by Clare Mulley
Grief-stricken, Andrzej could no longer bear to tread water in Cairo. In November, the moment his transfer was approved, he went to Ramat David, just outside Haifa, to undertake SOE parachute training. At first there was some resistance to his joining the course, in case his artificial leg broke on landing. Undeterred, he offered to pay for any damage and secured the permission of his doctors. First they practised rolling off the back of a truck moving at 40 mph. Then they were taught to jump harnessed from a tower, and after that through the floor of an old Wellington bomber. Two Red Cross lorries were put on standby when Andrzej did his first real jump. He landed perfectly, but a colleague broke a collarbone. After five jumps from a Hudson, the lowest from 500 feet, Andrzej earned his wings. There were ‘some very colourful people’ on that course, one of the other trainees later remembered. Andrzej was the most colourful of all, ‘a splendid person’ and, the instructors noticed, a hugely comforting presence, jumping out of the Hudsons with his wooden leg ‘just as merrily as the rest of us’.11 ‘He is as happy as a King’, Christine now wrote to Kate O’Malley, ‘and I am as light to him as a butterfly because he has been given some purpose again.12 Andrzej was the first one-legged parachutist in SOE, but he was barred from dropping in the field because of his disability, which enraged him.13 Instead he was posted to Italy as a parachute liaison officer, but only after a trip to London to get his artificial leg adjusted.
It was December by the time Andrzej arrived in London from the Middle East. Although not a sun-worshipper like Christine, over the last two years he had gained a deep tan which emphasized what a friend once described as his ‘hot blue eyes’, so he made a striking figure in London’s wintry streets.14 But he didn’t stay there long. He had kept in touch with Kate O’Malley, who was now in her early twenties and living between London and Surrey. Kate had been deeply impressed by both Christine and Andrzej in Budapest, feeling that they embodied the romantic and courageous spirit of resistance, and she had even written a novel based on their exploits.* However, while Christine described Kate as ‘my best and only friend’, Kate’s most especial esteem was reserved for Andrzej, and by the time he returned to London he had persuaded himself that he was more than a little in love with her too.15
The last time that Kate had seen Andrzej they had just helped Christine fold herself into the boot of Sir Owen’s car, to be smuggled across the Hungarian border to safety in Yugoslavia. Andrzej had then driven off in his fabulous Opel, with a gun and a bottle of Hungarian brandy in his pockets, to take his chances alone. Kate had left Budapest not long afterwards, travelling with her father, the other Legation staff and Christine’s husband, Jerzy Giżycki, through Russia to England ahead of the Nazi advance. Now Andrzej turned up on her doorstep in the Surrey village of Ockham. Andrzej’s English was much improved, but his voice had not lost its strong Polish accent, and when he talked passionately on any subject its deep timbre ‘made his utterances seem to emerge with compressed force’.16 Indeed everything about him seemed forceful: his pride in his country, his determination to serve, and particularly his zest for life, his humour, and his gift for catching laughter despite bearing the deepest tragedy. Kate was swept off her feet, while Andrzej in turn found her freshness and doting admiration ‘adorable’.17
They only had a few weeks together. At the end of January, Andrzej was sent to Italy to take up his post at the Polish parachute school in Bari, before being moved on to Ostuni. Although he sent Kate silk stockings and love letters, written with the aid of an English dictionary, in which he professed to be ‘missing you terrible’, it was clear that his committment to her was already wavering. ‘Write to me as much as you can without waiting for my elaborate replies’, he told her, adding that should Christine be sent to London, ‘you must not tell to her about us in any circumstances’.18 The end of the affair left Kate pining, Sir Owen furious, and Christine unjustly hurt and angry at what she saw as Andrzej’s ‘betrayal’.
