The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (46 page)

Former agents though, were more sympathetic. Jan Marusarz, the Olympic skier who had once guided Christine across the snow-covered Tatras into occupied Poland, was now working at the Club as a general factotum, and would loudly welcome her whenever she arrived. Later he gave her a silver bracelet studded with turquoises which he had made for her himself. Other regulars at the White Eagle included the former Musketeers Michal ‘Lis’ Gradowski, and Teresa Łubienska, who had survived not only Pawiak prison, but incarceration in both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps.
*
Gradowski introduced Christine to Józef Kasparek, who also had experience of covert operations, and with whom he now ran a small business from the basement of the club. Christine took a shine to Kasparek, and learning they were distantly related took to playfully calling him ‘cousin’ and inviting him to join her for lunch upstairs. There she entertained him with elaborate stories, once claiming to have visited Britain before the war and, through family connections, met and married an Irish aristocrat named Granville. But however unreliable her stories, and whatever the opinion of some politicians and intellectuals, the old Polish intelligence hands at the club always asked after her, Kasparek remembered proudly, and soon she was dubbed ‘a queen of the European underground’ by an organization honouring the achievements of Poles in the resistance.
7

Christine soon found that many other old Polish friends were also in London, including the journalist Florian Sokolow, and Richard Truszkowski, with whom she had worked in Cairo, and whose young daughter she now shocked when she visited by sitting cross-legged at Truszkowski’s feet in front of the fire, a very bohemian and unladylike thing to do, prompting a diary entry describing her as ‘a horrible lady’.
8
Andrzej’s cousin, Ludwig Popiel, who had smuggled the anti-tank rifle out of Poland, was also in town, working as a builder and decorator after a hare-brained scheme to buy hashish in Lebanon and sell it in Cairo for a profit had failed to make his fortune. Zofia Tarnowska, her brother Stas, and her new husband, Bill Stanley Moss, who had both been involved in Ludwig’s scheme, were there too. When they did not feel up to the formal surroundings of the big clubs they would meet for pierogi and beetroot soup, or tea and chocolate éclairs, at Daquise, the cosy Polish café beside South Kensington tube station. Sometimes they would go on to the Pheasantry on the King’s Road, where the rooms were full of smoke, laughter and people dancing and ‘drinking to destruction’ as Mary
ś
Tyszkiewicz, who would later marry Christine’s cousin, Jan Skarbek, put it.
9
*

They were all at a bit of a loose end, but Christine perhaps most of all. Andrzej was working and building up savings in Germany. Moss was writing
Ill Met by Moonlight
and, a jobbing journalist, he was also starting to consider the possibilities of turning Christine’s stories into something that could be published. She let him interview her, along with a reporter from the
Daily Express
purportedly examining the lives of Polish émigrés, and had fun with them both. ‘As soon as I was old enough my father taught me to use a rifle, though in later years I preferred a hand grenade’, the
Express
later quoted her. ‘I could kill fifteen men with one hand grenade … later I carried a machine gun and grenades and killed many people’.
10
Spicing the drama with tragedy, she added that her former husband, Jerzy Gi
ż
ycki, had been killed in action. She must have decided he was unlikely to see the
Daily Express
in Canada. But the paper did not run the piece straight away and Moss was busy completing his own memoir. Zofia was pregnant with their first child and they needed the publisher’s advance.
†
Their daughter was born in July 1949 and Christine visited the new family in Bayswater a few days later. When Zofia said that they had not yet settled on a name, Christine told her to ‘name her for me’, because Christine was the ‘lucky name’ that had got her through the war unscathed.
11
Zofia loved the idea, but little Christine Isabelle Tarnowska Moss soon refused to answer to anything other than ‘Pussy Cat’.
12

