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

by Clare Mulley

  To distract her, Michael took Christine out of town as much as possible. Soon after she arrived they had travelled to the Belgian Congo, but it was the open spaces of Kenya that really caught her imagination. Nairobi was surrounded by game parks where they could see herds of impala crossing the road in single file, leaping over the tarmac, and sometimes baboons, or hippos wallowing in the shady water of tree-lined rivers, and occasionally lions with their cubs. Further out, the slopes around Kilimanjaro provided some of the most beautiful farmland in the world, where sisal, alfalfa, sweetcorn, avocados, citrus fruits, pineapple and mangoes were harvested. Christine was entranced and cautiously started to dream of a new future. She applied for permission to live and work in Kenya, and while waiting wrote letters to friends sketching out plans to ‘start something of my own’, perhaps a dairy farm or ‘a tea shop at a crossroads’; anything that would give her ‘the feeling of belonging to something or somewhere’.72 Then perhaps, she wrote to Sir Owen, he and Kate could stay with her ‘for ever and ever and we all will be happy!!!’73 But a few weeks later the Colonial authorities, drowning in residency applications, turned hers down.

  With immaculate timing, Christine now received an envelope from the High Commissioner’s office, containing a gilt-edged invitation to a ceremony at which her George Medal and OBE were to be presented to her by the Governor of Kenya, Sir Philip Mitchell. ‘Bloody bastards’, she spat.74 In what Michael called ‘typical Christine fashion’, she quickly made it known that she was not about to accept honours from the king’s representative in Kenya when His Majesty’s Government regarded her as an unsuitable resident.75 It was only when, to avoid an embarrassing incident, she was granted permission to stay, that she agreed to accept the awards. Engraved around the rim of the George Medal were the words ‘Madame Christina Giżycka’, but the OBE on its civil ribbon, ‘For God and the Empire’, was for the British Christine Granville.76 She was also presented with the War Medal 1939–1945, crowned stars for service in Africa, Italy, France and Germany, and the 1939–1945 Star. Along with the Croix de Guerre, with one star, the Vercors Combatants’ Medal, and her British parachutist’s cloth wings, it made an impressive collection. To these Christine would add the commemorative gorget in the shape of a shield, depicting the Polish eagle protecting a Madonna and child – the Musketeers’ badge that she and Father Laski and others had once held in secret. The design was remarkably similar to the token she had been given as a child visiting Częstochowa with her father. As a British agent, Christine was never honoured by Poland, either by the Polish government-in-exile or the Communist regime in her homeland, but perhaps she felt she carried something just as precious with her in this little Polish talisman, a reminder that she had always fought for the free Poland of her youth.

  Michael now took a job heading the new Kenya Tourist Travel Association, and Christine correspondingly applied for a job as a ground stewardess with Kenyan Civil Aviation. During another unfortunate interview, however, despite her residency permit she was asked why she was travelling on a British passport, and why she did not therefore return to her own country. Kenya was awash with Polish refugees seeking work and Christine was seen as just another immigrant, second-class again. Infuriated, she returned to the offices with a lawyer the following day, and asked her interviewer to repeat his statements, but inside she was sick of such battles.

  Too proud to stay somewhere she felt so unwelcome, Christine travelled back to London, meeting Andrzej, who flew over from Germany to join her, Aidan Crawley and his wife, the war correspondent Virginia Cowles, and other friends. Life had already moved on for most of them; they were settling down in steady jobs and busy with their growing families. Even Francis’s wife, Nan, was pregnant again. Crawley could see that Christine was immediately ‘stifled by an ordinary climate of living’, especially in the grey autumn of dismal post-war London, where Poles were no more welcome than they were in Kenya, and where life seemed to be held together by ration books and food queues.77 Feeling no more at home in Britain than Kenya, and missing the warmth, good food and wide horizons of Africa, Christine begged Andrzej to join her there, and returned to Nairobi.

