by Clare Mulley
When the Poles specified that if Christine were to work for them she would first have to give up her British passport, she became intensely suspicious. In July she told Tamplin she feared that the Second Bureau would lose no time in having her interned ‘on any convenient pretext’, or that she would otherwise be ‘deliberately compromised’ or ‘put in the cooler’, should she give up the protection of her passport.39 Later a friend, possibly Colonel Bobinski, who was deeply involved in Polish intrigues, wrote to Christine ‘begging her for her own sake’ not to accept any Polish assignment.40 She now understood that she would never be able to work directly in the service of her own country. Despite his excellent military record Andrzej shared Christine’s dim view of their situation, telling SOE that, if he worked for the Poles now, he too ‘would probably be shot down at the first … opportunity’.41 When he was finally offered employment under his former commander, General Kopanski, he turned it down.
Christine now petitioned to join the ATS, the women’s branch of the British army, offering to ‘do any kind of duty, except office work, preferably near the front’.42 Inactivity was driving her crazy, and she even applied for a job with the new American mission in Cairo. In mid-July she sent an SOS to a friend in Hungary saying she was reduced to working as a waitress in Cairo, and ‘on the rocks’.43 Hearing of this, Gubbins quickly telegraphed Cairo demanding to know what had happened to her and Andrzej. Within a few weeks Andrzej was employed as a transport officer with the SOE Middle East motor fleet, a job that could hardly have been more perfect for him. He was working ‘in cars’, Christine noted drily, while ‘I am still waiting’.44 Suggestions that she might serve as Andrzej’s secretary left her ‘very browned off’ indeed.45
But there were distractions, at least. In June, Richard Truszkowski arrived in Cairo to temporarily take over from Guy Tamplin, who had been promoted.* Truszkowski was a senior British SOE intelligence officer of Polish extraction, usually based in London, who had accompanied Gubbins on his first military mission to Warsaw. Hungry for Polish conversation, he now moved into the same Zamalek boarding house as Christine and Andrzej. In the evenings, while the resident WAAFs and FANYs were out dancing at the Continental or the Turf Club, Christine, Andrzej and Truszkowski would eat at Shepheard’s or at the Gezira Club where there was dancing on an outdoor terrace, under lights among the trees. Back at the pension they would stay up talking in French and Polish late into the night over whisky that Truszkowski described as ‘almost pure fusel oil, with a headache in every drop’, and gin that was ‘faintly corrosive’.46 Sometimes they wrapped up against the sand-flies and slept under the brilliant night sky on the building’s flat roof, counting the stars and discussing the kind of Europe that might emerge from the war.
Christine was soon providing Truszkowski with full organizational overviews of both the Musketeers and the ZWZ, as well as specific nuggets of local information. Once she informed on the mistress of a Polish officer whom she suspected of being a German double agent. SOE investigations revealed that the woman was ‘definitely suspect’, using the diplomatic post to send uncensored letters to Hungary referencing particular pages from a specific edition of Goethe.47 When the officer involved was reprimanded for ‘mixing business with love’, he angrily telegrammed Sikorski, demanding that those who accused him of ‘working for the Gestapo’ should be disciplined.48 Instead, he was removed to ‘an insignificant post in East Africa’, clearly showing the importance attributed to Christine’s intelligence.49 The incident also reveals that Christine was not the only beautiful spy in Cairo. Soon the British had a nickname for the German equivalent of Olga Pulloffski: ‘Venal Vera … from Gezira’.†50
In July 1942 Tamplin’s permanent replacement arrived. Gubbins had appointed Captain Patrick Howarth, a comparatively junior officer in the Intelligence Corps who spoke fluent Polish. As Howarth arrived at Shepheard’s Hotel he overheard some Sudanese waiters teaching each other German. It was not an encouraging start. There was now heavy fighting in the Egyptian desert as Rommel’s advance halted just sixty miles from Alexandria. Recognizing that many Egyptians were not unhappy at the prospect of a change of European guest, Rommel’s Afrika Corps Radio broadcast to the capital: ‘Get your party frocks out, we’re on our way.’51 Allied Egypt suddenly seemed at risk, and the whole of Cairo was soon in a flap. On the day that would become known as ‘Ash Wednesday’, Christine walked to Rustum Buildings through a swirl of charred papers as the British and other embassies burnt their most sensitive files. Story has it that Andrzej was among those selected to stay behind enemy lines in Cairo should the Germans take the city. Certainly, although the huge crowds heading for Jerusalem filled the stations and jammed the streets with traffic, neither he nor Christine packed their bags. Nor did their headstrong friend Zofia Tarnowska, who defiantly took a train to the now deserted Alexandria, where she went to the best restaurant and was given bottle of their finest wine. Before the end of the month, however, the Axis advance was halted at the first battle of El Alamein. Patrick Howarth, who had a weak stomach, found it all ‘a bit of a strain’.52 From then on he survived in Cairo on a diet of weak tea, boiled rice, Stella beer and whisky, which in no way prevented him from socializing with his Polish agents.
