The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (27 page)

Most SOE agents, regardless of working towards the same end, were independent creatures, and often rather solitary. But being able to work in a team was crucial and Christine completed her training with a three-day hike around Blida, at the base of the Tell Atlas mountains, as part of a team-building exercise. Carrying heavy rucksacks, she and her partners had to slide down scree hills in the hot sun, before walking in the shade of the pines that covered the deep valleys cut by zigzagging streams, and scrambling under wild rhododendrons, their branches heavy with flowers, whenever they heard a noise.

After their shifts the FANYs would go to parties in the Officers’ Clubs but, for security, the agents led more secluded lives. The enforced distance suited Christine. She had no interest in FANY parties and was pleased to disappear from observation for a while, spending more time with her fellow agents while trying to cultivate the anonymity required for her undercover work. As the only female agent, however, she inevitably stood out. Dorothy Wakely, the Signals Planning Officer, remembered meeting her occasionally around the camp. Although she thought Christine’s looks were unremarkable, her ‘hair, face and skin colour generally the same uniform brown’, she was still struck by her ‘remarkable grace of movement and charm, and something about her which made one look longer’.
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Christine would have been disappointed.

Christine spent most of her free time with Gunn, O’Regan and Roper. Although its climate was as hot as Cairo, Guyotville had the benefit of the coastal breeze. In fact, that spring the weather was ‘unbelievably bad’ in North Africa, taking some of the pleasure out of Christine’s habitual sunbathing.
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Instead she and some of the men drank coffee in the quieter Officers’ Club, went for picnics along the coast at Tipaza among the ruins of a Roman city, or walked the mile to the Massingham gates and hiked up into the hills. Determined not to be the weakest link, Christine would often leave her companions behind. Gunn strode along more casually, taking off his shirt to soak up the sun, and, O’Regan remembered, ‘occasionally talked mysteriously of our crusade’.
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O’Regan suspected, too, that Gunn was ‘falling in love with Christine’. He certainly called her ‘a wonderful, wonderful person’, chose his code-name, ‘Bambus’, in memory of a clump of bamboo that he and she had once encountered during training, and accepted her dare to drop into France with a teddy-bear she bought him as a passenger.
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But when Gunn asked Christine about her post-war plans she refused to be drawn.
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She could not envisage what her life would be like in peacetime and in any case, she told him with a laugh before striding off, she preferred to concentrate on the here and now, and on getting as fit as possible. ‘She was vital and full of fun … [with] a marvellous sense of humour’, Gunn later commented, but ‘strangely, she did not appear to have any sense of roots. She lived entirely for the moment, and appeared to look upon the future with some trepidation’.
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Gunn’s impression of Christine speaks volumes. To the men she was different for being female, but she had otherwise proved herself to be one of the lads. The implications of her being Polish, the pain of her past and her unimaginable future, had not registered. Christine was keeping herself very private.

Sometimes, if she could get a lift along the coast in a jeep or on a motorbike, she would go alone to visit the old pirate port of Algiers. The FANYs were advised not to go to the Kasbah, the Arab quarter, but most ventured into the fringes. For some the market was disappointing, ‘totally bereft of any buyable thing’, but Christine had little interest in material possessions.
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After the souks of Cairo she was completely at home, chatting away in French over sticky dates and glasses of tea with the shopkeepers and stallholders. Eventually she bought three leather wallets, one for Andrzej, one for Patrick Howarth, and one for herself, all for a few small and colourful Algerian notes.

As soon as he was able, Andrzej secured two weeks’ leave and flew to Algiers to join her. While he could not help noticing that in her RAF uniform Christine ‘looked even more attractive than usual’, he tried to focus on redeploying some of her time from hiking, picnicking, sunbathing and sightseeing towards learning to swim, cycle and shoot accurately – all, astonishingly, talents she still lacked.
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In these endeavours he was helped most of all by the unseasonable weather, which curbed some of her enthusiasm to lounge about in the sun, her ‘inherent laziness’ she called it.
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But despite Andrzej’s best efforts Christine never would learn to swim, or master many of her other weaknesses.