  Andrzej, however, had no wish to leave his many friends and new plans for his own future. The idea of ‘boiling my brains in the sun’ didn’t appeal to him in the least, he said, and besides he was sure that if he held out Christine would finally come back to live among her friends in Europe.78 Feeling slighted, Christine threw herself back into life with Michael Dunford, travelling extensively in the Middle East with him that autumn. By the end of the year she was trying to persuade her cousin Jan to come out, settle, and lend her some roots. But while fond of Christine, Jan felt that any suggestion of hers should be treated judiciously and, busy trying to make ends meet and support his family in London, he never even managed to visit her. He was right to be cautious. Christine was enjoying a temptingly easy life with Michael, but she was not satisfied. ‘She pined for action…’ Anna Czyzewska realized, ‘for the ancient parapets of Europe, and for Andrew’.79 In 1948 Michael and Christine visited Cyprus, where they spent some of their happiest weeks together and he bought land to build a holiday house, but Christine was always glad to get back to Nairobi, where she could catch up with her friends and the post bringing news from Europe.

  Henry Threlfall, with whom she had waited interminably in Bari to be dropped into Poland, was in Beirut, and invited her to join him there, as he felt so ‘sad and lonely’.80 Aidan Crawley had secured her an interview through the WAAF if she was interested in returning to London. Andrzej was ‘flourishing’ and still ‘fulminating against officials of all kinds’, Crawley told her. ‘I suspect he loves you as much, and as little, as ever.’81 A more recriminatory letter arrived from Sir Owen. ‘Providence’s intention was, I am sure, and is, that you should not lose touch with Kate and me as long as any of us three are alive’, Sir Owen tried to tick her off without seeing her off. ‘You have always gone against Providence, and have left my letters unanswered … I do not ask much of you, but I do ask this, that you should remember me at least once a year and send me a postcard or the shortest of letters.’82 Although not an overt love letter, the strength of Sir Owen’s feelings for Christine was clear. She dutifully replied, saying she would love to sit at his feet, in front of a big fire, and hear all his news, but meanwhile asked after his happiness, before rather pointedly asking how Kate had been, and specifically ‘whom did she pick up as a flirtation? Did she again get engaged to some smart Guards officer?’83

  Francis also wrote regularly. He had now been appointed as the first director of UNESCO’s Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges, with Vera Atkins as his deputy. His third child, another daughter, had been born in February, in Brussels, and, showing the measure of Nan’s generosity as much as Francis’s admiration, she had been called Christine.*

  Despite hating letter writing, Christine was also constantly in touch with Andrzej, trying to tempt him out with stories of great sun-washed valleys, open roads, the help ex-servicemen received with the purchase of land, and the time they all spent watching the cricket. Andrzej was unmoved. Farming had never appealed to him, and the thought of a life built around sowing, reaping and ‘ticking off days until there was Saturday again, and he could roll down to Nairobi and get hopelessly drunk in a hotel lounge with some war-pal’ kept his resolve firm.84 Come to Germany, he wrote back, where the country was being reconstructed and full of opportunities. But Christine could no more contemplate a life in Germany than Andrzej could imagine living in Kenya. They had reached an impasse.

  The summer of 1948 stretched on and Christine drifted through it without much of a plan. ‘Where in the wide world are you?’ Sir Owen wrote. ‘Is your restless spirit at peace or war with itself? And have you got a husband or a lover?’85 Sir Owen had finally retired to his ancestral home in Ireland, where he had a horse, five cows, a small sailing boat named Christina and a rather strained relationship with his wife. ‘No two lives cou
ld be more different than yours and mine, but we are linked together,’ Sir Owen wrote romantically, ‘and so I send you my love from afar; and it will go over mountains and lakes and swan-haunted shores, over the sea, over sunny comfortable England, perhaps over the deserts of Africa and reach for somewhere, some time, and perhaps you will think that enduring affection deserves a response’.86 She did not, at least not immediately.

