The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (42 page)

But while Cairo society celebrated, for Christine the war was far from won. Although always happy to enjoy some romantic distraction, she had started manoeuvring for active service as soon as she arrived. She had already submitted an application to the RAF when in mid-March she petitioned ‘Perks Kochany’ (Dearest Perks) for work. ‘I am afraid that the prospect of employing you in an operational capacity, either now or in the near future, have become exceedingly remote’, Perkins told her. ‘In view of the unhappy position of Poland there is obviously no possibility of an operational mission to that country.’
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‘For God’s sake, do not strike my name from the firm,’ she replied earnestly, ‘remember that I am always pleased to go and do anything for it.’
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Her letter smacks of desperation, even including an uncharacteristically humble apology for her spelling. Dealing first with her RAF application she begs Perkins, in her imperfect English, to ‘write and tell them that I am honest and clean Polish girl’. Should this prove unsuccessful her second plan was to parachute into Germany to ‘get people out from camps and prisons … before they get shot’. ‘I should love to do it,’ she wrote, ‘and I like to jump out of a plane even every day.’
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Christine was clearly thinking about the cancelled Fernham and Flamstead rescue missions to camps in Poland. She probably also knew that Andrzej was now standing by at Sunningdale golf course, with Paddy Leigh Fermor, Havard Gunn and others, to be dropped in advance of Allied troops in Germany to prevent the many hurried executions that were taking place in the camps towards the end of the war.
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‘Please do look after Andrew, and don’t let him do anything too stupid’, she told Perkins.
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Francis Cammaerts had already been sent to Germany with SAARF, the ‘Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force’ specifically created for this work. He would be present in April at the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where 15,000 inmates died, mainly of starvation and typhoid, within days of their liberation.
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It is doubtful whether Christine’s offer to join these missions was given serious consideration, however, as SOE now ruled that no female personnel were to be sent into Germany ‘under any circumstances’.
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A few months later her former Cairo flatmate, Laura Foskett, witnessed ‘the horror, the looks of incredulity on our faces, the numbed silence that fell over the office’, when news of the concentration camps began to filter through from SOE’s press section, followed by rolls of unexpurgated film.
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Christine’s thoughts then turned to the people close to her. Perkins had managed to get an address for her brother in Poland and she sent him a parcel of food and clothing and, possibly, some of Xan Fielding’s money. She asked for news of her husband, Jerzy Gi
ż
ycki, and forwarded a letter for Alfred Gardyne de Chastelain, her friend and colleague from Istanbul and Cairo, who was starting to face questions about the political contacts he had made during SOE operations in Romania. ‘If it is true that he is into troubles,’ Christine wrote, ‘there are people here who could give him some evidence which may be helpful to him.’ With an eye to her future, she even sent her ‘fondest love’ to Gubbins.
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The war, and life, went on. In April, Zofia Tarnowska married Bill Stanley Moss in a Greek Orthodox church in Cairo, having converted after securing her divorce from Andrzej Tarnowski. Their friends in the Egyptian royal family gave them a magnificent reception. The wedding was arranged partly because Moss was about to be dropped into Siam, and they knew he might not return. Inspired, Christine tried one last avenue to secure a mission herself. An SOE note from April records her report that she had been approached by the Poles to work for them. ‘Christine is inclined to exaggerate at times,’ the author wrote, ‘but I feel that there is something in what she told me, very confidentially.’
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But no Polish work followed, and if Christine had been trying a ruse to prompt SOE to employ her, it was a gamble that backfired. A month later a reply came back, saying that this ‘would seem an admirable solution for her future’.
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By then, though, Hitler had committed suicide as the Russians entered Berlin. The war in Europe was effectively over.

