by Clare Mulley
The next day Christine and Andrzej left for a week in Switzerland. As the Pawlikowska portrait had not yet arrived, she gave the pastel sketch to Andrzej as a promise of things to come. Andrzej later told his niece that he had given Christine an open proposal, that they marry and live somewhere in Europe on condition that she would be faithful to him. Christine had yet to make a commitment when she received a telegram from the Union Castle Line shipping company, offering her work on the Winchester Castle sailing from Southampton to South Africa at the end of the month. She decided to accept the job, with its useful salary, after which she and Andrzej would hole up together for a while in Brussels or Liège and plan the future.
With Christine in Switzerland, Hanka bore the brunt of Muldowney’s frustration in London. Unknown to either of them, he had left his job on the ships to take work as a resident porter at the Reform Club on Pall Mall, for what he called ‘pin money’, purely so as to be closer to her. Now she was not to be found at her regular haunts, Muldowney started repeatedly phoning Hanka, asking to meet, and when Hanka said she had no wish to discuss Christine with him, he swore that he had no feelings for her before asking whether she had met someone else.
Christine wisely stayed with Andrzej until the last moment, returning to London only on 28 April, two days before she was due to join the Winchester Castle. Coming back from a restaurant the following evening, she had a sudden surge of anxiety and phoned Ludwig Popiel, asking him to meet her at High Street Kensington. As they walked back to the Shelbourne together Christine told her old friend how frightened she was of Muldowney, and how he had been ‘molesting’ her, following her wherever she went and watching her hotel.69 Ludwig was sceptical and told her she was exaggerating, but Christine was convinced that Muldowney would be ‘prowling around’, and when they reached the hotel, at about 11 p.m., they saw him there, waiting.70 After a few pleasantries Muldowney said he wanted to speak to Christine alone. She refused, giving the classic ‘I have no secrets from anyone’ line, although all of them knew this was patently not true.71 When pressed she said that she had now repaid his kindness, she did not mean to be rude but he was behaving oddly, and she insisted that she no longer wanted to see him and that he should leave. Ludwig watched the distraught man struggle to control himself, and was struck by what he called ‘a strange look in his eyes’.72 Finally Muldowney mumbled that he knew he was not good enough for Christine and her friends, agreed to go and, shoving his hands deep into his raincoat pockets, he stalked off down the street.
17: BRUTAL END
Christine had never had a strategic approach to life. Since childhood, her most defining characteristic had been an intense desire for freedom: freedom from authority, to roam and ride and live, as wealthy men did, a life of action and adventure. Jobs, marriage, and the polite rules of society were unacceptable constraints, quickly making her, as SOE’s Vera Atkins astutely recognized, ‘a loner and a law unto herself’.1 When Germany invaded and occupied Poland in 1939, Christine suddenly found herself perfectly placed to fight. Duty and pleasure at last went hand-in-hand as she pitted her wits, courage and charm against absolute, imposed authority. Christine was an opportunist, whose greatest opportunity came with the war, but Poland’s defeat had left her not only without a home, but without a role. It was, as Paddy Leigh Fermor wrote, ‘out of restlessness, independence and need, and at a loss suddenly with nobody to rescue’, that she ‘sailed away from her rather thoughtless adopted country with a temporary job as a transatlantic stewardess’.2 But by 1952 Christine knew that while working on the ships felt in some ways like helping to run another escape route, she herself remained trapped. The shore leave was not enough to compensate for the long weeks spent cleaning bathrooms and serving as a personal maid. And then there was Muldowney, a black cloud, waiting for her every time she sailed back into London. She needed a strategy. Andrzej was her ‘one lasting attachment’, as Atkins put it, and Christine began to wonder whether he might not, after all, be her best chance of some kind of freedom.3
The day after Christine sent Muldowney packing from the Shelbourne, in April 1952, Hanka saw her off at Waterloo station, on her way to join the Winchester Castle at Southampton for a six-week round trip to South Africa. As the ship was run by a different line she felt there was no chance of Muldowney being signed up to the voyage and little likelihood of him knowing she was sailing. A few days later Hanka spotted him walking past her house in Hammersmith, and in early May he booked a room at the Shelbourne under an assumed name. Christine’s ship had sailed, but she knew Muldowney would be waiting for her. At her last port of call on the return passage, Christine called her friend Livia Deakin to ask if she might stay for a few nights when she got back. ‘I am very tired’, she said. ‘I don’t want any food, I just want to sleep.’4 The Winchester Castle arrived on schedule on Friday 13 June, but instead of heading to her friend’s, Christine met Ludwig for coffee at the Marynka café. Working on the ships over the last year had not brought the results she had hoped for, she told him. She had signed up to one more voyage on the Winchester Castle; after that, she said, she was quitting. She then booked the first available flight, for that Sunday, to spend the week before her last voyage with Andrzej in Belgium.