Christine had no excuses for resenting Andrzej’s fling: she was up to her neck in new romances of her own in Cairo, and ironically Kate’s brother, Patrick O’Malley, was one of her distractions. It was fortunate, Christine told Kate, in a letter carried by a friend and so free from being ‘deciphered by thirty-six people’, that she had met Patrick on the eve of his wedding, as ‘otherwise I would have fallen madly in love with him … and as here young blondes are difficult to find … I assure you that I am not joking, in fact you know a bit about my tastes and you know he is my type’.19 As it was, although Christine clearly liked and admired Patrick, ‘so spontaneous and kind … a very handsome boy’, she was unusually intimidated by his fiancée. Their first meeting was ‘unfortunate’, she reported. It was at Shepheard’s, ‘the most snobby place in town’, and Christine was in ‘a dirty ugly dress’ while Patrick’s fiancée was ‘very elegant and wore make-up … a woman of the world and a Londoner’.20 After five minutes Christine made her excuses and left. Two days later she bumped into the happy couple again, and having fought back her initial impulse to flee, she suffered a ‘crisis of shyness’, finding herself suddenly unable to pronounce a word in English to them. ‘All the fragile scaffolding of our friendship … has collapsed’, she told Kate, ‘Voilà!’21 But, as ever, Christine had other admirers waiting in the wings.
Michael Dunford was a tall, blonde British officer, who had been seeing Christine’s former flatmate, Laura Foskett. But once he met Christine he was smitten. Dunford was a radar specialist and expert in communications who had travelled widely in the Middle East working in diplomacy, and he implicitly understood the need for tact and patience in negotiations. Recognizing that he could not pin Christine down, he decided he was prepared to wait for her.
Christine’s friend Zofia Tarnowska had meanwhile fallen for Bill Stanley Moss, a former captain in the Coldstream Guards who had joined SOE after returning from the final defeat of the Afrika Corps in Tunisia. Tall, good-looking and ‘devilishly languid’, Moss fought bravely, danced beautifully and drank enthusiastically.22 Back from the front, treated like heroes, and with a fortune in back-pay, he and his friend Paddy Leigh Fermor wasted no time in moving out of their barrack-like Cairo digs, popularly known as ‘Hangover Hall’, to rent a Zamalek villa. Soon there were six young SOE officers living in the house between missions, and ‘all pretty pleased with ourselves’, Moss admitted.23 Zofia joined them that autumn, moving in with a fictitious chaperone, a swimming costume, evening dress and her two pet mongooses. They called the villa ‘Tara’ and, for a few months in late 1943 and early 1944, their wild parties made it the most exciting venue in Cairo. Glasses were smashed and chairs broken. When the sofa caught fire it was thrown from a window, and Zofia’s prune vodka, infused in the bath with alcohol bought in gallon containers from a local garage, once rendered her friends blind for several days. Guests included King Farouk, who arrived with a case of champagne, Egyptian princes, Allied generals, diplomats, journalists, writers and actors. ‘The Poles, of course, were the worst’, one Tara inmate, David Smiley, remembered. ‘They used to come and let their pistols off and shoot bottles … they were a bit wild.’24 It was here too that Moss and Leigh Fermor dreamt up their plan to kidnap the German commander of Crete, mapping out their moves on Tara’s steamy bathroom tiles for the operation that would later be made famous by Moss’s book Ill Met By Moonlight and the film based upon it, starring Dirk Bogarde.
