The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville

by Clare Mulley

  The truth was an even better story. Knowing the risk she ran as a British agent whose face and name were already in German files, the woman who had once been too shy to talk to her friend’s handsome brother and his intimidating fiancée in British Cairo had walked straight into Gestapo headquarters in German-controlled France and demanded the release of three captured British and French officers with nothing but her own bravado and some broken radio crystals in her bag. On paper it looked suicidal. ‘The way she handled these thugs, whom I had had occasion to meet myself, and who were entirely without normal human reactions, was unbelievably skilful’, Francis testified two months later.61 ‘It was a tremendous bluff by a very, very courageous lady … she took voluntarily one chance in one hundred. Undoubtedly if it had not come off she would have been shot with us.’62 To which Fielding, who would later dedicate his own war memoir to Christine, added, ‘fortunately her courage was matched by her wits’.63 In the words of General Stawell’s citation for Christine’s award for bravery, her ‘nerve, coolness and devotion to duty and high courage … must certainly be regarded as one of the most remarkable personal exploits of the war’.64

  * * *

  Once the Allies had got through the southern coastal defences after the 15 August landings, they made their way quickly up the country. Some of the units followed Havard Gunn, either driving a little Fiat while dressed in full uniform with kilt, or sitting in a café with his feet on the table, waiting for the columns to catch him up. ‘There was no real resistance’, Gunn reported. Progress was greatly supported by the work of the Maquis, both in uprooting the anti-glider stakes, known as ‘Rommel’s asparagus’, designed to prevent the arrival of enemy air support, and in harassing the German retreat and even trapping some of the smaller garrisons that had been left isolated. Small groups of troops now began to surrender indiscriminately. Boys of fourteen and grandmothers in headscarves were seen with anything up to twenty German prisoners in tow. Francis’s men covered the more dangerous right flank of the forces advancing towards the northern borders of Italy, and were soon in control of the hugely strategic Route Napoléon from Cannes to Grenoble. His organization was of ‘inestimable value to the allied armies’, SOE later recorded.65 By 17 August the American general Patch had landed unopposed at Saint-Tropez with 100,000 men and 10,000 vehicles, and started driving north, quickly outflanking the residual German presence. ‘Basically,’ Gunn said, ‘the Germans realized the war was over.’66

  Digne was liberated two days after Christine’s rescue operation, and she, Francis and Fielding joined the celebrations as the town applauded the Americans, some of whom drove by standing up in their cars, lapping up their warm reception. Lezzard, now officially a casualty of war, sat in a chair in the main street, where a queue of women lined up to kiss the injured hero. A few streets further up Fielding noticed a different procession had been organized, in which the main participants were being made to parade in front of a jeering crowd. At first, as their heads had been shaved, he could not tell if those being humiliated were men or women: ‘sullen creatures … they looked like frightened lunatics’.67 But their half-dressed state soon revealed them to be women, each being punished for having spent some nights in the arms of a German soldier. It was a depressing scene soon being enacted across France, sometimes more horrifically with swastikas branded on the women’s cheeks, as long-suppressed sorrows, political rivalries and petty score-settling surfaced in the first weeks of liberation.

  On 20 August, Francis and Christine, driving a borrowed jeep and looking rather scruffy in makeshift uniforms ‘with all kinds of insignia, pips on one shoulder and none on the other’, presented themselves to the American General Butler at Sisteron.68 Their attire was far from unusual among their fellow British officers, who were standardly sent in with just a pair of boots, blue pants and vest, uniform, and an army groundsheet with a collar sewn on it so it could be worn as a mackintosh when required, and who had often lost much of that after a few weeks in the field. The Americans had arrived in ‘gorgeous uniforms’, complete with peaked caps, ‘suntanned’ shirts, rain-covers and macs.69 To their eyes Francis and Christine did not look as if they represented much of a fighting force, and their offer of continued help met a curt response. ‘He told me to bugger off, he didn’t want anything to do with private armies [or] bandits, and turned back to his maps’, Francis recorded furiously.70 He and Christine, her quick temper ever sensitive to insult, had to be calmed down by one of the general’s intelligence aides, who apologized, explaining that as there were still so few official reports of the role played by the resistance the general preferred to deal only with French military officers. As a result General Butler lost the support of the one Allied officer with years of experience in France and an unequalled knowledge of the area and its people.