Christine sorted through her things the next day. Still unable to part with them, she stowed her heavy SOE wireless radio and commando knife at the bottom of her ship’s trunk, and laid some clothes on top. Her uniforms and linen went to one side, to be labelled before they were stored. The Shelbourne had agreed to keep them for her until she was ready to collect them. The Pawlikowska portrait had arrived, and she left it leaning against her trunk, ready to go with her. Looking at it again, she pulled out the outfit in which she had been painted: a soft, black, short-sleeved jumper, pearls, and her favourite scarlet silk scarf with a repeating pattern of foxes’ heads. Wearing the clothes to hand over the portrait would enhance the symbolic nature of the gift. Andrzej told his niece that he and Christine were getting married. It had been a difficult decision for them both but, he said, ‘we finally decided that we wanted to be together forever’.5
The next morning, Sunday 15 June, brought both good and bad news. Christine’s flight to Belgium had been cancelled due to engine failure, but Muldowney had reportedly been locked up following a brawl the night before. Having telegrammed Andrzej to let him know she would be a day late, Christine killed time meeting friends for coffee and lunch. That afternoon she washed her hair and, everything else packed, she put on the good clothes she had laid out to travel in before meeting Ludwig at the Polish Air Force Club in Earls Court. After supper with a couple of friends at the Marynka, Ludwig left her at South Kensington tube and she walked back to the Shelbourne alone.*
It was a quarter past ten when Christine got back. Muldowney was waiting for her. At the cinema earlier that evening he had happened to meet a fellow seaman just off the Winchester Castle, who told him there had been a Polish stewardess on board ‘always running after the stewards’ on the ship, and telling stories about him being in some trouble on the Ruahine the year before.6 Muldowney was incensed. He returned to the Reform Club, collected a wooden-handled, double-edged sheath knife, and walked round the park to Kensington. An hour later he watched Christine arrive and let herself in. After a moment’s hesitation, he steeled himself to follow.
While Muldowney stood on the street, his fingers checking the knife in its sheath down the back of his trousers, Christine was inside, carrying a bottle of marking ink and a pen. She had borrowed them earlier that day to label her linen before putting it in storage, and was just returning them to the hotel housekeeper before going to bed. As she went upstairs, Muldowney stormed though the lobby and shouted up to her, demanding the return of his letters. The hotel porter came out, waited a moment to see whether Christine wanted Muldowney to be thrown out, judged not, and disappeared again. Christine sighed, came back down the stairs, and told Muldowney that she could not return his letters as she had burned them. She was off to the
Continent, she said, and would be gone for two years. She then repeated that she did not want anything more to do with him. For her the very phrase had become tedious. She was bored by Muldowney. Bored by his persistence, his lack of self-respect, and his lack of understanding. Bored with trying to shake him off. Bored, and contemptuous.
Muldowney lunged at her, pinning her against the wall, his face just inches from hers. She was not engaging with him. The porter heard her scream ‘get him off me’. Muldowney raised his right arm and thrust the knife deep into her chest in a single, powerful movement. The five-and-a-half-inch blade penetrated her red silk scarf, her soft black jumper, and her heart. Instinctively she moved one hand up towards the blow, but she was dead from shock and haemorrhage within seconds.