Paddy Leigh Fermor remembered Christine slowly ‘dawning’ on him at Rustum Buildings, where he once pushed through a crowd to see her and Andrzej being refused entry by the security guards in 1941. Later he noticed her at the Gezira Club and then at Tara. ‘Her beautiful looks…’, he wrote, ‘were gentle and unobvious; the charm lay in the quietness’.25 In late 1943 Christine was still reeling from the horrific reports from Poland, and Sikorski’s death. While the high-spirited Zofia distracted herself from her own grief by living life to the full, Christine hovered somewhat uneasily in the social margins. ‘Christine was solitary, she hated parties
and rarely accepted an invitation’, Laura Foskett wrote, and although always very conscious of her appearance, Patrick Howarth noted that while Zofia was turning up at parties dressed as Scarlett O’Hara, Christine ‘frequently dressed in a manner that attracted little or no attention’.26
Christine had always had what Howarth called a ‘chameleon quality’, which had helped her to be so supremely successful as an agent in Hungary and Poland.27 Now she picked her moments to shine socially. Moss remembered her once entering a room ‘hunched like a drowned rat’, and only standing up straight when he pinched her behind.28 That evening she made her excuses for not dancing by telling her would-be partner that a man she had been madly in love with had once died in her arms on the dance floor, and she had sworn thereafter never to dance again. The real reason, Moss believed, was that she was tone-deaf and could not dance at all. ‘She only knew one song’, he wrote mischievously, ‘and would whistle it out of tune.’29
But if the mood took her, Christine had what Moss called a ‘mesmeric power of “switching on” her personality’.30 Paddy Leigh Fermor was drawn to her by her courage and flair, rooted, as he saw it, in ‘patriotism and a sense of pity, backed by a love of adventure’.31 For others the appeal lay in her dark good looks, once described as ‘la Beauté du Diable’, the Devil’s Beauty.32 For Moss though, her attractiveness lay in ‘a blend of vivacity, flirtatiousness, charm and sheer personality … like a searchlight’ which when she chose ‘could blind anyone in its beam’.33 Nevertheless, he declared, ‘I would never become involved with Christine. It would be like buying a Hispano-Suiza.’34 The Hispano-Suiza company was famous for producing luxury cars crafted in rosewood, but during the war focused entirely on aircraft engines and high-performance automatic weapons. Moss tried to objectify Christine, but what came to mind conveyed not just class and quality but power and danger. He knew that Christine was no longer simply whiling away her days round the Gezira Club pool. She was, like the other agents, being trained in preparation for a return to the field.
SOE was launched, one agent later wrote, in the face of ‘bitter political opposition to using women in a combat situations’.35 Women were still restricted to non-combatant roles but Gubbins had successfully argued the case for using women as armed couriers in occupied countries, securing Churchill’s backing in April 1942. Gubbins was considered ‘a lech’ by some of the female staff, and admired for his way with women by several of the men, including the young Kim Philby.36 But he also recognized the potential contribution of able and determined women, like Christine, who had shown that they could move more freely around enemy-occupied territories than any able-bodied man, and could bring valuable results. By 1943 women had proved so successful as couriers that, unknown to the public, the decision was taken to use them in other capacities, such as wireless operators, one of the most dangerous roles of all.
SOE’s basic training programme owed much to Gubbins’s 1939 manual The Art of Guerrilla Warfare and its companion text, The Partisan Leader’s Handbook, which were full of concise and practical advice on how to organize an ambush, sabotage telegraph lines, contaminate water supplies, set fire to cinemas, and stop enemy informers – ‘they must be killed’.37 In Britain, training took between six to nine months as students progressed through a four-stage series of ‘schools’. The process started with an assessment, which was followed by weeks of paramilitary training in the Scottish Highlands where trainees built up endurance, learnt to live off the land, were taught fieldcraft and received commando-style training in weapons and explosives, silent killing, raid tactics, demolition and signals. Those who stayed the course went on to parachute training, and finally to what Christine’s Cairo friend Ivor Porter called the ‘ancient and modern tricks of subversion’, which were taught at Beaulieu Abbey, popularly known as the SOE ‘finishing school’.38* In North Africa, however, Howarth believed that training ‘could transform the enthusiastic volunteer into an effective agent within two to three months’, which was fortunate – that was all the time that Christine now had.39
Christine, typically, seemed to be doing the right things in the wrong order. She had already started her training in Morse codes and wireless signalling when she was sent on a parachute course, probably at Ramat David near Haifa. Like Andrzej before her, she slowly progressed from throwing herself from moving trucks until she was deemed ready to undertake three practice drops from an aircraft. Each time she dropped perfectly, her parachute billowing into a silken cloud above her until she braced to land, rolled, and gathered it up. But, as a woman, she was not expected to take the final practice drop that would enable her to earn her coveted paratrooper’s ‘wings’ after her fifth ‘op’ jump. This was a constant irritation to female SOE agents, giving the lie to claims made by Maurice Buckmaster, Head of SOE’s F (French) Section, that ‘we didn’t make any differentiation’ between the genders.40 But the training was still both rigorous and exhausting.