  That autumn Christine received a telegram telling her that Andrzej had been involved in a serious car crash in Bonn. Given his love of fast cars, it had been an accident waiting to happen for some years. Days later he was still unconscious, and being held on the hospital critical list. Christine took the next available flight out. She never returned to Kenya. Anna Czyzewska was furious with her for not marrying Michael, who was left cursing himself for knowing all along that she could never be tamed. She had a sort of ‘esprit de contradiction’ he once said, and seemed to enjoy the chase more than the catch, be it for a medal, a passport or a relationship.87 It was true that Christine certainly always wanted the recognition that she felt was due to her, yet afforded her little satisfaction when it came. Michael’s love was heart-felt, but very civil, and although Christine had sheltered in it gratefully during the early years of the peace, momentarily allowing herself to dream of a future among the landscapes and animals of Africa, ultimately she was more interested in action. Desperate for freedom, Christine had treated Andrzej badly, but she still knew that the bond between them was deeper than any fleeting romance. As loyal as she was patriotic, when the need came she made sure she was there for him, hoping that there might even be further battles they could fight together.

  16: DEEP WATER

  Andrzej was down, but not out. When he finally opened his eyes Christine was there, glowering at him from the end of his bed. Delighted though he was to see her, Christine was no ministering angel. She kept him company at the clinic, laughing at his refusal ever to slow down and his almost complete set of broken limbs, and living by necessity at his expense. But when he was discharged and able to stand on his own, she made it clear that she would not be staying in Germany for very much longer. They agreed that although Christine would make a go of life in London and Andrzej would continue living in Bonn, they would find a way to meet regularly.

  Back in London by default in early 1949, Christine met up with her Lwów cousins. Jan and Andrzej Skarbek had arrived in Italy in 1945, where they had joined the Polish II Corps under British command. Their father had a post in the Polish government-in-exile in London and Jan had served as a junior adjutant to General Anders, and as a result in 1946 the whole family was evacuated to England. The brothers were in their early twenties and spoke no English when they arrived, but Jan took a series of manual jobs and Andrzej went to medical school. Soon after, Andrzej married an attractive, horse-loving, Irish woman, who bought a flat in Lexham Gardens, in Kensington. Christine now took a room in a hotel on the same street. The Shelbourne comprised two town houses knocked together by the Polish Relief Society to provide cheap accommodation, mainly for émigrés. The cook was another reduced Polish aristocrat, Countess Przezdziecka, whose Polish teaching qualifications were not recognized in Britain, and who had landed the job after buying some second-hand cookbooks and experimenting. She and Christine would soon become firm friends.

  Christine stowed her few clothes and possessions at the Shelbourne: her uniforms from the WAAF and the FANYs; a couple of books including a biography of a Siamese cat called, amusingly, O’Malley; her unloved medals and a few pieces of good jewellery, mostly presents from Andrzej; her standard-issue commando knife in its metal-tipped leather sheath, and her heavy wireless radio transmitter that no one in SOE had remembered to recall.1 Then she walked across the road to warm her hands round a cup of hot lemon tea in her cousin’s kitchen, the conversation slipping from Polish to English as it switched from the war to showjumping.

  Christine soon tracked down another cousin now in London, Stanisław, whom she had not seen since before the war. Stanisław thought that Christine ‘seemed to have lost a little of her brilliance’, but ‘even so, she was more alive than most people’.2 One evening the various cousins all got together for rather an intense reunion, raising many toasts to absent family including Jan and Andrzej’s mother, who now lived near Bletchley; a tough Skarbek aunt in Nice who had served briefly with the Polish government-in-exile when it was based in France; and Christine’s older brother Andrzej, still in Poland. This Andrzej Skarbek had joined the resistance and survived the conflict as a prisoner-of-war, almost certainly under an assumed identity. Christine had sent him a parcel in 1945, but she had no idea if it had arrived. She did not expect to hear from him – she was a prominent émigré and a former British agent. Andrzej would have been wise to keep his distance. But after being liberated from the camp, Andrzej enjoyed only a few years of freedom before – unknown to Christine – he was arrested and imprisoned by Poland’s new Communist leadership.

  Those relatives who had to be presumed dead were also now toasted in London. When prompted, Christine added Jerzy to the list, adding only that they had been divorced for some time. Christine’s mother, Stefania, was also quietly remembered. Although many Poles applied to trace their families after the war, there is no record in the archives of the Polish Red Cross that either Christine or her brother ever searched for their mother. Christine had long believed Stefania dead and, according to Stanisław Skarbek, ‘any mention of her upset her terribly’. He had no doubt that ‘Christine had loved her mother deeply’.3 Although she was drawn to her relatives, and happy to spend time with them, Christine was clearly deeply unsettled, refusing to talk about what had happened since they had last met, or what the future might hold. There were people to whom she could tell her tales and act a part, enjoying the admiration or shock she could so easily provoke, but with her surviving family, the past was not just a series of stories, and it was not to be despoiled.