On 7 May 1945, when Germany signed the formal surrender, Christine was invited to a celebratory ball, but she was in no mood for rejoicing. Although the first of Britain’s ultimately victorious Allies, Poland had suffered some of the greatest losses, including its independence, much of the territory in defence of which the war had been declared, and more than two thirds of the capital’s buildings. Nearly six million Poles had died, the vast majority of whom, including a quarter of Warsaw’s residents, were civilians. The country’s total dead amounted to a fifth of the pre-war population. Another 500,000, mostly political and military leaders and members of the intelligentsia, were scattered around the world with no prospect of returning, Christine among them. VE Day, Victory in Europe, on 8 May, a day of triumph for the British, was one of the darkest of Christine’s life.

After a week of celebrations came demobilization. British officers thought of home, their families waiting to welcome them, and interrupted careers that must now be resumed. As a member of the Polish landed gentry, who had fought with the Allies, and whose details had been given to the NKVD by the British, Christine had absolutely no hope of returning to Soviet-administered Poland. Her British passport, issued to her in Budapest by Sir Owen O’Malley and twice renewed since, was her only identity document and was due to expire in July 1947. She was to all intents stateless, and almost immediately homeless. On 11 May, just three days after the Germans had ratified their surrender, Christine relinquished her commission in the WAAF. ‘After the physical suffering and mental strain she had suffered for more than six years in our service…’, wrote Xan Fielding, whose life Christine had saved in France, ‘she needed, probably more than any other agent we employed, security for life. After her outstanding personal contribution to our victory, she deserved it. Yet a few months after the armistice she was dismissed with a month’s salary and left in Cairo to fend for herself.’
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15: SECOND-CLASS CITIZEN

‘Official intelligence in peace-time comes home to roost in Whitehall, and is an office job…’ one former SOE agent wrote scathingly after the war in Europe was officially concluded. ‘Civilian clothes are no longer an intrepid disguise. The man who is caught is not shot at dawn. It is no longer a matter of life or death. It is, most of it, an exchange of files between the Foreign Office, the War Office and Scotland Yard.’
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Basil Davidson, Christine’s SOE friend from Budapest and Cairo, agreed, knowing from personal experience how difficult it was ‘to get adjusted to the idea that you’re not going to die…’
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It was clear that Christine was not going to find the transition to peace easy.

Some of Christine’s former colleagues fared better than others. June Darton, who had known her in Italy, was invited to stay in Siena for a few weeks, before Henry Threlfall picked her up in his chauffeur-driven car and took her to the opera in Rome, ‘a very thrilling thing to do’.
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Other well-heeled FANYs from Cairo and Algiers ‘had a wonderful time’ on adjustment courses, with weekend lectures and trips to museums and galleries in Florence and Venice.
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But for most servicemen with direct experience of war, demobilization brought little or no support, and often no work either. For Christine there was also no home to return to, no parents, no children, no career – no normal life at all. ‘The cold winds of unemployment are beginning … to whistle rather drearily round the streets of London’, one of her FANY friends wrote. ‘Christine seems to have been one of the wisest as she’s gone to ground in Cairo, saying she’d rather be poor there than anywhere else.’
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But even in the sunshine, Christine needed an income to maintain her café lifestyle and, after living on a knife-edge for the last few years, she also needed a new source of regular adrenalin. Like many who had fought with courage, belief and hope throughout the war, she became increasingly depressed by what she soon referred to as ‘the horrors of peace’, political betrayal, bureaucratic red tape and, perhaps most deadening of all, humdrum daily routine.
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Denying defeat, Christine would not stand for any of it.

Barely a month after the Yalta conference in February 1945, Stalin made it clear that he had no intention of honouring his agreement to promote independent Polish democracy. International access to the country was restricted while mass arrests, deportations and executions effectively ended internal Polish resistance or organized opposition. In July, the same month that Britain enthusiastically elected a Labour government with whom to ‘face the future’, the Communist-installed Lublin administration was officially recognized in Poland. The following January, rigged elections sealed Poland’s fate. The country would be a Communist state by 1949.