  Learning that the Americans’ next move was to liberate Gap, Francis and Christine decided to get there first. They arrived ahead of the US forces only to discover that the Wehrmacht troops had already surrendered to a member of Francis’s network, and had been herded into a cinema where they were being guarded by boy scouts while the resistance groups congregated to celebrate in the main square. Francis and Christine joined the party, and late that evening they stole back to their jeep, took off the handbrake, and rolled down the steep hillside, laughing all the way like a couple of kids. When American tanks arrived the next day there was nothing for them to do except to organize a parade.

  A last German counter-attack the following morning lasted less than fifteen minutes. Three hundred men were captured, raising the local total to over a thousand – a logistical nightmare. Learning that several hundred of these were Poles, Christine was delighted to be given a megaphone by a US captain and invited to address the men in their native language as they sat lined up on the bank of a river. ‘She asked them if they were willing to fight with us’, Francis recalled, and then told them that as, under the Geneva Convention, they could not fight in a foreign uniform, they would have go naked to the waist – at which hundreds of soldiers started to rip off their vests and shirts. ‘They tore them off, exultant! Col de Larche all over again.’71 But General Butler would not countenance this approach, and threatened to have Christine and Francis arrested and court-martialled if they did not leave immediately. ‘Perhaps Butler simply didn’t like our faces’, Francis mused, but taking him at his word they moved on to report to General Patch at Draguignan.72

  As the Allies continued their advance, liberating Avignon on 25 August, the German retreat was hugely hampered by the resistance. Francis’s network now not only successfully held the entire Route Napoléon, but also closed off German access to the Alpine frontier passes. The Allies arrived at Grenoble within seven days, almost without any fighting. The local Wehrmacht surrender was accepted by the French commander Huet, the former military leader of the Vercors. Recognizing this extraordinary achievement, General Patch asked Francis and Christine to act as his liaison team with the resistance forces in the area.

  The outcome of the invasion was no longer in doubt, least of all to the Nazis. Francis and Christine drove their open-topped jeep along roads bordered by piles of burnt and abandoned military equipment. None of the French guarding the columns of hundreds of prisoners that they passed had met any threats from enemy forces moving in the other direction, and there was no information on troop movements at any of the new town authorities on their route. Within two weeks French section FANYs from Massingham, who had sung the Marseillaise in Algiers as the first Allied troops landed in southern France, were heading towards the bomb-pockmarked runway at Aix-en-Provence. From here they drove to Avignon, the new international HQ. ‘All along the route we were constantly stopped by excited groups of resistance workers, most of them armed with a motley selection of guns and all of them prepared to fire if the answers were not in order’, one FANY recorded. ‘It was a hair-raising progress.’73 But for Francis and Christine the immediate action in France was over, and they knew that their own intimat
e partnership would also soon be a thing of the past.

  Arriving at a joyous, liberated Lyon, Christine was delighted to meet old friends including John Roper, who was clearly still deeply in love with her and very glad to find her in one piece, and Peter Storrs, who described her as looking ‘very attractive, in a slim-greyhound sort of way’.74 Even Sylviane Rey was there, having been liberated while still nursing wounded maquisards in the Vercors. Despite the long summer months working in the open, Sylviane’s pale skin seemed untouched by the sun, but she had developed the ‘sad amused smile’ that was common to many veterans of the resistance.75 Now she laughingly pointed out that Christine and Francis had arrived in a car with the number-plate ‘MI5’. But the many friends who could not join them meant that celebrations were inevitably muted. Gubbins estimated that the resistance alone had lost 24,000 people, but, sitting in his Baker Street office, he neatly concluded that ‘France had regained her soul.’76

  ‘There were parties,’ Francis remembered, ‘but it wasn’t feasting. The war was still going on.’77 Above all, ‘the tragedy of Poland’, now suffering horrific losses as the citizens of Warsaw joined the underground Home Army in house-to-house fighting against the German occupiers, ‘was driving Christine mad with impotence and impatience.’78 Francis understood that Christine was ‘passionately Polish’, and felt her obligation to her country ‘profoundly’.79 As the people of Paris, Lyon, Avignon, and even tiny Saint-Julien-en-Vercors were toasting their liberators, in Warsaw thousands of Polish resistance fighters and civilians were still battling Wehrmacht troops. Being surrounded by cheering crowds, women throwing flowers and men handing out glasses of wine was a bittersweet experience for Christine. She was delighted to have helped defeat a common enemy and bring freedom to the French, but she could not help but be disappointed that she was not walking down a Polish street, wasn’t bringing freedom to her people and her country, and that this was not the fulfilment of her dreams.