Christine took a deep dislike to bicycles, which, after a while, she refused to ride at all. It was not that she found them unladylike, or worried that cycling might lead to excessively bulging thighs and muscular calves. On the contrary, she was very conscious of the importance of keeping fit, and often cursed how thin she was, fearing it might undermine her physical endurance. But she had ridden astride horses from her earliest childhood, and simply found them stronger and better at jumping fences and testing unsteady ground. Bicycles might be faster than walking, and able to make even the strangest-looking packages seem quite innocuous in a basket or pannier, but for Christine they were flimsy, unreliable and apparently hostile.

Her dislike of guns was similarly tenacious. After weeks of training she still closed her eyes whenever she fired, claiming to hate the noise. ‘Anyway, I could never bring myself to shoot anyone!’ she told Andrzej.
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Howarth later swore that she never did, preferring to employ other weapons in emergencies, above all what he called ‘her formidable powers of persuasion’.
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These, he believed, derived from a combination of her ‘feminine charm’, her ‘controlled indignation which, it was easy to believe, might suddenly erupt into fury’ and ‘her ability to persuade any man on whom she was working that he was unusual in being perceptive enough, not only to understand the arguments she was advancing, but to agree with them’.
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Christine was certainly possessed of an almost reckless self-confidence in most respects. She knew she had a number of basic gaps in her repertoire of espionage skills but, typically, she refused to spend time mastering anything that did not either interest or come naturally to her. To make matters worse, she had been allocated a briefing officer who, according to Andrzej, ‘rubbed her up the wrong way’. This was putting it mildly.
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Francis Brooks Richards, head of Massingham’s French section, had arranged for Christine to be briefed by Major Benjamin Cowburn, code-name ‘Tinker’, and ‘one of the most gallant and courageous SOE agents’, who was temporarily in between missions in France.
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Sparks flew immediately. Cowburn was a short and stockily built, taciturn Lancashire oil technician, altogether the very picture of ‘a dour north-countryman’.
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Furthermore he liked to answer back. Maurice Buckmaster, SOE’s London head of F (French) Section, found Cowburn’s ‘directness of manner as stimulating as it was disconcerting’.
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Although Cowburn had proved he had all the personal resources and determination needed to provide Britain with the first direct intelligence from occupied France, he could not make a connection with Christine. Whether this was because he was a fan of what he called ‘blue stories’, or an even greater fan of bicycles, is not known.
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‘I think, in retrospect, that there were displays of temperament that were to be expected of a “diva”, even when attending master-classes by another great performer’, Brooks Richards later wrote.
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In fact, whoever had to sit Christine down to learn about life in occupied France, from political nuances to police uniforms and cultural details such as never to ask for a café-au-lait in case she should be betrayed by not knowing there was no milk, was going to have a hard task. Agents in Britain were sometimes given seven weeks of this kind of ‘head cramming’; Christine could hardly sit still for a couple of days.
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The course was full of exactly the sort of life-saving minutiae that drove her mad, and it took not only Andrzej, but a flying visit from Howarth, to calm her down and get her to pay the lectures, and her own detailed cover story as the fictional ‘Jacqueline Armand’, the level of attention they required.

One evening, a month after arriving at Massingham, Christine pinned down Dodds-Parker, demanding to know when, exactly, she was to be dropped into the field. ‘I want to go to France, I am going to France’, she told him, and when he protested that she was too flamboyant, too brave, and that she would get caught, she told him, her voice heavy with emotion, ‘I’ll keeeel you.’ ‘Kill me?’ Dodds-Parker echoed, and quickly sent her over to see General Stawell, the new regional head of SOE, who was on a visit. After dinner, Christine and the general disappeared behind the sand dunes, and when he came back Dodds-Parker noticed that Stawell was ‘knocking at the knees, and said she had better go to France’.
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At last, and not without some personal intervention, Christine had full clearance.