During his London briefing, Howarth had been shown files leading him to believe that Christine and Andrzej were people best avoided, but in Cairo Richard Truszkowski firmly told him to look after them. ‘Christine was a very remarkable woman,’ Howarth soon decided, ‘we became very close friends.’53 He would never forget the first time he saw her, ‘stretching in cat-like delight with the Gezira sun’ in her ‘dull dark-brown jacket, dull light-brown skirt, [and] brilliant brown mobile arresting eyes’.54 She had just flatly turned down another offer of office work from Tamplin. When Howarth asked her reasons she replied that while she had plenty of physical endurance, she had no intellectual stamina. Howarth believed her real reason was her determination never to accept anything second-rate. ‘In issues that were important to her,’ he wrote, ‘she wanted the best or nothing.’55 Later he would describe her aversion to office work as ‘almost pathological’.56 Truszkowski, however, believed that Christine’s fear of being desk-bound came from a deep-seated ‘inferiority complex’.57 She was proud and, being surprisingly thin-skinned, likely to ‘burst into tears’ at the slightest criticism, giving ‘the worst possible impression of herself’, he wrote.58 ‘I am incapable of working in an office’, she admitted.59 In the field, Christine’s self-belief and determination were steely enough to overcome the most extraordinary challenges; but she had little interest in, or aptitude for, paperwork and, unsuited to the faintest shadow of constraint, the etiquette of an office left her cold. She was, however, quite prepared to guide Howarth on the intricacies of Polish politics, provide background on particular officers, or discuss the possibilities for getting Polish workers to defect across the Balkans. She even proposed Michal Gradowski for an SOE mission in Albania, but Christine was also still holding out for a mission of her own, and ‘the more difficult and dangerous’, Howarth recognized, the better.60
It did not take Howarth long to see that Christine’s considerable talents were being wasted with her ‘salamander existence’ at the Gezira Club, and he made up his mind to rehabilitate her.61 Later he would claim, only half-joking, that ‘the most useful thing I did in World War Two was to reinstate Christine Granville’.62 It was also perhaps one of the more difficult. A man of his time, Howarth was not a natural advocate of treating his female colleagues on the same terms as their male counterparts. When his secretary undertook to darn his socks he praised her initiative alongside her complexion and ‘tinkling voice’.63 But although ‘thoroughly feminine’, Christine was clearly exceptional: she had worked for British secret services in the field for two years before SOE was officially given the green light to recruit women for operational duties.64 She herself, Howarth noted, had no time for any kind of discrimination. ‘She set her own standards, which were high … [
and] would treat a General or a Sergeant with exactly the same courtesy and, if she thought their human qualities merited it, the same degree of attention’, and she had an ‘aristocratic disdain’ for differences of creed or colour. She was never intolerant of failure or inadequacy, but she was tersely dismissive of people she found pretentious, sending them away with such comments as ‘bloody fool’ or ‘quel poltron’.65 Howarth judged Christine to be at once attractive, intelligent, passionate about her country and her people, experienced, able and under-utilized. With support from Churchill, the first female SOE agents had been dropped into France the previous autumn. It was time to get Christine ready to return to the field.
