by Clare Mulley
Christine soon found that many other old Polish friends were also in London, including the journalist Florian Sokolow, and Richard Truszkowski, with whom she had worked in Cairo, and whose young daughter she now shocked when she visited by sitting cross-legged at Truszkowski’s feet in front of the fire, a very bohemian and unladylike thing to do, prompting a diary entry describing her as ‘a horrible lady’.8 Andrzej’s cousin, Ludwig Popiel, who had smuggled the anti-tank rifle out of Poland, was also in town, working as a builder and decorator after a hare-brained scheme to buy hashish in Lebanon and sell it in Cairo for a profit had failed to make his fortune. Zofia Tarnowska, her brother Stas, and her new husband, Bill Stanley Moss, who had both been involved in Ludwig’s scheme, were there too. When they did not feel up to the formal surroundings of the big clubs they would meet for pierogi and beetroot soup, or tea and chocolate éclairs, at Daquise, the cosy Polish café beside South Kensington tube station. Sometimes they would go on to the Pheasantry on the King’s Road, where the rooms were full of smoke, laughter and people dancing and ‘drinking to destruction’ as Maryś Tyszkiewicz, who would later marry Christine’s cousin, Jan Skarbek, put it.9*
They were all at a bit of a loose end, but Christine perhaps most of all. Andrzej was working and building up savings in Germany. Moss was writing Ill Met by Moonlight and, a jobbing journalist, he was also starting to consider the possibilities of turning Christine’s stories into something that could be published. She let him interview her, along with a reporter from the Daily Express purportedly examining the lives of Polish émigrés, and had fun with them both. ‘As soon as I was old enough my father taught me to use a rifle, though in later years I preferred a hand grenade’, the Express later quoted her. ‘I could kill fifteen men with one hand grenade … later I carried a machine gun and grenades and killed many people’.10 Spicing the drama with tragedy, she added that her former husband, Jerzy Giżycki, had been killed in action. She must have decided he was unlikely to see the Daily Express in Canada. But the paper did not run the piece straight away and Moss was busy completing his own memoir. Zofia was pregnant with their first child and they needed the publisher’s advance.† Their daughter was born in July 1949 and Christine visited the new family in Bayswater a few days later. When Zofia said that they had not yet settled on a name, Christine told her to ‘name her for me’, because Christine was the ‘lucky name’ that had got her through the war unscathed.11 Zofia loved the idea, but little Christine Isabelle Tarnowska Moss soon refused to answer to anything other than ‘Pussy Cat’.12
Émigré Poles in Britain had every reason to seek talismans that might bring good fortune. Clement Attlee had agreed that demobilized troops and their families could stay in the country, but he still hoped that many of them would return voluntarily to Poland, where the Communist regime was introducing land reforms, nationalization and reconstruction. In this he caught the British public mood. ‘Poles go home’ was increasingly found scrawled across walls in Britain’s cities, insults were shouted in the streets, and former aristocrats and decorated servicemen were reduced, as they saw it, to working as barmen, bottle-washers and jobbing decorators.13 Even the former head of the Polish 6th Bureau, Jósef Smolenski, ended up washing dishes for TWA in Hounslow.14* He, like many, felt deeply humiliated. ‘How odd it is that one is not afraid of death at war, yet one is frightened of such a life…’ one Polish colonel wrote. ‘Friends and colleagues … when my hour comes how will you greet me, a labourer from an English laundry?’15 ‘How the English treat us Poles!’ Christine stormed to Józef Kasparek in the bar of the White Eagle, but she also knew that she needed to find a job. ‘You think I’m set up for life’, she sighed. ‘I’m not.’16
Christine’s compatriots could do little to help her find work, but British friends, like Francis Cammaerts, Harold Perkins and Aidan Crawley, rallied round. An agency had been set up to help former SOE people into employment, but after offering Christine a number of secretarial roles, it gave up the attempt to place her. Christine still ‘could not bear to work in an office’, she told her friends at the Shelbourne, ‘she wanted to live’.17 The difficulty, Francis believed, was that ‘no one really took the trouble to find the kind of job she would have done very well’.18 Christine told Francis that she wanted to work with people, but other than that she could only specify what she hoped to avoid. There were to be no long training courses, and ‘she definitely did not want to become involved in administration’.19 He suggested a job vetting hotels for a travel agency, but there was not a lot going in that line. She held on to the hope that there might be more intelligence work, and kept a note of both Lord Vansittart and Freddy Voigt’s addresses at the back of her diary, but there was nothing for her there either, and Sir Owen was unable to find anything in the diplomatic world. Some weeks later Kate O’Malley turned up in London, returning from a job at the British Embassy in Rome with a new surname and baby to match. Christine duly visited, cooed, and never went back. It seemed that all the women from Christine’s recent past had now embraced motherhood. Christine embarked on a series of uninspiring, low-paid and short-lived jobs instead.
