The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (5 page)

Christine’s brother, Andrzej, seemed to be having better luck. In 1930 he had married and, just as Christine’s divorce came through, he and his wife Irena gave Stefania some good news: on 3 August 1932 Irena gave birth to their daughter, Teresa Krystyna. As it is customary in Poland for a child’s second name to reflect their godparent, it seems likely that Andrzej invited Christine to act as his daughter’s godmother. If so it was not a role she undertook with any great enthusiasm; if anything her first experience of the ties and responsibilities of motherhood put her even more firmly off the idea of having children of her own.
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Half-Jewish, impoverished and now divorced, Christine had little social status left to lose. In some ways this meant that she had more freedom than ever. With Gustav’s settlement to pay her rent and keep her in silk stockings, she moved to a small but central apartment and threw herself into Poland’s more bohemian scene.
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Champagne-fuelled evenings were now spent flirting with writers and artists across Warsaw and Zakopane. Christine was ‘exceptionally charming’, one young journalist remembered, but even to the party crowd it was obvious that she ‘was full of odd issues of self-esteem relating to her family’.
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Things came to a head when she fell passionately in love with a handsome, charming, well-born but equally impoverished bachelor called Adam. ‘Love will forgive you everything’ ran the theme tune of the Polish blockbuster film
Spy in a Mask,
released in 1933. It must have seemed a good soundtrack for Christine’s own life as she and Adam broke with convention yet again by publicly flaunting their romance. Reasoning that Christine made a perfectly good mistress, Adam’s worldly mother turned a blind eye to the affair, but when the relationship deepened she invited Christine round to meet her. Her words were as clear and scalding as the lemon tea she served: as a penniless divorcée Christine had no hope whatever of marrying her son. Despite her recent personal history Christine was stunned. It would be a difficult, rather character-building, few years before someone with an independent fortune and absolutely no regard for the social niceties would step into her life …

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As a teenager, the well-born, brilliant and unpredictable Jerzy Mikolaj Ordon Gi
ż
ycki had been put off school after witnessing a fellow student being shot and stabbed by Cossack guards after testing home-made bombs in the woods outside their town. Jerzy grew up to be a moody and temperamental young man, given to violent fits of rage. Prevented by his wealthy father from studying art in Paris, he flunked an engineering course and boarded a steamer for America. There, travelling from state to state, he found work as a cowboy, trapper, gold-prospector and chauffeur for J. D. Rockefeller, and, until his patience wore out, even aspired to be a Hollywood film extra. Although he had plenty of personal vanity, Jerzy did not have the onerous sense of family heritage that plagued Christine. At one point he happily sold his gold signet ring with its family crest to pay for a friend’s rail ticket. He was driven above all by his appetite for adventure and self-improvement.

A talented linguist and socially adept, by the 1920s, when he was in his thirties, Jerzy was established as a secretary in the newly opened Polish Legation in Washington, developing a new interest in intrigue. ‘The activities of our legation had no secrets for me,’ he later boasted, ‘I was the only one … who had the key to the safe where we kept our codebook.’
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Jerzy would always maintain warm links with Polish diplomatic circles, but after a few years of conspiracy, and regular tennis matches with the Ambassador, Prince Kazimierz Lubomirski, he left the service to visit New York and London. There he joined the team preparing for Poland’s first national participation in the Olympics. In 1924, carrying a huge Polish flag, he led the athletes into the Paris Olympic stadium. The following year he took part in an expedition to West Africa, acting as secretary and photographer to the Polish explorer Anton Ossendowski. It was a trip that instilled a deep love of Africa in him, and that led to the first of a series of books. Having done his part to contain the local elephant population, and contracted malaria, Jerzy felt he could tick off the main safari activities, and returned to Poland in 1932.