Hearing Christine’s scream, the porter ran back into the hall, where he saw her and Muldowney against the wall at the foot of the stairs. Thinking Muldowney was forcing himself on her, the porter pulled him off and slammed him to the floor. Unsupported, Christine, too, slipped to the floor, the right side of her face falling against the Victorian tiles, her legs drawn up towards her waist. At first Muldowney did not know if he had killed her, and kept demanding to see her.* The porter told him there was nothing to look at, but realizing the truth, Muldowney uttered his only words of remorse, ‘Oh no, Christine’, before adding, ‘I did it because I loved her.’7
A second porter and the cook arrived moments later and, thinking that Christine had fainted, they propped her up in a sitting position. As soon as they let go she slumped back down the wall. The housekeeper was next at the scene, and lifted Christine’s head to try to revive her with a drink, but the water ‘ran down from her mouth’.8 She ‘seemed to have no life in her’ the second porter commented flatly.9 None of them noticed the knife. A minute later the hotel manager came in. Seeing the porter repeatedly ‘banging [Muldowney] on the stairs’, he pulled the two men apart.10 He then turned to Christine, saw the knife, instinctively pulled it out and in the same movement dropped it to the floor. It was ‘bloodstained to the hilt’.11
Although he had struggled with the porter, Muldowney made no attempt to leave. Ten minutes later the first police officers arrived. Sitting Muldowney in an armchair in the hotel lounge, they told him ‘the lady’ was dead, and asked what had happened. Muldowney told them that he had killed her, but that she had driven him to it. At around midnight, one of the officers noticed him trying to pour something into his mouth behind the unlikely cover of a coloured silk handkerchief. Knocking his hand away a bottle of aspirin powder went flying, spilling its contents across his clothes, the chair and the floor around. The officer then examined Muldowney’s mouth and finding some powder adhering to his dentures, removed the lot.* It was a quarter past twelve when Chief Superintendent George Jennings arrived at the Shelbourne. By then a doctor had already been at the site for over an hour, and had estimated Christine’s time of death to be 10.30 or 10.40 that evening. Muldowney was now so eager to make a full confession that he could not wait for his police caution, later giving the inspectors some cause for concern as the case approached court. His statement ended: ‘I killed her. Let’s get away from here and get it over quickly.’12
Just before two that morning, a police photographer arrived and took five remarkably clear photographs of the crime scene. In life Christine had never been camera shy, yet most pictures of her are blurred and grainy. Her identity photos are clearer, but the teenage beauty queen in her fur, and the no-nonsense FANY in someone else’s uniform buttons, both present an image more than a person. Only these police photographs expose Christine in absolute clarity and intimate detail, from the soft dark hair on the back of her wrists, and her upper lip, and the moles on her neck and face, to the fillings in her teeth as her mouth rests open. But they are photographs of a dead body; the camera had not caught Christine at all.
Among the papers in Christine’s room, the police found a plane ticket for a 10.15 flight that coming morning, and her seaman’s papers, which gave her next-of-kin as Andrew Kennedy, Alexander Strasse, Bonn. Jennings sent him a telegram. Somehow Andrzej managed to get to London later that day. As the official next-of-kin he was shown Christine’s Skarbek signet ring, which he recognized at once.* Later that afternoon he managed to give a brief statement. He had known ‘Mrs Granville’ since childhood, he told the inspectors, and they had ‘always been on very friendly terms’.13 Apart from providing contact details for her Skarbek cousins, he added little more. Both shock, and his training in surviving interrogation, had kicked in. He would not add unnecessary comment. Christine was dead, yet Andrzej still felt a lifetime’s unrequited need to protect her.
On the evening of Friday 20 June 1952, Kate O’Malley was among the friends who paid their last respects to Christine. ‘She looked eighteen’, Kate wrote to her father afterwards, her skin unlined, and just the faintest trace of grey in her thick hair.14 Looking at her old friend, Kate opened her purse and took out the medal of the Madonna of Częstochowa that she had carried with her ever since Christine had given it to her when fleeing Budapest. Now she quietly slipped it into Christine’s hands, to be buried with her. Andrzej was the last to say farewell, giving Christine a final salute as he left the room.
