A friend of mine came back from Algeria full of
appalled contempt for ,the OAS and admira- tion for the Guardian's Clare Hollingworth. Before she left Algiers for a short rest in Paris she had been on the job for nearly ten weeks— longer than any other British or American corre- spondent. The BBC has been changing its men every two or three weeks, and one of the toughest news agency reporters had to ask to be relieved after six weeks. No male correspon- dent, says my friend, would visit the Algiers Casbah unless accompanied by an armed patrol of the French Army or by FLN guides, but Miss Hollingworth made a point of walking alone through the Casbah every day. Muslims, she said, would never bother to kill a woman; but they sometimes emptied chamber pots over her from upper windows. Both in Oran and in Algiers the pieds noirs did everything to make life difficult for her, but they got nowhere. She saw more horrors than most, and never lost her nerve. When a gang of OAS gunmen raided her hotel one night in search of the Italian Caracciolo, she helped to drive them away, threatening their leader in very loud, very clear, and very English French: `Do' you want me to hit you on the head with my shoe?' All the cor- respondents in Algiers with military experience agreed that the degree of courage Clare Honing- worth displayed would in other circumstances have won her the DSO.
Previous page
