The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (43 page)

Unknown to Christine, there were quite a lot of people – ‘other chaps’ as Perkins’s secretary, Vera Long, referred to them – who viewed her as, ‘for want of a better word, “scatty”’, and were quite looking forward to dropping her.
18
Not long later Xan Fielding gently let her know that many people in SOE did not consider that they owed her anything for the simple reason that when she was in Hungary and Poland she was working not for them, but for the Poles. ‘Perhaps he does not know that I was sent by George Taylor to Poland through Hungary in 1939’, Christine rightly remonstrated in a letter to Gubbins. ‘But it is all very hard on me if this story is believed as I have got into so much trouble with the Poles because I worked for the firm!’
19

Christine was already at a professional disadvantage alongside her former colleagues. She had outstanding ability and experience, and her ‘exceptional language skills’ had been praised by Stawell among others in SOE.
20
Yet in a March 1945 list of Polish-speaking officers who might be offered post-war positions, the languages, availability and SOE’s ‘obligations’ towards the men, including Andrzej, were all specified, while against Christine’s name there were just three words: ‘no employment here’.
21
In peacetime, the qualities still so highly valued in the male agents were no longer recognized in her, and she had few of the skills traditionally sought in women. Bemoaning her unchanged attitude towards secretarial work, officials began to record that ‘it appears that there is little more we can do to help her’.
22
Christine’s ‘English is not perfect…’ they noted, ‘she cannot type, has no experience whatever of office work and is altogether not a very easy person to employ’.
23
Andrzej had a similar CV, but none of this seemed to stand in the way of his landing a post in the Allied-run military government of Germany, and later being posted to the British Intelligence Corps. Unintentionally rubbing salt into her wound, at the end of official letters informing Christine, for instance, of the termination of her commission with the Air Council, she started to receive cheery notes such as ‘Hope you are being a good girl!’
24
Eventually she visited Gubbins, hoping that she would at least be treated with some respect and possibly be considered for an active commission of her own, but when she left his office she was unusually quiet. ‘He just wants me in bed’, she told Francis and, while she refused to elaborate, she was obviously furious.
25

Christine considered an office job only once. Learning that Patrick Howarth had been posted as Press Attaché to the British Embassy in Warsaw, now operating from the first floor of a former railway hotel on the outskirts of the devastated city, she sent him a telegram asking for work. Howarth was delighted to help and won the Ambassador’s backing, but the Foreign Office would not countenance employing a foreign national in one of their embassies. She then applied to BOAC, the British Overseas Airways Corporation, reasoning that a stewardess was ‘some sort of conducting officer’, but again her nationality proved a stumbling block.
26
It was evident that whatever work she sought, she was not going to get far until she had secured full British citizenship.

As a temporary British passport holder who had spent the war risking her life in the paid service of the British government, Christine believed she would be entitled to ongoing British citizenship if she needed it. She had raised the issue with Perkins while in London in September 1944, and he had agreed that ‘this would seem a very suitable recompense’ for her services.
27
Both of them were shocked therefore, when word came back that Christine should apply to the Home Office through a solicitor. ‘This does not reflect the spirit with which we have built up SOE and obtained the loyalty of those working for us’, Perkins stormed, but the matter was dropped when Christine’s ‘Folkestone’ mission to Poland was given the green light.
28

Now, stuck in post-war Cairo, knowing that ‘my chances of ever going back to Poland are very small’, Christine raised the question again, specifying only that ‘I want to keep the name Granville that I have made for myself, and of which I am rather proud’.
29
But the naturalization papers that, as Xan Fielding put it, ‘from the moral point of view … should have been delivered to her immediately on demand’ were now obstructed by a combination of prejudice and bureaucracy.
30
Internal memos began to refer to Christine as ‘this girl’ and to her application as a ‘headache’.
31
‘I know nothing about her’, one official wrote. ‘I think she only assumed this name for her commissioning as they would not commission a Polish subject.’
32
Christine was not only an unconventional woman, but a Pole, and the implication seemed to be that her application need not be taken seriously. In June 1945 it was decided that ‘her naturalisation … is absolutely out of the question’.
33
Because she had not resided in England for five years ‘as required by paragraph 12’, she was told that she did not qualify for ‘immediate naturalisation’ and should ‘apply for special instructions’.
34
There was simply no precedent for someone like Christine and, despite SOE friends pressing for her to be given ‘preferential treatment’, by November it had become ‘obvious’ that her application might ‘remain pending for [a] long time’.
35

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 Gi
ż
ycki’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
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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 Gi
ż
ycki, 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 in 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.