As a first step, Howarth arranged for Christine to be recruited into the FANYs. In 1943 women in the British military were not allowed to carry guns or explosives. To get around this Gubbins enrolled female SOE agents into the FANYs, which officially operated outside the Armed Forces but still offered some protection under the Geneva Convention in case of capture, and provided pensions should the women become casualties. For a couple of weeks Christine was placed in the care of Gwendolin Lees, who was soon captivated by this ‘most remarkable’ woman.66 Christine practised her cover story on Lees, presenting herself as a penniless patriot, married at the age of just seventeen, and so now unable to marry the love of her life, ‘Andy Kennedy’. But her passion and patriotism were undisguised. She was completely dedicated to helping SOE to liberate Poland, Lees reported, hugely impressed.67 Although the two women spent only a short time together, years later Lees would name her eldest daughter after Christine.
Apart from this Christine had little to do with the FANYs, either operationally or socially. The only time she wore the uniform was for the photograph for her papers, and then she had to cadge the correct buttons from a friend’s summer drill set. Christine carried any uniform well, but the resulting photo was a far cry from the naked-beneath-a-fur-coat shot that had once graced her Polish identity papers; there would be little chance of even the most efficient card-index putting the two together. Her once deliberately provocative beauty was now hidden behind a clean face, beret, khaki uniform with shirt, tie, and borrowed brass buttons. Only her signature, squashed up against the document’s spine as it overran the allotted space, hinted that there was more to this woman than could be contained on paper.
By September 1942 Howarth was working to find Christine a job as a wireless operator in the field, sending information, and messages for drops of men and supplies to aid national resistance, back to base in London or Algiers. The idea appealed to her, but Howarth was concerned that training would be difficult to arrange, as she would be ‘the only woman housed with some 300 thugs’ in Rustum Buildings.68 Nonetheless Christine started a course in October and was soon reportedly ‘very happy with her Morse alphabet’.69 She had much to smile about. Her teacher was a handsome young half-British, half-Italian sergeant-instructor called Dick Mallaby, known at least as much for his ‘gentle, almost dreamy manner’, as for his fine record of service.70 Her greatest source of pleasure, however, was an offer of employment in Turkey on completing her training. But despite many weeks spent on the roofs of various Cairo buildings with her SOE suitcase transmitter bleeping and whispering on its dials as she sent practice transmissions to Baghdad, Christine could not get the hang of her wireless.71 After early sessions she would throw her hands in the air, her skin flushing, and exclaim loudly to all around that she could not do it; it was impossible.72 It was not an office job, but it was the kind of repetitive work she abhorred, and when, in August, her proposed mission was cancelled because it was decided that she was too well-known in Turkey, her patience with the authorities who were still forcing her to remain away from active service began to wear perilously thin. But ‘slowly and with some difficulty’, she at last began to master her wireless set, and was able to send a decent fifteen words a minute by the end of the year.*73
She now needed to work on her coding, ‘the deadliest of parlour games’, as SOE’s Head of Coding, Leo Marks, put it.74 The best signallers and coders were ‘girls straight from higher education schools…’, Gubbins wrote, who ‘had not lost the classroom’.75 Once again Christine was not a natural, and once again her famously courageous, and now infamously temperamental, figure became a familiar sight in Rustum Buildings, where, to the irritation of the other FANYs, even the most taciturn officers would fall over themselves to be introduced. She ‘had the most extraordinary grace and a casual sort of chic’, Margaret Pawley remembered, along with ‘qualities of fascination which men found irresistible’.76 ‘As soon as she came in all the men stopped to look at her, even the very austere Colonel, who usually had his nose in his books, would leap up to offer her a seat.’77