Francis Brooks Richards was given complete discretion as to where to send Christine. Like so many men before him, he was not impervious to her charms. ‘She was a very handsome woman,’ he said, ‘a woman of great presence’, and he accepted unquestioningly her personal ‘cover’ story that she had been Miss Poland in 1937, as well as a skiing champion, and the wife of ‘the Polish Consul General for the whole of Africa’.
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During his assessment of her, he reported, Christine made it ‘quite clear she was perfectly prepared for cover purposes to become fictively married to somebody’.
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Immediately he thought of Francis Cammaerts, one of F Section’s best agents, running a highly effective resistance network in southeastern France. Cammaerts had put in a request for a new courier to replace the female agent caught by the Gestapo a few weeks earlier. Danger, drama, a fictional romance: it could hardly have been more perfect.

Christine was now one of SOE’s most highly trained, experienced and motivated agents, but she still faced an agonizing wait while on standby to depart. Parachute drops could only take place during a fourteen-day moon-period. Even when the moon was bright, flights might be held up by ‘a thousand accidents of politics, weather or war’.
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In Christine’s case something more personal delayed her at the eleventh hour. ‘She was pretty impatient and we had an awful dilemma,’ the officer in charge of her departure tactfully reported, ‘when at a certain time of the month, her physical condition and the moon coincided.’ When her drop was delayed on this pretext, ‘it took the whole of the unit to keep her pacified and occupied’ until the next flight opportunity arrived.
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Finally, on 7 July 1944, Christine was driven to the airfield half an hour before take-off. She was dressed in a shirt, skirt and jacket cut to a French pattern by a tailor in London’s Margaret Street. Her hair was set in the latest French style, and even her teeth had been checked to ensure they complied with French dental practice. Now she had her clothing searched for old bus tickets, small change or any other tell-tale evidence that might give her away, and was fitted with her parachute suit. A FANY gave her some sandwiches and a flask of tea for the journey. She was also given Benzedrine, to keep her awake for a few extra hours should she feel exhausted at the wrong moment, and her ‘L’ tablet: a little cyanide pill coated in rubber so that it would not melt in the mouth unless bitten.

In October 1942 Hitler had ordered: ‘all opponents engaged in so-called commando operations … are to be exterminated … all quarter is to be denied on principle’. To ensure there was no misunderstanding, a supplementary directive added that ‘all sabotage troops will be exterminated, without exception … the chance of their escaping with their lives is nil’.
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Christine was about to be dropped into France, one of the most dangerous theatres of the war, where few SOE agents were expected to last more than three months before being brought back to England if they had not already been caught, and where wireless operators had an average life-expectancy of only six weeks.
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She felt alive again at last.

10: A FRENCH OCCUPATION

In 1944 Francis Cammaerts was twenty-eight. Tall, lithe, with serious dark eyes and a serious attempt at a moustache, when he relaxed with a cigarette he was distinctly handsome. The youngest child of a Belgian poet and his English actress wife, famed for her ‘voice like figured satin’, he was born in Kensington during the First World War and his earliest memories were of being brought up ‘under the shadow of poison gas, absent fathers and one-legged lovers in the park’.
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Thoughtful and confident, at sixteen he became a socialist and a pacifist, even renouncing his Belgian citizenship to avoid national service. Later, he would personally execute one man and plan the deaths of many others, but he would never entirely relinquish his belief in the value of either democracy or the pacifist cause.

When war was declared Francis was a history teacher. His brother Pieter enlisted immediately, but Francis registered as a conchie. Convincing the Conscientious Objection Tribunals of the sincerity of his views, he avoided both active service and jail, and spent the next two years working on the land in Lincolnshire. Over Christmas 1940, Nancy Finlay, the sister of a friend, visited. Nan, as she was only ever known, casually walked in on Francis in the bath as he was washing off the blood of a goose he had just slaughtered. That evening they made love in his car and they were married three months later. Nan’s friend, the journalist Katharine Whitehorn, claimed she valued Nan above all for her human wisdom and emotional strength. They were qualities that would be sorely tested over the coming years.