For the Poles who had ended the war overseas, these were agonizing times. Very few of the 30,000 servicemen and their families based in Britain risked returning home. After Yalta, Churchill had announced his support for Polish troops to be given citizenship and the ‘freedom of the British Empire, if they so desire’, declaring that ‘His Majesty’s Government will never forget the debt they owe to the Polish troops’.
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The debt was indeed great: the Polish contribution to the war had been outstanding. Poland had produced the fourth-largest armed force in Europe, after the Soviet Union, the United States and the combined troops of the British Empire. Polish pilots had formed the largest group of non-British personnel in the Battle of Britain, and Polish troops had fought under British command in decisive battles in Italy, France, the Netherlands and Libya. In intelligence, the Poles had provided the Enigma machine to Britain’s cryptographers and cracked the early version of the code; and they had supplied sample parts of Germany’s V2 rocket. In recognition, in mid-1946 the new Labour government, under Clement Attlee, set up the Polish Resettlement Corps, offering Polish servicemen temporary jobs until they could find permanent work. But the popularity that the Poles had enjoyed during the war quickly fell away when tens of thousands of Polish ex-servicemen contributed to flood the British job market, which was already struggling to cope with the five million Britons being demobilized.
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Insult followed when, in June 1946, only the Polish airmen who had taken part in the Battle of Britain were invited to join London’s Victory Parade, while the Communist government in Warsaw sent official representatives. For Polish émigrés, having to live in a country where they felt so little welcome or respect was compounded by the trauma of not knowing what had happened to their loved ones left at home. Although sheltering in Cairo, Christine, like all her compatriots, faced a difficult and uncertain future, but she, at least, believed she could reasonably expect recognition for her service and some decent support in her transition to civilian life.

Christine’s courage and achievements throughout her service were admired by everyone who knew her. In December 1944, General Stawell had recommended her for the George Cross, the civil equivalent to the Victoria Cross, for her ‘nerve, coolness and devotion to duty, and high courage’.
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But Christine was not impressed. The only medal that she would be proud to wear, she told Francis, would be a military medal. It was ‘typical’ of her, he said, that this was the one honour she could not hope to get.
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Women were ineligible for British military honours, a situation that caused another female agent, Pearl Witherington, to protest that ‘there was nothing remotely civil’ about what they had done.
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For reasons not recorded, General Alexander, the Supreme Allied Commander of the Mediterranean Theatre, then downgraded Stawell’s recommendation for Christine to an OBE. This was subsequently raised to a George Medal by the War Office to ‘make it obvious that she had been decorated for gallantry, as her courage was outstanding’.
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At the beginning of June 1945, the recommendation was approved and the offer made.
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Christine did not respond. Francis believed that ‘one of the fiercest factors in her make-up was her inborn dislike of authority’, a trait that he ascribed to her experience of ‘her aristocratic father and the suffering that her mother, a beautiful Jewess, had had to submit to’.
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Now, irrespective of her distinguished record, Christine’s evident lack of respect for authority, rules and procedures would count heavily against her.

London had informed Christine that her services were no longer required even before the formal end of the war, in April 1945. Early memos show a complete lack of concern, or even comprehension, about her situation. ‘She is no longer wanted…’ one personnel officer wrote. ‘Unless we have any likely job in the offing I suggest it would be a simpler matter to arrange for her to resign her commission and to go back to that civilian life from whence she came.’
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Others were anxious only about the potential security risk of Christine continuing to carry a WAAF identity card or, perhaps more reasonably, not respecting the restrictions of the Official Secrets Act. However, Christine still had a number of friends in ‘the firm’, as SOE had always been known to insiders, and a temporary job in Cairo. In addition, SOE now agreed to keep her on half pay until the end of 1945 to give her ‘every chance to arrange her affairs’.
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She decided to take the money as a lump sum, in order to reduce her dealings with the finance department. ‘They really are quite impossible’, she told Gubbins. ‘Wing Commander Venner refused to pay me London allowances, danger pay, and parachute pay, simply because I was not a man!’
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Beyond these arrangements, Perkins told her that if she had any plans of her own, all help would be put at her disposal. He was rather at a loss as to what else to suggest for the sole female former agent of his section, for whom he felt so responsible. ‘I know how you hate letter-writing,’ he told her, ‘but please answer this.’
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