In the autumn of 1942 relations between Poland and the Soviet Union were rapidly deteriorating. General Anders’s army was now more than 75,000 strong, including plenty of Soviet spies and agitators. Soon rumours began to circulate suggesting that the tide of support was shifting to Anders from Sikorski. By mid-September Sikorski felt compelled to denounce plotters in a speech to the National Council. If anything, however, the intrigues became more complex. Anders was a brilliant professional soldier, not a natural conspirator. According to Richard Truszkowski, now in London, when told by the Polish authorities that ‘if he stuck to straight soldiering he would be a howling success, but that he was a mere child where politics was concerned’, Anders reportedly ‘took it all like a lamb and promised to be more circumspect in the future’.78 Christine, however, reported that ‘cavalry officers of her acquaintance’ all believed that the established Polish authority’s days were numbered.79
In December, Truszkowski outlined the ‘numerous’ difficulties still surrounding the operational deployment of both Christine and Andrzej. The main problem was ‘the violent opposition to them by practically all Polish organisations’, a position exacerbated by what he called ‘their somewhat complex personalities’.80 But there were also other concerns. The two of them had stated that they were little known to the Gestapo and would be able to move around occupied territory without risk, but Truszkowski had his doubts. ‘Their somewhat striking personal appearance’, combined with Andrzej’s wooden leg, made them ‘the sort of people who once seen are never forgotten’, he wrote very reasonably, and to make matters worse they had ‘literally hundreds if not thousands of friends [and] enemies, all over Europe, Africa and Asia Minor’, increasing the risk of recognition.81 ‘They would shine under conditions in which personal courage and determination are essential’, Truszkowski noted, but he continued, rather unfairly given the amount of information Christine had been passing to the British in Cairo, neither of them ‘have any special talents for conspiratorial work’.82
As a result of Truszkowski’s report it was suggested that Christine should be kept in the Middle East and found work as a nurse, preferably within a danger zone, as a wireless operator, or with prisoners-of-war. Christine was happy with all of this, asserting only that she could not countenance the humiliation of receiving any further pay for no active service. Then a radical new idea was floated. George Taylor reported that Christine was ‘convinced she could live in France as a Frenchwoman’, and that Andrzej might pass as a French Pole.83 The Poles could have no objection to them being dropped into France or French North Africa. With the prospect of a new mission, Christine, Andrzej and Patrick Howarth celebrated Christmas at a flurry of charity balls and military dances. The future suddenly seemed worth looking forward to.
1943 started optimistically. Christine was still waiting for orders, but while she did so she took classes in English and Italian. When Howarth had first arrived in Cairo he noticed that she always spoke French as, ‘her English was not very good’.84 In fact she spoke English charmingly, if not very accurately, with a lilting accent and similarly seductive turn of phrase, often translating idioms literally if she felt it added impact. But then even her French was ‘fluent but rather breathy’, a friend noted, and her nat
ural manner was to speak in what Wladimir Ledóchowski had once described as a ‘halting … panting fashion’.85 Always conscious of the power of language, when she felt charm would not help her Christine would simply petition friends to write ‘in your King’s English’ on her behalf.86 While preparing for an unknown future, she also now took the opportunity to re-establish contact with old friends, exchanging letters through the diplomatic post with, among others, Kate and Sir Owen O’Malley. The next month Sir Owen was appointed as the British Ambassador to the Polish Republic, represented by the Polish government-in-exile in London under Sikorski, a position he retained until the end of the war. ‘Do you think he loves me still’, Christine asked Kate, ‘for months I have tried to write, but the problem of how to begin defeats me’.87 She need not have worried. Christine could ‘still rely absolutely on his undying friendship’, SOE reported, having read their exchanges.88
Andrzej’s prospects were also improving. In March he was sent on a paramilitary course in Haifa in Palestine. Despite his false leg, he did well. Happy and popular, he was soon being considered as a potential instructor. While Andrzej was away Christine shared a small flat with Livia ‘Pussi’ Nasta, the daughter of a well-known Romanian journalist, and who worked for the British, broadcasting news back to her country despite being terrified that her voice would be recognized and harm would come to her family. She would later marry Bill Deakin, who ran SOE’s Yugoslav section.* Christine still moved in an international crowd, although more and more of her British officer friends had arrived in Cairo, among them Aidan Crawley, Alfred Gardyne de Chastelaine, Ivor Porter and Ted Howe.