But Poland disappointed him. It was ten years since the heroic war with Russia that had followed the First World War, but Marshal Piłsudski’s peace had not brought the economic stability or social improvements that Jerzy, like so many Poles, had expected. A natural enemy of conformity, he began to criticize the country’s leaders and formed a brief friendship with General Sikorski, who, since Piłsudski’s coup in May 1926, had been unpopular among the political elite and who Jerzy felt had been particularly ‘shabbily treated’.
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In between games of tennis, and escorting Sikorski’s daughter, Zofia, to her riding lessons, the two men discussed the future of their country, and the roles that each might play in it. But despite this friendship, Jerzy found Warsaw life ‘normal, uneventful … and devoid of excitement and emotional elements’. He soon moved on again, to Zakopane and what he called his ‘beloved Tatra Mountains’.
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Jerzy knew the Carpathian mountain range well, having spent some months skiing them with his mother and three sisters when he should have been studying engineering. He now settled down to ski some more, hike, write, and socialize with the great and the good who came to stay in Zakopane. Although independently wealthy, Jerzy was unable to resist the call of the Polish Foreign Office, and at one point he spent ten months in Ethiopia ostensibly as consul, but secretly to report back on the possibilities for Polish colonialism on the basis of the Italian experience.
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After a brief stop in Rome, where he added another language to his collection while fraternizing with the local business, diplomatic and intelligence communities, Jerzy returned to Poland.
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While he was never entirely settled, Zakopane would remain his base until the Second World War.

‘My constant companion there was Countess Krystyna Skarbek’, Jerzy later wrote in his memoirs. ‘Excellent horse-woman, fair skier, and the most intrepid human being I have ever met – man or woman.’
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In those days the wooden skis, buckled on with leather straps, weighed a ton, and without steel edges they would slide almost uncontrollably across ice. Story has it that Christine lost control of her skis during a perilous descent in a blizzard so fierce that the forest trees ‘rose and bowed in waves as though a field of wheat’.
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Jerzy, who, though approaching fifty, was nearly six foot tall and as strong as an ox, reached out and literally grabbed hold of her. One account even has him saving her with a lasso, catching her like a heifer on the American plain, before whisking her off for some vodka to steady her nerves.
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However he did it, and despite being nearly twenty years her senior, once Jerzy had caught Christine he refused to let her go.

Intelligent, financially and emotionally secure, well connected and patriotic but not hugely political, Jerzy neither needed nor wished for anything in life except to satisfy his appetite for freedom and adventure. He had spent half a century avoiding commitments of any kind: study, work, political party membership, alcohol except in moderation, and relationships. ‘Fortunately there were no women on the ranch,’ he had pronounced as a young cowboy, ‘so we lived peacefully and harmoniously.’
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But Christine was not only young, sporty and very attractive, with good legs, bone structure, posture and deportment: she was also possibly the only person in Poland less domesticated than Jerzy. He was sunk. Theirs was not a one-sided affair though. Jerzy was the only man other than her father who ever dominated Christine, and she would later refer to him as her ‘Svengali’.
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Like Count Skarbek, Jerzy was a handsome, powerful and popular figure, larger than life and not a man to be easily contained, but unlike the count he was intellectually rigorous and had no regard for convention, or prejudice, of any kind. ‘We liked each other, and despite some considerable difference in our ages, we became lovers’, Jerzy recorded simply. ‘Then we got married.’
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In fact Christine did not marry Jerzy until November 1938, at Warsaw’s Evangelical Reformed Church, by which time their relationship was well established.
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Christine and Jerzy made a charismatic couple, and both before and after their marriage were regular guests at Zakopane’s many parties, which were attended by a wide circle – including well-brought-up young women from ‘good homes’ who enjoyed the thrill of mingling with authors, journalists and politicians. With Jerzy in a good humour, Christine’s confidence sailed high, and she enjoyed winning over any audience. And if his mood grew dark or bullying, or simply when she got bored, Christine could just as effectively withdraw, in time developing the useful ability to blend into a room that she had captivated only moments before.