By the end of March 1944 she had also received training in elementary explosives, and had undertaken an SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) course in firearms, in particular pistol handling and use of the SOE weapon of choice, the Sten gun. Although Christine had grown up with guns at her family estate, she had preferred racing to hunting and had little shooting experience. Now she was taught to shoot from the hip, aiming intuitively at a target and firing two shots, in the style taught by Major Bill Fairburn and Captain Eric Sykes, SOE’s two combat experts, previously employed by the Shanghai police force. Although a brilliant technique, what Christine mainly learnt was that she hated firing guns, finding them too loud and too shocking. Fortunately Fairburn and Sykes had also developed the ‘ideal’ fighting knife, with a seven-inch, double-edged, steel blade that could easily penetrate a ribcage, and which was issued as standard. Christine’s fitted neatly into a leather sheath designed to be strapped to her thigh.
The SIS course also covered personal security and silent killing, the extreme version of unarmed combat using only a knife, a noose or bare hands. The methods were a mixture of karate, ju-jitsu and what Fairburn had learnt ‘from hard practice on the Shanghai waterfront’.41 Such training not only gave the slender Christine more physical confidence, it was designed to drill into her that her task might, at times, have to be aggressive. ‘This is war, not sport’, the SOE training manual instructed. ‘Your aim is to kill your opponent as soon as possible.’42
She was also taught ‘tradecraft’, ranging from simple personal disguises such as changing her hair or putting bungs in her mouth or nose to alter the shape of her face, to the art of covert surveillance. Finally she was trained to organize dropping grounds for arms and explosives, and prepare reception committees for Allied agents being sent in to support specific actions. For this she needed to know how to identify suitable fields, organize a landing committee, arrange communications with London or Algiers and, if necessary, control an aircraft landing with the use of pocket torches. It was work she loved and in which she excelled.
In February 1944 Gubbins found a telegram in his in-tray, informing him ‘with regrets’ that his eldest son, Michael, had been killed by a shell at Anzio while moving into no-man’s-land in advance of the Allied landings. ‘A totally useless death’, he told Wilkinson.43 Yet his professional focus did not falter. By the spring preparations were well under way for the Allied invasion of Europe, and numerous SOE missions were taking place in Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, Italy, Greece and France.
Throughout the early months of 1944 Zofia threw a series of parties at Tara, and other suitably flamboyant venues such as the Cairo racetrack, whenever one of their group was sent on a mission. At some point in the evening a car would come and quietly collect whoever was due to be dropped into enemy territory. The unspoken rule was that no one was to feel anxious, as that would have been ‘to accept the possibility of something dreadful happening to them’.44 Even the SOE secretaries put a brave face on the farewells, writing poems like ‘Darling Joe, Please Go’ – Joe being the s
ecure code-name given to all agents in transit – which begged them to stop ‘hanging around the office, waiting for the planes, slowing the arrangements, of our fertile brains’.45 For Christine, however, each departure raised a different anxiety; that her turn to be dropped would never arrive and she would be left hanging around the office for months to come. But in March 1944 ‘Operation Kris’ was tailor-made for her.
SOE’s plan was to drop Christine back into Hungary, without the knowledge of the Poles, to reactivate the networks that had lost contact with London and the British base in Istanbul earlier that year. The aim was to encourage national resistance, and specifically the sabotage of vital communications, transport lines, industry and oil installations. To achieve this they needed to re-establish wireless communications and make reception arrangements for SOE agents and supplies to be dropped into the country. It was, Howarth wrote, ‘an operation involving the greatest risks and only a slight chance of success’, and yet the strategic importance given to Hungary was deemed great enough to warrant the attempt.46 Christine was SOE’s only trained wireless operator with knowledge of Hungary, and ‘the requisite personal qualities’ to ‘stand at least a chance of survival’.47 She was delighted. Building her case, she told SOE she had a number of close personal friends in Hungary, mostly among the landed gentry although also some of a ‘more left-wing nature’. The drawback was that she could only speak a few words of Magyar but, Howarth concluded blithely, this was compensated for by the fact that ‘she is a person of quite outstanding courage with exceptional charm’.48 Christine, someone scribbled at the bottom of the page, had ‘obviously worked overtime’ on Howarth.49
