LITMIR.BIZ

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the spirit of the country was most vividly revealed. Not everyone in the Blanckley household was as favourably impressed by their first sight of the country as Elizabeth. Her Maltese nurse was so disconsolate ‘at seeing herself surrounded by turbans’ (from the moment they disembarked, she never ceased weeping and exclaiming, ‘I must die, my heart is broke’; ‘il mio cuore sta negro, il mio cuore sta negro’) that the family took pity on her and dispatched her back home. Instead they found a new nurse, Maria; her husband, known as Antonio the Stupid because he could never do anything right; and a butler who could turn his hand to anything, but was particularly adept at making dolls’ wigs. Most exciting of all for Elizabeth and her sister, who were then still quite young, there was Angela, a seventeen-year-old slave, who was presented to them by the Dey (the local ruler) along with her three-month-old baby.

      As Christians the Blanckleys were not allowed to own slaves, who were usually hired out to them as domestic servants (Maria and Antonio the Stupid were both slaves of Maltese extraction). Angela and her baby, however, were gifts, which was just as well because ‘the poor helpless unfortunate’ appeared to be unable to do anything at all either for herself or for her baby, let alone in any capacity as a domestic. The Blanckleys, who were good-natured and rather intrigued by her interesting circumstances, took them into their household and cared for them all the same. The baby, who was known as Angelina, became a great favourite.

It was their janissary, however, who became their most important link with the country. Janissaries were not really servants at all, but aristocrats,^* an elite corps of soldiers created under the Ottoman system of devshirme (a levy of at least one son from each non-Muslim family in the empire). The most talented of these boys either became janissaries, or went into the Turkish civil service; throughout the Ottoman empire at least one of their number was always assigned to the household of a foreign diplomat to act as bodyguard. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, though, Sidi Hassan had much more exciting duties to perform. He would hide behind their drawing-room curtains, for example, and pretend to be a lion in his den while she and her sister took the role of lambs or travellers whom he would proceed to gobble up. But, best of all, Sidi Hassan was a storyteller.

      Elizabeth listened to these stories, these ‘Algerian Nights’ as she called them, with a delight that even in later years, when she had long left Algiers, never faded from her memory. These fascinating tales of genii and princesses were so long that some of them took the evenings of an entire week to conclude. One, which she never forgot, was the story of a girl whose eyelashes were so long that she always swept the floor of her chamber with them. Elizabeth and her sister would sit and listen to Sidi Hassan in his room at the back of their house; he would smoke his pipe, the smell of which clung so strongly to their skin and dresses that such visits were finally banned by their mother.

      Elizabeth Blanckley spent six years of her childhood in Algiers, from 1806 to 1812. Like Mary Fraser in Japan nearly a century later, from the moment their boat landed (the Noah’s ark so admired by Nelson) Elizabeth felt at home. They did not live in the town of Algiers itself, but in a country residence, a ‘garden’ just outside the city. The house was built on cliffs overlooking the sea. In the heat of summer it was delightfully cool, watered by fountains and shaded with vines which produced bunches of grapes at least three feet long.

      Although the house was built in the Moorish manner, around an open courtyard, much of it was decorated in the English style. Elizabeth’s favourite room was her bedroom, which was more dear to her even than the grand Parisian boudoir which became hers in later life. This room had a domed ceiling and was surrounded by four smaller chiosks, or domed recesses. The first was the door; the second was taken up with books and toys, while the third accommodated her bed, ‘with its white muslin curtains, drapé by violet-coloured ribbons, and couvre-pied of scarlet and gold’. The fourth chiosk was a window, shaded by the branches of the vine, which overlooked the sea.

      Away from the cliffs, the house was surrounded by groves of fruit trees – pomegranates, almonds, orange and lemon trees, as well as the bergamot, or sweet lemon – in which nightingales sang. The fig trees bore fruit of such perfection that it had hitherto been considered fit for the Dey alone, while the apricots were so abundant that two of their pigs died from a surfeit of them. (It was not only the pigs who became over-excited at the prospect of so much wonderful fruit: a local synonym for apricot was ‘kill-Christians’.) Their vegetables grew in prodigious quantities, too. In her potager Elizabeth’s mother grew cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli, carrots, turnips, onions, leeks, peas, french beans, haricots blancs, artichokes, calabash, pumpkins, cucumbers, musk and watermelons, aubergines, tomatoes and several kinds of capsicums, okra, strawberries and potatoes.

      The Blanckleys kept so many pets that their ‘Garden’ also became something of a Noah’s ark. Their animals included a spaniel, a tortoise, a hare, a silver fox, a lamb, a tame gazelle and a goat called Phyllis. Mr Blanckley tried to keep wild cats, but they did not survive captivity. Nor did their pet lamb, which was eaten by jackals; nor their father’s eagle, for whom an even worse fate was in store. One day, mistaking the bird for a guinea fowl, the cook killed it, plucked it, and hung it in their already well-filled Christmas larder. If Elizabeth and her sister had not missed it, no one was in any doubt that it would have been served up at table.

      But even for Elizabeth there were intimations of something more disturbing beyond this vision of childhood utopia. For the convenience of Mr Blanckley in fulfilling his consular duties the family kept a second house in the town, and it was here that Elizabeth experienced the greatest thrill of all – greater even than Sidi Hassan’s ‘Algerian Nights’. As the sun began to set, exactly one hour before the muezzin began to call the faithful to prayer, she would make her way up onto the flat terrace at the very top of the house. Here, almost every evening, she would conduct a secret rendezvous with the secluded women of the neighbouring house.

      I doubt not that the something of mystery connected with the rendezvous, and its realization through one of the Gothic pigeon holes in the upper chamber of our terrace, from which our fond Mahommedan neighbours had by degrees completely annihilated all intervening glass, increased the interest of the interview, and caused a battement de coeur, a something inexpressibly delightful, beyond, or at any rate, certainly very different from what I have experienced in all other liaisons of simple amitié.

      Although she was only a little girl of nine or ten at the time, these forbidden meetings had an extraordinary, almost sexual frisson, which derived only in part from their clandestine nature. ‘I knew nothing of them,’ she wrote of her Algerine friends, ‘beyond the delight with which they ever sought and conversed with me, and the anxiety with which I ever ascended to the terrace and kiosk, and listened to their signals.’¹⁶

*A white linen veil fitting tightly round the head and hanging over the eyes with only a small open-worked hole to breathe through.

* King Charles II.

* Mary tells the story of one of Hugh’s earliest postings, before their marriage, in Guatemala. When his boss was sent on leave Hugh remained there as chargé d’affaires, with responsibilities in five republics in Central America. ‘His headquarters were in the new town of Guatemala; his staff, a native clerk; and his only means of transport, a mule. He used to tell me how he would journey from capital to capital through the forest, in uniform, cocked hat and all, this latter for the benefit of any stray bandits that might have been drawn there for shelter. They would not touch a foreign representative in a cocked hat and gold lace, though they might have cut his throat in mufti. England was a word to conjure with in those days.’ After a year and a half ‘a dreadful doubt began to enter Hugh’s mind. His mail grew scantier and scantier. His chief had not returned. Appeals for direction were unanswered and the FO turned a deaf ear to his suggestions of an exchange.’ Eventually he decided to take the matter into his own hands. He packed his bags and left. When

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