Calling on her Cairo switchboard experience, her first position was as a telephone operator at India House, the home of the Indian High Commission. A friend, Izabela Muszkowska, worked in the restaurant there and the pair of them would meet to gossip through their lunch hours, Christine joking about their reduced circumstances and ‘laughing like mad’ at any story that saw them through the day.20 Their pay packets helped to keep up their spirits too, and Christine was soon able to enjoy buying a dressing gown and decent leather shoes, and having her hair done in Alfonse Ltd in Piccadilly, who billed themselves as ‘Court Hairdressers’.21 For a few short weeks she was happy living in the moment, as the two women had a tacit agreement not to talk about the past or future. Christine was therefore shocked when Iza broke the news that she too was pregnant. ‘Oh my God! What have you done!’ she cried.22 It was not just that Iza and her husband were only just managing to cover their rent and food bills on two salaries; she was losing yet another friend to family life.
Although she had none of her own, Christine was not without sympathy for individual children. In Nairobi she had sometimes sought out the company of her friends’ daughter, and in Cairo she had made a point of visiting the lonely five-year-old daughter of a colleague, who was boarding in a Catholic school. She even took a distant interest in the baby daughter of her cousin Andrzej Skarbek and his wife, once commissioning a copy of the Skarbek family crest, worked in leather by Polish artisans in London, to hang above her cot. But she rarely chose to hold a baby, and when Iza gave up her job to care for her child, Christine stayed in touch by phone but never visited.
Without Iza, Christine did not last long at India House. Her next jobs were more sociable, but still left her aching with boredom and frustration. She took a position selling frocks at Harrods, where she quickly made friends with another salesgirl, retelling her most outlandish war stories, and gossiping about their supervisors: ‘ladies with bosoms and backsides so symmetrically arranged about their waists’, she once commented, that ‘putting them upside-down wouldn’t perceptibly change the general aspect’.23 A similar blunt honesty with clients quickly made her unemployable. ‘The customers found me too rude’, she admitted.24 A role running the linen room of a Paddington Hotel, where ‘make do and mend’ was the order of the day, lasted little longer; a position as a hat-check girl less still. Sometimes she did not even get past the interviews. A friend introduced her to the manager of a chain of hotels. Told that only married women need apply, she asked whether the same rule applied to men. On hearing that it did not, she smiled, and asked for a list of his unmarried staff, telling him ‘I’ll marry one of them.’ ‘I was thrown out’, she reported with more pride than contrition.25
Finally she found a job as a waitress at the Marynka, a small Polish café on the Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, where her sense of humour, marital status and acce
nt were irrelevant. Here she served strong dark coffee to all ranks of the demobilized Polish military, former civil servants, and ex-ministers. Most bore a grudge against the British government, and would sit muttering infamies or tapping their papers and exclaiming in delight, ‘Serves them right, the bastards’ at the worst domestic news.26 Many, however, recognizing Christine, would gallantly spring to their feet to kiss her hand before placing their orders. Soon wartime friends, colleagues from SOE, parachutists who had met her in Egypt and Palestine, and FANYs and agents from Italy would all drop by to chat with her, inviting her out for lunch at Ognisko, dinner at the Special Forces Club or dancing at the White Eagle.