Christine was buried the following day, less than a week after she died, under a scattering of Polish soil in the Roman Catholic cemetery at Kensal Green in London. Her medals were carried in the cortege on a velvet cushion, and the Polish national anthem, Dąbrowski’s Mazurka, which starts ‘Poland is not yet lost’, was sung as the coffin was lowered into the ground. Although a bright day, a fierce wind shook the wreaths of red and white carnations and whipped at the coats and hats of the mourners. It even helped to blow down the freshly planted metal cross bearing Christine’s Polish name, which slipped in the newly cut earth and fell into the grave, sending Andrzej rushing forward to right it again.* Two hundred mourners had come to pay their last respects, including many of Christine’s friends and colleagues from the services, from Colin Gubbins to former FANYs. Among them were many of her closest friends and allies. Francis, who confessed to being usually ‘very little aware of what people call pain, tragic suffering and so on’, had broken down completely at the news of her death.15 Disappearing for three days, he had left Nan alone to deal with the mass of press people who camped on their doorstep. The Polish émigré community was also out in force, with Teresa Łubienska representing the Musketeers, and forty veterans of the French Resistance had travelled over from south-eastern France. A more unexpected guest among the mourners was Stanisław Kopanski, who came to quietly represent the Polish government-in-exile.†
‘To the many who knew and served with “Christine”, as she was known throughout Special Forces, her untimely death has come as a terrible shock’, Gubbins wrote for the Times. ‘Happy only in action’, she was bravely facing life in exile ‘in her own independent way’ when she died – a great woman of ‘spirit and courage’.16 The War Office, Patrick Howarth, John Roper and others all also released statements. ‘She was certainly one of the finest members of the service’, Francis told the Daily Mirror, ‘a magnificent person’.17
Perhaps appropriately, Christine’s death certificate also tells a set of stories. Only the cause of death, ‘stab wound to the chest’, is truly accurate. The name ‘Christine Granville’ was her adopted name, of which she had come to feel so proud, and her age ‘37 years’ came with it, but neither corresponds with the name and date of her birth, forty-four years earlier, in Warsaw. But perhaps most misleading is her stated ‘occupation’: ‘the former wife of George Gizycki, a journalist from whom she obtained a divorce’.18 Never was a memorial less appropriate. Christine was a wife, twice, and might have been again, and she was a lover many more times than that, but she was never defined by her relationship to a man. Christine loved passionately. She loved men and sex, adrenalin and adventure, her family and her country; she loved life, and the freedom to live it to the full. When that freedom was denied her by law or con
vention, she defied expectations by breaking the rules or simply changing her faith, age, name or story. When it was threatened by invasion, occupation and terrorism, she fought back with a passion, patriotism, determination and courage unsurpassed by any other special agent in the Second World War.
War, subverting the disciplinary structures of peacetime, in many respects liberated Christine. Her achievements are extraordinary. She was the first woman to work in the field as a special agent for the British, starting just weeks after Britain’s declaration of war, and two years before SOE officially recruited women, and indeed before it was even established. She was Britain’s longest-serving female agent, undertaking missions in numerous theatres of the war throughout the conflict, including undercover operations in two different occupied countries where an agent’s life expectancy was little more than a few months. She delivered some of the first intelligence to reach Britain showing German preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union, weeks before Churchill accepted this possibility. With Andrzej, she helped to ‘exfiltrate’ hundreds of Polish and international servicemen from POW camps in Hungary back to the frontline, including many of the pilots who flew in the Battle of Britain. With Francis, she supported preparations for the Allied invasion of southern France, including the subversion of a strategic enemy garrison, and the rescue of key resistance leaders at huge risk to her own life. The list of Polish, French and British officers whose lives she saved makes an impressive roll-call on its own: Andrzej Kowerski extracted with her from a Budapest jail; Wladimir Ledóchowski, from arrest in Poland; Francis Cammaerts, Xan Fielding and Christian Sorensen, from execution in France; and Max Waem, their would-be executioner, from retribution days later.