Both essentially restless, when they tired of Zakopane, Jerzy and Christine travelled through Poland, calling in at parties and press clubs in Warsaw, Kraków and Cieszyn, where Jerzy introduced her to writers, painters, and the Diplomatic Corps. It was about this time that the first rumours began to surface that the unfathomable Christine was working for British intelligence. Then they headed to Europe, Christine finding a use for her most sultry Miss Polonia photograph in her new passport. Long months were spent in Paris, then they travelled across France to Switzerland where, having broken his collarbone in an accident, Jerzy wrote books and visited clubs, while Christine improved her skiing, perfected her French, and played at being a journalist. The peripatetic but moneyed lifestyle suited her, and she wallowed in the freedom she now enjoyed. Routine domesticity would never have suited her. She was happy, and despite the pleasure she got from mixing in a more intellectual and international set, she gave little impression of paying any attention to Jerzy’s heated arguments about the rise of fascism, the pros and cons of Poland’s various international alliances, or the developing crisis in Europe in general.

Towards the end of 1938, the Polish Foreign Office once again called on Jerzy’s services, this time to open a consulate in Kenya with responsibility for Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar (now Tanzania), and Nyassa (now a province of Mozambique), which together formed a territory about the size of Western Europe. Jerzy was to serve his country as a senior diplomat in a colonial state full of European émigrés and upper-class British officers, lending an aristocratic tone to the white settlements flourishing on the revenue from tea and coffee plantations. Christine was not perfect diplomatic-wife material: she was too edgy and unpredictable for that; but, determined, attractive and increasingly socially adroit, she was definitely an asset in the male world of diplomacy. Despite Jerzy’s concerns about colonialism, with his love of Africa and Christine’s love of luxurious adventure it must have seemed an ideal future for them.

Their first stop was London, where, while waiting for the official formalities to be concluded, they spent some weeks accepting Embassy invitations and catching up with friends from across Europe. But while Jerzy was in his element, Christine began to feel claustrophobic – their relationship was increasingly intense and demanding. She started to spend more time with friends of her own such as Florian Sokolow, the London correspondent of the Warsaw Press, and son of the Zionist leader Nahoum Sokolow, who had been ‘very fond’ of Christine.
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As Florian had his hands full, being attached to the BBC, the Warsaw Press, and also contributing to Zionist papers, Christine even overrode her dislike of office work to offer him some secretarial support while she was in London.
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As a result, and perhaps for the first time, she began to consider the alternatives open to Polish Jews, the growing anti-Semitism that faced them across Europe, and the attractions of Palestine.

After some weeks in London, Jerzy and Christine finally boarded a steamship to South Africa, Jerzy overseeing the safe stowing of the British estate car, fitted with extra petrol tanks, that was to take them the 2,500 miles from Cape Town to Nairobi. On arrival in South Africa they spent some time with the Polish consul general before heading north. Like Jerzy before her, Christine now found that the wide horizons of South Africa quickly got into her blood. As winter faded into spring, the countryside came into its own. Once across the mountains north of Cape Town they were in the Karroo, ‘the land of great thirst’. These usually dry rolling plains would just have been bursting into flower as Christine and Jerzy drove between the few ranches in the shallow valleys. At one point some ranchers used their mules to pull the car through a river, swollen by the last of the winter season’s heavy rains. Some of the baggage got soaked but Christine just laughed, stretching her legs out to dry with their clothing in the sun as Jerzy tended to the car. They were making slow but mainly very pleasant progress.
*

Having driven nearly 900 miles they reached Johannesburg, a city ‘full of Polish Jews’, Jerzy recorded, at the end of August 1939. On 1 September Hitler invaded Poland, without a declaration of war, on three different fronts, and with one and a half million troops. Two days later Britain, quickly followed by France, declared war on Germany, the only nations to take the initiative and not wait for a direct attack.

Although in 1934, the year before he died, Poland’s Marshal Piłsudski had signed a pact of mutual non-aggression with Hitler, within five years it had become clear that Germany coveted both Gdansk and Poland’s prosperous western territories. In March 1939 Britain gave Poland an assurance of support should their independence be threatened, and the two countries signed a treaty of mutual assistance in August that year. Unknown to them, that same month Germany and Russia signed a non-aggression pact, which included a secret protocol, detailing a new partition of Poland, and this now spurred Hitler into action.