Émigré Poles in Britain had every reason to seek talismans that might bring good fortune. Clement Attlee had agreed that demobilized troops and their families could stay in the country, but he still hoped that many of them would return voluntarily to Poland, where the Communist regime was introducing land reforms, nationalization and reconstruction. In this he caught the British public mood. ‘Poles go home’ was increasingly found scrawled across walls in Britain’s cities, insults were shouted in the streets, and former aristocrats and decorated servicemen were reduced, as they saw it, to working as barmen, bottle-washers and jobbing decorators.
13
Even the former head of the Polish 6th Bureau, Jósef Smolenski, ended up washing dishes for TWA in Hounslow.
14
*
He, like many, felt deeply humiliated. ‘How odd it is that one is not afraid of death at war, yet one is frightened of such a life…’ one Polish colonel wrote. ‘Friends and colleagues … when my hour comes how will you greet me, a labourer from an English laundry?’
15
‘How the English treat us Poles!’ Christine stormed to Józef Kasparek in the bar of the White Eagle, but she also knew that she needed to find a job. ‘You think I’m set up for life’, she sighed. ‘I’m not.’
16

Christine’s compatriots could do little to help her find work, but British friends, like Francis Cammaerts, Harold Perkins and Aidan Crawley, rallied round. An agency had been set up to help former SOE people into employment, but after offering Christine a number of secretarial roles, it gave up the attempt to place her. Christine still ‘could not bear to work in an office’, she told her friends at the Shelbourne, ‘she wanted to live’.
17
The difficulty, Francis believed, was that ‘no one really took the trouble to find the kind of job she would have done very well’.
18
Christine told Francis that she wanted to work with people, but other than that she could only specify what she hoped to avoid. There were to be no long training courses, and ‘she definitely did not want to become involved in administration’.
19
He suggested a job vetting hotels for a travel agency, but there was not a lot going in that line. She held on to the hope that there might be more intelligence work, and kept a note of both Lord Vansittart and Freddy Voigt’s addresses at the back of her diary, but there was nothing for her there either, and Sir Owen was unable to find anything in the diplomatic world. Some weeks later Kate O’Malley turned up in London, returning from a job at the British Embassy in Rome with a new surname and baby to match. Christine duly visited, cooed, and never went back. It seemed that all the women from Christine’s recent past had now embraced motherhood. Christine embarked on a series of uninspiring, low-paid and short-lived jobs instead.

Calling on her Cairo switchboard experience, her first position was as a telephone operator at India House, the home of the Indian High Commission. A friend, Izabela Muszkowska, worked in the restaurant there and the pair of them would meet to gossip through their lunch hours, Christine joking about their reduced circumstances and ‘laughing like mad’ at any story that saw them through the day.
20
Their pay packets helped to keep up their spirits too, and Christine was soon able to enjoy buying a dressing gown and decent leather shoes, and having her hair done in Alfonse Ltd in Piccadilly, who billed themselves as ‘Court Hairdressers’.
21
For a few short weeks she was happy living in the moment, as the two women had a tacit agreement not to talk about the past or future. Christine was therefore shocked when Iza broke the news that she too was pregnant. ‘Oh my God! What have you done!’ she cried.
22
It was not just that Iza and her husband were only just managing to cover their rent and food bills on two salaries; she was losing yet another friend to family life.

Although she had none of her own, Christine was not without sympathy for individual children. In Nairobi she had sometimes sought out the company of her friends’ daughter, and in Cairo she had made a point of visiting the lonely five-year-old daughter of a colleague, who was boarding in a Catholic school. She even took a distant interest in the baby daughter of her cousin Andrzej Skarbek and his wife, once commissioning a copy of the Skarbek family crest, worked in leather by Polish artisans in London, to hang above her cot. But she rarely chose to hold a baby, and when Iza gave up her job to care for her child, Christine stayed in touch by phone but never visited.