  After forty-eight hours, Christine, Francis, Sorensen and Fielding reported to the Bristol Hotel in Paris for debriefing. Keen to reclaim French national pride, de Gaulle had demanded the immediate repatriation of British SOE officers, and brought FFI forces under fresh army control. Roper had already driven north on his motorbike. Fielding was posted back to Greece.* Sorensen took a senior intelligence post in the city, and later became the mayor of Algiers. Colonel Zeller, who had fought with Francis and Christine in the Vercors, became the military governor of Paris. Christine and Francis remained in the capital for a few days, meeting up with friends and comrades. ‘Paris was enjoying a brief revival of her old self. There was … a sparkle and a gaiety that Parisians had not known for a long time’, wrote Laura Foskett, Christine’s former Cairo flatmate, who now also found herself in the capital.80 But although Paris ‘seemed to be full of ex-spies’, Foskett quickly saw that Christine was finding it hard to adjust to the peace. ‘She came to Paris in search of new lovers and adventures’, Foskett surmised, perhaps unfairly, with a mixture of admiration and sympathy.81

  Christine was not at a loose end, however. The immediate thrill of clandestine resistance might be over, but she and Francis now wanted to help set the record straight about the support that members of the Jockey circuit had rendered to the resistance, which, during the war, had had to be kept secret from their own communities. They also started to distribute SOE funds to the families and widows of those who had worked with SOE units and did not initially qualify for French help. Later Francis would come back to France on a ‘Judex’ mission to ensure that the families of those who had helped the resistance were fully recognized and supported. He also tried to help set the record straight for Pierre Agapov, his former deputy who faced prosecution for informing under torture, and helped Albert, his radio operator, to trace his wife and daughter, both of whom had survived their incarceration in the camps.

  With former resistants finally able to speak openly, Francis suddenly found himself heralded as a great man and Christine, his assistant, as a ‘magnificent woman’.82 Neither of them had sought or desired such praise, but for many Francis was as a brother or an uncle, and their doors would always be open to him. He was deeply moved, and maintained strong ties with the families he had once worked with, later making his home with them in the south of France.* Christine, however, shared none of Francis’s feeling of belonging, or sense of closure. They had shared something fabulous in France, and his friendship was something she would always prize. But the liberation celebrations, and the many small dinners and tributes they received locally, brought home to her the great difference between them. To the people of France, and to some extent even to Francis himself, what mattered was that Christine was a woman of great determination and courage. Her endearing accent might have been Polish, or she might have been Irish, British or even French; her actions completely transcended the question of her nationality. But to Christine, she herself, her determination and her courage were all Polish. And, for her, the war was far from won.

  In September, Christine finally hitched a lift on a small British plane flying to London. She was pleased to be wearing some new nylon stockings, then ‘as rare as snowballs in summer’, that had been given to her by Sylviane, and she was carrying the few British gold sovereigns she had not been able to put to good use.83 To witness celebrations in Poland similar to those taking place across France was perhaps a wish too far, but Christine was determined to now at least play a useful role in the liberation of her own country.

  14: MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

  ‘Please allot a code name urgently to Miss Christine Granville, who has been chosen to act as a courier in Poland’, an SOE memo of 9 November 1944 requested.1 ‘Anxious for further work in the field’, Christine had volunteered to join three mission teams of British officers who were to be dropped into Nazi-occupied Poland to observe political conditions and attempt the rescue of prisoners held in German camps.2 Her proposal was gratefully accepted, and supported by both the British and the increasingly desperate Polish special services. She had been in Britain for less than a month.

