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

by Clare Mulley

  Part of the problem was that SOE had been officially disbanded in January 1946. Both Ernest Bevin, the Labour Foreign Secretary, and Dwight Eisenhower, about to be appointed Chief of Staff to the US Army, had sent Gubbins appreciative letters about SOE’s contribution to the victory. But when Lord Selborne, the former head of SOE, argued that they had built up a worldwide communications network that could serve as a valuable intelligence tool in the years ahead, Clement Attlee responded that he had no wish to preside over a British Comintern, and insisted that they were closed down with immediate effect. This meant that although a small nucleus of expertise was brought into the Secret Intelligence Service, not only was there no obvious role for Christine, but most of her friends had been dismissed too. Even Gubbins was soon informed that there was no further appointment for him. ‘SOE’s brilliant bloody-minded CD had been dismissed like a redundant doorman’, Leo Marks commented, while Gubbins’s number two, Peter Wilkinson, added bitterly that ‘at this time Major Generals were two a penny’.36 Over the following year, many SOE papers were deliberately burnt and a fire gutted the top floor of Baker Street, destroying yet more records. Editing, arson or accident, these bonfires were perhaps ‘a fitting finale’ to the SOE story, a story that had begun five years earlier with Churchill’s order to set Europe ablaze.37

  Refusing to be filed and forgotten, Christine applied for British citizenship through the standard, public process, proposing to settle in Kenya or another British colony should her application be successful. Her forms, dated December 1945, must have been among the more exciting ones in the Home Office in-trays. ‘I have no nationality…’ Christine submitted her reason for making the application. ‘My Polish papers were taken from me by the Gestapo in Hungary when I was in the service of the British Crown.’ And when it came to the standard question about ‘any previous convictions’, she jotted down, as if routine, ‘Sentenced to death by German military court on charge of sabotage against the Reich, 1940 Poland, 1941 Hungary’.38

  Yet even with Perkins as her faithful and distinguished referee, nothing happened. Two months later Christine called in the support of a few bigger names. Lord Selborne cited her ‘outstanding services’ and ‘heroic bravery’ directly to the Home Secretary, before boldly stating that Christine’s desire to become British ‘would be a fitting tribute to her gallant and devoted service’.39 But it now turned out that Christine’s service to Britain was irrelevant, because she was not a man. ‘A married woman is disbarred, under the present law, from obtaining naturalisation independently from her husband…’ a rubber-stamping official explained.40 Without evidence of Jerzy Giżycki’s death or a valid dissolution of his and Christine’s marriage, the Home Office simply saw ‘no point in considering whether she could be regarded as eligible in other respects’.41 Over six million Poles had died during the war, there were few official records, and Christine was in any case disbarred from returning to Poland because of her service for the Allies, but she was now told that to be eligible for British citizenship proof of her marital status was more important than her war record. It was a low moment for Home Office policymakers.

  Sick of British red tape, Christine flew to France in July 1946, to join Francis in being honoured by de Gaulle’s government. Both had been awarded the Croix de Guerre, Christine’s with one star, and the Order of Vercors, a combatant’s medal showing the Vercors chamois, which she claimed to ‘value even more’.42* For a few days they attended memorial events, visited friends and talked and thought of the past rather than the future. A photograph shows Christine in a white summer dress, smiling beneath her sunglasses, a scarf tied loosely over her hair, and her hands, as usual, in her pockets, as she walks with local families beside a memorial to the Vercors heroes. The burnt-out skeletons of the German gliders that had descended onto the plateau two years earlier would later be brought down to rest beside the memorial park, along with upended rows of the rusting metal containers that Christine had once helped to collect from the fields to supply the resistants with arms and ammunition.

