month for an apartment of two rooms and kitchenette and bathroom into which (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) one had to put a bath for oneself. None of the Arab houses had bathrooms; and none had water laid on. And even where water was laid on it was strictly rationed. Rainfall is measured there in millimetres -and for 13 months on end once I remember the water was turned on for only six hours a day, and all extra water had to be carried from wells. Also, no Arab houses and not all European ones had gas or electricity (both of which were very expensive, although the radio licence was only 2/6 a year) laid on. We cooked by the old friend the primus and also over the charcoal pot. And, of course, charcoal has the one great advantage that it cooks so slowly and gently. I remember in one Arab house in which we lived there was a marble courtyard with the house built round the four sides. But it was so hot! As Arab women must not be seen inside the house or on the street, there are no windows facing the street or in the outside walls. And so there is no draught of any kind and one becomes overpowered by the heat. The only remedy is a bucket of cold water. I can still feel the sensation of standing on the warm marble of that courtyard with cool water pouring over me. That was delightful, just as the rockless, mudless, smooth beaches were; no sharks, no danger and my little girl could stay in the water three hours at a time." Roofs, Schools, and a Library The roofs of the Arab houses were flat and the Arabs hung their washing flatly on them to dry; doors were strongly bolted, but when she was alone at night, with only a softly-burning oil lamp for protection, Mrs. Chadraba sometimes felt far from safe-how easy it was, how often proved, for a nimble Arab to climb. over the flat roof into the courtyard! But none did, though she was alone sometimes for a week or two at a time when her husband was working on the electric plant at the distant power station. "One great delight I had," Mrs. Chadraba said. "In the Arab quarter there was an excellent library where for a subscription of 2/6 a year you could take out eight books at a time. The reading room was always full of Arabs studying. But I was the only subscriber

who regularly read The Times. I tried to persuade them to take Punch but they said it was too expensive." Religious Riots Mrs. Chadraba said she could not understand the message (since denied), announcing that the Bey of Tunis had fled. "He is the head of the Mohammedan religion; he is the leader of such a great majority of the people to whom their religion is of the utmost importance. I cannot think that he would leave. He seemed to be essential to their everyday life. On a feast day the Bey made the first movement and then was followed by the heads of all the families. On the Féte des Moutons he kills the first sheep in his palace at Hamman Lif and then the signal is given and all over the city sheep are being killed for the feast. The Arabs, they say, are never converted. You will hear of a riot and you will find it is because an Arab who has been naturalised by the French has died and his people have tried to bring him for burial to the Mohammedan burial ground. His family fear for him if he does not return to Mohammed; the orthodox Mohammedans fear for the sanctity of their burial ground if he does return; and so there is a riot." To live in Tunis is, in the first place, to need to know at least a little of four languages-French, Italian, Arabic, and English. The various nationalities keep to their own languages mainly, the Maltese having their own in addition. Next it is to live within a small space in widely cosmopolitan conditions. And then it is to be between the very old world-Carthage, near at hand, is still the scene of excavations carried on by a monastic order’ known as the White Fathers-and the new world of antiaircraft gunnery practice from the ruins of a fort hundreds of years old. "Yes," Mrs. Chadraba says, "it was a good place to live for a time; it would be a pleasant place to live always if you had plenty of money and could go away for prolonged summer holidays to France to escape the quite unbearable heat and if you could send your daughter to suitable and probably expensive schools out of the country. But," she concludes, "it is not the sort of alee to bring up your daughter in."