Christine was coping, but as the war retreated and life returned to normal for so many, she found she was far from happy with her safer, smaller, civilian life. She missed the excitement of her special-agent years, and was constantly drawn to conflict, change or any argument to get her blood up. ‘She found post-war Britain a drab place’, Patrick Howarth realized, and Vera Atkins, now working with Francis, saw that ‘she was quite unable to adapt to boring day-to-day routine … she lived for action and adventure’.27 Even Francis recognized, with some pain, that Christine ‘was a deeply unhappy and unsettled woman’.28 One afternoon she was hit by a car at Hyde Park Corner. More shaken than seriously injured, she was perhaps hurt most by the rumours that now began to circulate about her state of mind. Andrzej’s loyal old friend, Stas Tarnowski, saw the worst in her: a woman drinking too much and, he guessed, taking painkillers and sleeping pills. His new young wife, Ada, also thought Christine was ‘very unhappy, always sad and bitter’.29 Yet other friends, such as Iza Muszkowska, remembered her as ‘always laughing and joking … healthy, straight, noble and energetic’, and her friends at the Shelbourne Hotel thought she was lively, outgoing, and no more sad than any other politically aware Polish émigré at the time.30 She was often to be found at the heart of a party, telling her stories and always surrounded by men ‘like bodyguards’.31 But Bill Stanley Moss would later say that he never heard her talking about herself, and felt she dodged his questions with ‘a self-effacing smile’, and only accepted social invitations if she knew there would be no other guests. ‘She used to raise an imperceptible barrier against deep personal relations with anyone’, he later claimed.32
London depressed Christine. She could not bear the thought of spending the rest of her life as a spectator, doomed for ever to stand offstage with only a growing sense of containment, boredom and isolation in place of purposeful activity. She had not entirely given up her hopes of moving to Africa, and still sometimes daydreamed about the acres she would manage while following stories about Kenya in the British press. When she could afford it, she satisfied her need for action and freedom by travelling, mainly to see Andrzej in Bonn or Lucerne, where she indulged in the good food that was hard to come by in austerity Britain, and visits to a beauty salon. At one point she picked up a pretty silver-covered Elizabeth Arden notebook, inside which an admirer pencilled in imperfect German, ‘Christiana: Mein liebling, ich leiber ich’.* Whoever the author was, Christine kept the page in, while tearing out those around it. She would also visit friends in Paris or stay in Nice, close to her aunt who was now, despite being in her eighties, actively promoting the welfare of Poles in the south of France. She even considered taking a local job in an estate agents there, and Andrzej thought that had she had enough money she might have bought herself an old farmhouse in the hills, with no electricity, and never enough furniture, but ‘a family of stray dogs, cats and birds’, and ‘for the rest of her life she would have lain in the sun’.33
But Christine refused to settle, even when the opportunity was handed to her on a plate. Some time after the war a firm of chartered accountants notified her that a colonel with whom she had enjoyed a romance in Cairo before he was killed on active service had left her a London house in his will.† Christine reportedly renounced the gift without even checking the address, or stating her reasons. And when Livia ‘Pussi’ Deakin, with whom she had once sat gossiping round the Gezira Club pool, asked why she did not simply marry Andrzej, warning her that she was not getting any younger and he might not wait for ever, Christine laughed it off, saying that her only plans were to go travelling and send back ‘sackfuls of pretty postcards’.34 She was already looking for work that involved travel. A distant cousin called Hanka Nicolle, the sister of a Polish journalist Christine had known before the war, had a job as a stewardess on a passenger liner taking Polish émigrés to Argentina, and bringing back excellent meat.‡ Christine met her for lunch when she was on shore leave in London, but the thought of changing sheets and cleaning bathrooms put her off the idea of signing up as a cabin steward. In January 1950 Francis gave her a glowing reference for a job with a travel agency, and in March, Aidan Crawley’s lobbying finally led to an offer of work, as a secretary, but in the Air Attaché’s office in Paris. By then, however, another, more exciting, opportunity had come up.