  Francis had also struggled to find a satisfying post-war role. Despite having only spent ten months of his civilian life outside of the UK, after what was referred to as a ‘regrettable interview’ the Foreign Office had rejected his application to become a press officer for France, ostensibly because his father was Belgian.43 This and his subsequent failure to be accepted for other jobs for which he was eminently suited caused speculation that his early pacifism might have ‘caused adverse traces against his name in the central register’.44 However, like Andrzej, Francis had eventually been found a post in the military government of Germany. He and Christine now went to Paris to book flights out to Germany together. Walking through the city Christine saw Dorothy Wakely, the Signals Planning Officer she had worked with in Algiers and who, like many of the ops staff at Massingham, was now employed at the British Embassy in Paris. Catching her arm, Christine asked if she might be able to pull any strings at the Embassy to get her some work. ‘She clearly desperately needed a job’, Wakely realized, but she knew that Christine was regarded ‘as a loose cannon, and was not to be redeployed’.45 Wakely stood there feeling very unhappy at not being able to help, but when she later checked at the Embassy ‘they were vehement that in no way would they offer her employment’.46 There was clearly a black mark against Christine’s name at the ‘central register’ too.

  Andrzej had spent the last months of the war attached to teams in Germany, seeking out Gestapo agents and interrogating hundreds of SS personnel, work he undertook ‘with great enthusiasm and loyalty’.47 Cushioning his transition to civilian life, he was then awarded the MBE (Military Division), and given a government role with the Control Commission, enforcing measures against the black market. At the same time, and possibly not unconnected to his official work, he gradually succeeded in building up a number of business interests relating to his love of cars, themselves now a valuable commodity, while maintaining his links with military intelligence. Christine joined him in Bonn in late July, at once feeling at home in his company and enjoying driving around in his new, convertible, Opel.* But she was unable to accept his decision to make his new home in the country that had destroyed Poland. Instead she tried to persuade Andrzej to consider moving to Kenya, and getting some land outside Nairobi. Never a farmer at heart, and not a sun-worshipper like Christine, he could hardly have been less struck with the idea.

  Andrzej drove Christine to Berlin, where they visited the consulate department of the Polish Military Mission, hoping to secure her legal independence from Jerzy. On 1 August 1946, Christine emerged with legal permission to contract a marriage with one ‘Stanley Kennedy’.48 As divorces were not granted under Polish law, the new Polish Republic was issuing certificates authorizing plaintiffs to contract another marriage in lieu of divorce papers. To qualify Christine had had to secure the support of three of her former lovers: her husband, Jerzy Giżycki, who confirmed his agreement from Canada, Francis who served as a witness, and Andrzej acting as the proposed third party. This was particularly generous of Andrzej, considering the number of times he had unsuccessfully proposed to Christine for more honest reasons. Perhaps this was partly why he distanced himself from the certificate, choosing to use an anglicized version of his middle name, Stanisław, and avoiding listing his Polish family name, Kowerski, in the papers at all, though it was probably not unusual to be discreet in such matters. Nevertheless, the pair of them did spend a week celebrating Christine’s freedom at the Palace Hotel in Brussels, drinking wine and eating butter and seafood which could not be had easily elsewhere. They then returned to London to expedite their separate naturalization processes, Andrzej’s sponsored by the Control Commission, Christine submitting her new legal certificate.

  ‘Apparently your divorce certificate has given the Home Office such a shock that they have not yet sufficiently recovered to tell us what they think of it’, Perkins wrote to Christine in September.49 She was finally granted British naturalization i
n November 1946, the certificate coming through the next month. Given the amount of effort that had gone into attaining it, the document was a curious work of fiction. Christine’s date of birth was, of course, the usual seven years shy of the truth, but now, despite Jerzy’s acquiescence in the process, she was also listed as a widow. From now on, whenever she was asked, she would explain that her husband had died fighting the Germans. Perhaps, to her, he had. The following year, Andrzej was also naturalized, taking the name Andrew Stanisław Kowerski-Kennedy.

  It was with a mixture of relief and renewed hope that Christine now applied for a position with the International Refugee Organisation at the fledgling United Nations in Geneva, only to be rejected with the comment that ‘you’re not British at all. You’re just a foreigner with a British passport.’50 Christine’s new passport declared her to be a ‘British Subject by Naturalisation’, and listed certificate and reference numbers that, Andrzej said, made her ‘feel like a convict’.51 Refusing to accept what she saw as second-class citizenship, Christine took the issue up with Sir Owen O’Malley and Aidan Crawley, now a Labour MP. As a result, the Home Office changed the bearer’s status on all naturalized citizens’ passports to ‘Citizen of Great Britain and the Colonies’. Christine had won another battle, but she had had enough of British bureaucracy and headed back to Cairo. There she took a job as a switchboard operator and, living quietly, began to shun social functions and avoid anyone who wanted to talk to her about her war record.