  Christine had spent a miserable first night in London, pacing the wet September pavements and sitting for a while on a doorstep in Regent’s Street, as she refused to use the last of the SOE gold to pay for a room. She then moved into John Roper’s flat, which she shared with his aunt and, more conveniently, his cook. When that felt too crowded she stayed with the O’Malleys at their London house in Cheyne Walk. Roper was also in London, and within a few days both they and Francis visited SOE HQ in Orchard Court, just off Baker Street, to file their reports and be debriefed. Punctual as she was, Christine’s reputation preceded her. ‘All the bigwigs wanted to question her’, Noreen Riols, one of the SOE secretaries, remembered. ‘She was known to be an incredible woman.’3 Among those assessing Christine was Maurice Buckmaster, the Head of F (French) Section, who was particularly keen to hear the story of Francis’s rescue, and to praise what he called Christine’s ‘wonderful record’ of service.4 Vera Atkins, Buckmaster’s level-headed assistant, was more critical in her appraisal, finding Christine ‘very brave, very attractive, but a loner and a law unto herself’.*5 Riols was more interested in what Christine wore: a well-cut tweed skirt, casually tailored open shirt and smart suede jacket. She looked ‘rather sporty’, with her hands in her pockets, but was distinguished, Riols decided, by her ‘casual elegance’.6 Christine was dressed like a typical well-to-do Englishwoman of the time, just up from the country, an image also cultivated by Atkins, who was usually found in ‘a twin set or tweed’.7 In fact both women came from part-Jewish families in Eastern Europe and, consciously or not, were repositioning themselves in wartime London. As Christine had arrived with no papers, she had to resubmit her personal details. With an eye to the uncertain future, she quietly listed her place of birth as ‘London’, appropriately entering it beside her equally fictitious date of birth.8

  Christine did not feel much at home in London, however. Among her SOE friends there, R
oper was still half in love with her, but had a local girlfriend and described his relationship with Christine as an exceptionally close ‘straight friendship’. ‘It would be absurd to say that her beauty added nothing’, he qualified, but ‘the fact of the matter was she was an exceptional person with an exceptional capacity for friendship’.9 Francis, meanwhile, had quickly left London to be reunited with Nan and his two young daughters and, although he and Christine always met when he was in town, their relationship would never be the same. A greater advocate of full disclosure than Christine, Francis told Nan about their affair, and even asked if she would be happy for him to continue it. She told him that she would not. Francis had imagined Nan’s war to have been ‘utterly empty … except for the babies’, while he felt that his own life had been expanded in every direction.10 Now he learned that she too had had an affair, with his own conducting officer, who would not return from active service. Somehow they had to find a way of rebuilding their marriage. Francis did, once, introduce Nan to Christine, contact that he felt to be ‘necessary’, but it was brief and never repeated.11

  Christine’s focus was now entirely on Poland. A national ‘Rising’, timed to coincide with a major landing of regular forces or Western air support for a final push to freedom, had always been on the Polish agenda. By July 1944 the Red Army, now officially Poland’s ally, was marching from Russia to Berlin on its ‘westward flood’, as Gubbins ominously put it, and advancing rapidly towards Warsaw ‘like a swift rising tide’.12 The Polish Home Army aided their progress by attacking the German rear, and vital road and rail communications. At the end of the month Soviet troops had reached the River Vistula and the ‘sound of Russian guns could be heard in Warsaw’.13 The timing seemed compelling. Nazi Germany was still reeling from a bomb plot against Hitler; the Soviets had reversed the German advance; France was fighting towards liberation; and British SOE missions were increasing.* Britain had warned Poland that flight logistics prevented them from sending in the Polish Parachute Brigade or significant arms, or even from bombing German airfields. However, for some years, Wilkinson later confessed, SOE had been so deeply committed to the Polish cause that ‘we funked facing them with the realities of their situation’, making the limits of British support now hard to digest.14 The citizens of Warsaw were impatient for action, hoping to welcome the Soviets into their capital as free citizens, and in late July the Polish government-in-exile authorized General Bór-Komorowski, commanding the Home Army, to announce a Warsaw Rising at his discretion. The Polish premier, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, then flew to Moscow to win Stalin’s support for what they hoped would be a short and decisive action. On 29 July, Moscow Radio broadcast an appeal for the citizens of Warsaw to rise up against their German oppressors, urging that ‘there is not a moment to lose’.15