In early 1950 Christine heard again from George Michailov, the Serbian pilot with whom she had had a brief fling in Cairo. Having settled in Australia, Michailov had joined forces with a well-connected Australian pilot called Norman Hamilton to set up an ambitious network of car dealerships across the continent. In Britain it was all but impossible to buy a new car, as almost everything produced was being shipped to the USA to help pay off the British war debt, but Christine immediately thought of Andrzej. Andrzej was still living in Germany and had now swapped his interest in Opels for an obsession with Porsche, who had brought out their first branded sports car two years earlier. Discussions began about the possibility of a car dealership joint venture, with Andrzej responsible for supply and Michailov and his partner running the sales side in Australia. Christine and Andrzej spent the next few months developing motor contacts in Britain and Germany, among other coups winning the rights for Porsche agencies in Australia. Andrzej was in heaven. That summer they drove through France together, ostensibly for work but also taking in a tour of Christine’s old haunts, meeting Sylviane Rey and the other friends who still knew her as ‘Miss Pauline’, and ending up at the annual commemoration ceremony at Vercors. By the end of the trip, Andrzej felt that their relationship was back on track and they returned to London in high spirits.
Michailov and Hamilton, who had travelled over to London, were duly entertained at the White Eagle. They discussed the finer details of the joint venture, and registered samples of their signatures for a joint business bank account. A few days later they returned to Australia with the promise of some serious investment to back the Australian side of the start-up. ‘Please immediately transfer by telegram all money to national bank Australia in Sydney…’ Andrzej received a telegram a few days later, ‘love George Michailov’.35 Andrzej knew a lot about cars, and plenty about German tax and export duties, but much less about business. ‘He didn’t love to work’, his niece said tactfully, he ‘preferred to enjoy life, read history books, and talk about how to change the world’.36 But the world was already changing. A few months later the deepening recession in Australia completely knocked the bottom out of the market for expensive European cars, Michailov and Hamilton fell out, and Andrzej’s investment appeared to be completely irrecoverable. Both he and Christine were now once again penniless. Christine, who had brokered the partnership partly as a way of squaring her debt to Andrzej, was mortified. But without the means to get to Australia there were few avenues they could pursue either to make good their investment or to decide whether to make a claim against their former partners.
It was now that Christine learned that her brother had died in hospital in Poland the previous June. Andrzej Skarbek had been released from Wronki prison with a lung condition, almost certainly tuberculosis either contracted in custody or exacerbated by the conditions there. He died soon after and was buried beside his father in the Skarbek family plot in Warsaw’s famous Powązki Cemetery. Although they had not seen each other since 1939, and had not managed to re-esta
blish contact after the war, Christine was deeply affected by the news of her brother’s death. She would never know that he had kept a photograph of her among his few family possessions all his life.37*
Christine and Andrzej spent the next few weeks in Germany.† By the mid-autumn of 1950, with no further word from Michailov, she had decided to look for work as a stewardess on a shipping line with routes to Australia, so she could both earn a wage and hopefully pin him – and Hamilton – down. The tedious process of job-seeking followed. In the new year she applied to the Merchant Navy for work as a stewardess with the New Zealand Shipping Company, only to be rejected in March. She then resubmitted her application for a job as an air stewardess with BOAC, directly lobbying Whitney Straight, the deputy chairman, who had served as a pilot in the Battle of Britain and crossed paths with Christine in Cairo in 1943. However, she was now forty-three, eight years above the company’s age requirement for air stewardesses, and her application was rejected, but by then it didn’t matter. In late April she had been taken on by the Shaw Savill Line as a stewardess, ironically for the New Zealand Shipping Company’s new luxury ocean liner, the Ruahine.