  It was at this point that Christine learned that she was to be honoured with an OBE as well as her George Medal, this time ‘as a British subject’.52 ‘I don’t want it’, she responded. ‘I told them time and again I didn’t want it.’53 Having had to fight all the way for the one prize she valued, the security of British citizenship, she was reluctant to be patronized by inappropriate honours now. Perkins had told her that her George Medal related to her work undertaken as a WAAF officer. ‘It is quite clear that there is some mistake or misunderstanding…’ Christine replied irritably. ‘During my period in the WAAF I spent all my time sitting in the Imperiale in Bari, waiting for operations that never came off.’54 Receiving honours for a cancelled mission, she argued reasonably, ‘would only bring discredit to me and to any decoration that might be proposed for me’.55 But what really insulted Christine was the level of the honour. In an increasingly heated exchange of letters, Perkins thanked Christine for her ‘heart-throb’, and set out to be as frank in response. ‘In the first place’, he wrote, ‘you have not been decorated for sipping dry martinis in the bar of the Imperiale’.56 The ‘much coveted George Medal … an extremely good decoration’ had been awarded for her work in France. Other recognition had been delayed pending her naturalization to avoid unnecessary explanations to the new Polish government, he wrote, which would inevitably make any possibility of her eventual return home even more precarious. ‘I can well imagine…’ he continued tactlessly, ‘your feminine absence of understanding for such matters’.57

  Christine was incensed. ‘If you saw [the men whose lives I saved] on 17 August 1944 at eight in the evening, you would bet that they valued their lives a little higher than the equivalent of an MC,’ she stormed, ‘which, after all, is offered almost automatically to anybody who ever jumped anywhere … Goodbye and thank you again, Christine’.58 It was perhaps a good thing that it was this letter that Christine posted, and not her first draft which had further complained, ‘It does seem to me rather extraordinary that Mrs Sansom has been given the George Cross for not giving away the names of people she was working with and yet it is proposed to give me the George Medal for saving people’s lives half an hour before they were due to be shot…’59 She had a point, but she had already said more than enough to put Perkins’s back up. ‘You should be more discerning in determining between your friends who are trying to help you, and those to whom the name Christine Granville means just another case to be dealt with in their “in-bin”’, he warned her.60 They were both getting fed up with this protracted correspondence, and Christine finally got down to the root cause of much of her anger. ‘I am rather tired, after six years of more or less active service with the firm’, she wrote bitterly, ‘of being treated as a helpless little girl.’61

  Christine’s OBE (Civil Division), ‘for special services during military operations’, was formally announced in May 1947.62 Congratulations poured in from her friends around the world, including Aidan Crawley, Alfred Gardyne de Chastelain, George Taylor and Colin Gubbins, who reported on all the people asking after her at the Special Forces Club he had helped to set up in Knightsbridge, in London. Even Perkins sent his ‘humble congratulations’, and gave her a quick round-up of the press coverage in Britain, Egypt and Poland. ‘The Daily Mail is an easy winner in referring to you as a Beauty Queen!’ he wrote. ‘With all due respect to yourself and your charm, I must say I did not look upon you in that light, but perhaps my eyes were too full of your good work for the job as such to have any space left to notice your ravishing female beauty!’63

  Other friends did, however, feel that Christine had been rather short-changed. ‘Her pay-off and decorations were not over-generous for one who had risked her life many times to save the Allied cause’, Laura Foskett wrote.64 But it was only Francis, who had been invited to put forward a list of people who deserved recognition and later described the way the government handled the whole question of honours as ‘unspeakably crass’, who understood how upset Christine was by both the level and civil status of her awards.65 Francis had not only proposed Christine for the military DSO, but argued that ‘for her work in France alone’ she deserved ‘the highest possible honour and the immediate gift of British citizenship’.66 ‘Christine dear!’ he now wrote, ‘it must be worse for you than going to the dentist … The George Medal is a disgraceful insult!’67 Over a year later he was still trying to placate her, telling her it was ‘among the worst examples of injustice in a hopeless mess that has been made of decorations as a whole … a sickening and disgusting business’.68