  Christine also reached out to the wider Polish émigré community in London. About 150,000 stranded Poles had settled in the city, mostly in or around Kensington, working in low-paid jobs through the week, attending mass at Brompton Oratory on Sundays, and otherwise congregating in the restaurant and bars of the patriotic Klub Białego Orła, the White Eagle Club, in Knights-bridge. It was here that ministers of the no longer recognized Polish government-in-exile would meet to plan campaigns against the Communist regime in Poland, and former officers would dissect every detail of the war and, when in their cups, rail against the perfidy of their ‘allies’. In August 1949, the ‘Polish Association of Former Soviet Political Prisoners’ was founded, partly to demand an investigation into the massacre of the tens of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn. Among their supporters was General Anders, a regular at the White Eagle, where he would discuss politics or play bridge upstairs while his wife danced the mazurka at the parties held in the ballroom below. Another refuge was Ognisko, the Polish Hearth Club on Exhibition Road, which was established in July 1940 to provide a home away from home, with Polish music and theatre, and which, despite its rather grand exterior, in common with a number of homes at the time, could not afford to carpet the upstairs rooms. Christine made a bee-line for both, and also made a note of the addresses of the Polish Air Force Association and other officers’ clubs.

  Given that many of the members of these clubs had previously belonged to the Polish 6th Bureau, Christine expected a mixed reception. Even among exiles she was still an outsider – the half-Jewish daughter of the once-landed gentry, and a double divorcee with a reputation as, at best, a flirt. Wladimir Ledóchowski’s wife, whose father was a well-known Polish author and diplomat, met Christine several times in the years immediately after the war, and later described her as ‘nothing special’, which was about as dismissive as she could get.4 Perhaps most damning of all, however, was the fact that Christine was still widely considered as suspect for having worked with the British secret services rather than directly for the official Polis
h underground.

  When Christine told her war stories she enjoyed winning her audience over through a combination of flourish and apparent frankness. By now her anecdotes were well honed, ‘every sentence’, wrote the author Stanisław ‘Cat’ Mackiewicz, one of the White Eagle regulars, ‘glazed in extraordinary adventure’.5 Furthermore she never dodged the difficult issues, once refusing to deny that a relative had been executed by the Home Army as a traitor, and another time detailing the ‘swift and deadly’ use to which she had put her commando knife.* But when Christine recounted once losing her nerve after the Nazis ‘shot dead a whole village of the world’s most innocent peasants’ in reprisals for sabotage work with which she was involved, Stanisław Mackiewicz was probably not alone in thinking, ‘Miss Krysia … did you not pay a huge price in blood everywhere so that the British could make war, using the hands of others?’6†

  Former agents though, were more sympathetic. Jan Marusarz, the Olympic skier who had once guided Christine across the snow-covered Tatras into occupied Poland, was now working at the Club as a general factotum, and would loudly welcome her whenever she arrived. Later he gave her a silver bracelet studded with turquoises which he had made for her himself. Other regulars at the White Eagle included the former Musketeers Michal ‘Lis’ Gradowski, and Teresa Łubienska, who had survived not only Pawiak prison, but incarceration in both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps.* Gradowski introduced Christine to Józef Kasparek, who also had experience of covert operations, and with whom he now ran a small business from the basement of the club. Christine took a shine to Kasparek, and learning they were distantly related took to playfully calling him ‘cousin’ and inviting him to join her for lunch upstairs. There she entertained him with elaborate stories, once claiming to have visited Britain before the war and, through family connections, met and married an Irish aristocrat named Granville. But however unreliable her stories, and whatever the opinion of some politicians and intellectuals, the old Polish intelligence hands at the club always asked after her, Kasparek remembered proudly, and soon she was dubbed ‘a queen of the European underground’ by an organization honouring the achievements of Poles in the resistance.7