Without Iza, Christine did not last long at India House. Her next jobs were more sociable, but still left her aching with boredom and frustration. She took a position selling frocks at Harrods, where she quickly made friends with another salesgirl, retelling her most outlandish war stories, and gossiping about their supervisors: ‘ladies with bosoms and backsides so symmetrically arranged about their waists’, she once commented, that ‘putting them upside-down wouldn’t perceptibly change the general aspect’.
23
A similar blunt honesty with clients quickly made her unemployable. ‘The customers found me too rude’, she admitted.
24
A role running the linen room of a Paddington Hotel, where ‘make do and mend’ was the order of the day, lasted little longer; a position as a hat-check girl less still. Sometimes she did not even get past the interviews. A friend introduced her to the manager of a chain of hotels. Told that only married women need apply, she asked whether the same rule applied to men. On hearing that it did not, she smiled, and asked for a list of his unmarried staff, telling him ‘I’ll marry one of them.’ ‘I was thrown out’, she reported with more pride than contrition.
25

Finally she found a job as a waitress at the Marynka, a small Polish café on the Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, where her sense of humour, marital status and accent were irrelevant. Here she served strong dark coffee to all ranks of the demobilized Polish military, former civil servants, and ex-ministers. Most bore a grudge against the British government, and would sit muttering infamies or tapping their papers and exclaiming in delight, ‘Serves them right, the bastards’ at the worst domestic news.
26
Many, however, recognizing Christine, would gallantly spring to their feet to kiss her hand before placing their orders. Soon wartime friends, colleagues from SOE, parachutists who had met her in Egypt and Palestine, and FANYs and agents from Italy would all drop by to chat with her, inviting her out for lunch at Ognisko, dinner at the Special Forces Club or dancing at the White Eagle.

Christine was coping, but as the war retreated and life returned to normal for so many, she found she was far from happy with her safer, smaller, civilian life. She missed the excitement of her special-agent years, and was constantly drawn to conflict, change or any argument to get her blood up. ‘She found post-war Britain a drab place’, Patrick Howarth realized, and Vera Atkins, now working with Francis, saw that ‘she was quite unable to adapt to boring day-to-day routine … she lived for action and adventure’.
27
Even Francis recognized, with some pain, that Christine ‘was a deeply unhappy and unsettled woman’.
28
One afternoon she was hit by a car at Hyde Park Corner. More shaken than seriously injured, she was perhaps hurt most by the rumours that now began to circulate about her state of mind. Andrzej’s loyal old friend, Stas Tarnowski, saw the worst in her: a woman drinking too much and, he guessed, taking painkillers and sleeping pills. His new young wife, Ada, also thought Christine was ‘very unhappy, always sad and bitter’.
29
Yet other friends, such as Iza Muszkowska, remembered her as ‘always laughing and joking … healthy, straight, noble and energetic’, and her friends at the Shelbourne Hotel thought she was lively, outgoing, and no more sad than any other politically aware Polish émigré at the time.
30
She was often to be found at the heart of a party, telling her stories and always surrounded by men ‘like bodyguards’.
31
But Bill Stanley Moss would later say that he never heard her talking about herself, and felt she dodged his questions with ‘a self-effacing smile’, and only accepted social invitations if she knew there would be no other guests. ‘She used to raise an imperceptible barrier against deep personal relations with anyone’, he later claimed.
32

London depressed Christine. She could not bear the thought of spending the rest of her life as a spectator, doomed for ever to stand offstage with only a growing sense of containment, boredom and isolation in place of purposeful activity. She had not entirely given up her hopes of moving to Africa, and still sometimes daydreamed about the acres she would manage while following stories about Kenya in the British press. When she could afford it, she satisfied her need for action and freedom by travelling, mainly to see Andrzej in Bonn or Lucerne, where she indulged in the good food that was hard to come by in austerity Britain, and visits to a beauty salon. At one point she picked up a pretty silver-covered Elizabeth Arden notebook, inside which an admirer pencilled in imperfect German, ‘Christiana: Mein liebling, ich leiber ich’.
*
Whoever the author was, Christine kept the page in, while tearing out those around it. She would also visit friends in Paris or stay in Nice, close to her aunt who was now, despite being in her eighties, actively promoting the welfare of Poles in the south of France. She even considered taking a local job in an estate agents there, and Andrzej thought that had she had enough money she might have bought herself an old farmhouse in the hills, with no electricity, and never enough furniture, but ‘a family of stray dogs, cats and birds’, and ‘for the rest of her life she would have lain in the sun’.
33