  Thoroughly disappointed, Christine looked for fresh horizons. ‘I want to start a new life, open and free and normal’, she wrote to Sir Owen O’Malley, now the British Ambassador in Lisbon.69 Aidan Crawley canvassed jobs for her in London, and John Roper, who had been posted to Greece, found her work in Athens. But then Michael Dunford, her former Cairo lover, wrote telling her that he had decided to settle in Nairobi, where he was working for the British Council. Remembering the dreams of African sunshine, horses and freedom that she had once shared with Jerzy, Christine wrote back, to Michael’s astonishment, saying that she would join him there. She arrived in Nairobi a few weeks later, and although she took rooms of her own at the New Stanley Hotel, from where she could watch the green and cream national buses on the main road out of town, the two of them were quickly an item again.

  The New Stanley had been a social cornerstone for settlers in Nairobi for over forty years, watering many of the thousands of white émigrés who had arrived with the encouragement of the British government after the First World War, and later becoming famous when Ernest Hemingway propped up the bar in the 1930s. Now Kenya was once again a fashionable destination for European migrants, and Christine soon found herself at the centre of a large Polish émigré community, as well as being welcomed by Michael’s British friends. Among the Poles was Christopher Czyzewski, who had known Christine and her Lwów cousins when they were young, and had introduced her to his wife, Anna, in Cairo. The two women had got on well, Christine agreeing to act as godmother for her friends’ son when he was born in 1945, and they now developed a closer friendship.

  As Czyzewski had been seconded to Nairobi from the Cairo-based Polish General Staff, his family lived in army quarters just outside the city. Of their many regular guests, Christine was the only one who bothered to spend any time with their children. She was particularly fond of eight-year-old Suzanna, who she entertained with invented stories about a cat, and once gave a small watercolour of a
mother cat feeding her kittens. Another time she invited Suzanna, with her mother, for tea at the New Stanley, plying her with cakes until she was sick. Michael was also good with children, once taking Suzanna to meet Tyrone Power when he briefly visited Kenya. Everyone seemed to think that Christine, slight, attractive but perhaps a little fragile in her simple, well-cut clothes, and the terribly nice, pipe-smoking Michael, tall and fair beside her, made a wonderful couple. It was obvious that Michael adored her, and together they would go out riding, drag hunting and shooting, sometimes bagging antelopes for their meat. In the evenings they joined in the endless round of parties or spent quieter nights together at the cinema and the city’s many bars.

  But Christine was never entirely divorced from Europe and her past. Christopher Czyzewski was involved with resettling or repatriating the Polish refugees arriving in Kenya, and Christine would join in the heated discussions about the ethics of returning Poles to Communist Poland. Like many others, she also helped organize food parcels to be sent home. She had had no more news of her brother, and could only hope that he and his family were living quietly somewhere, unaffected by the press attention she had recently received for her decorations. The Polish émigrés all felt that their country had been betrayed by Churchill at Yalta and, given her direct service for the British, Christine was particularly bitter about it. She started losing weight, and sometimes suffered from bad dreams and stomach pains that her friends believed were brought on by stress. With this fresh and sympathetic audience, however, Christine began to bring out her war stories again, including tales that she had once slept with a man on a rescue mission, and had stabbed another. ‘I hate guns, so noisy’, she told Anna Czyzewska when she asked about the knife on her mantelpiece, the only ‘ornament’ on display in her room. ‘This weapon is swift and deadly, and I have made good use of it on many occasions.’70 But even her new friends realized that ‘she just told you what she wanted you to know’ as she reconstructed her own history, including many stories about her ‘extremely rich’ first husband, but never a mention of cuckolded Jerzy.71