The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (44 page)

It was with a mixture of relief and renewed hope that Christine now applied for a position with the International Refugee Organisation at the fledgling United Nations in Geneva, only to be rejected with the comment that ‘you’re not British at all. You’re just a foreigner with a British passport.’
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Christine’s new passport declared her to be a ‘British Subject by Naturalisation’, and listed certificate and reference numbers that, Andrzej said, made her ‘feel like a convict’.
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Refusing to accept what she saw as second-class citizenship, Christine took the issue up with Sir Owen O’Malley and Aidan Crawley, now a Labour MP. As a result, the Home Office changed the bearer’s status on all naturalized citizens’ passports to ‘Citizen of Great Britain and the Colonies’. Christine had won another battle, but she had had enough of British bureaucracy and headed back to Cairo. There she took a job as a switchboard operator and, living quietly, began to shun social functions and avoid anyone who wanted to talk to her about her war record.

It was at this point that Christine learned that she was to be honoured with an OBE as well as her George Medal, this time ‘as a British subject’.
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‘I don’t want it’, she responded. ‘I told them time and again I didn’t want it.’
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Having had to fight all the way for the one prize she valued, the security of British citizenship, she was reluctant to be patronized by inappropriate honours now. Perkins had told her that her George Medal related to her work undertaken as a WAAF officer. ‘It is quite clear that there is some mistake or misunderstanding…’ Christine replied irritably. ‘During my period in the WAAF I spent all my time sitting in the Imperiale in Bari, waiting for operations that never came off.’
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Receiving honours for a cancelled mission, she argued reasonably, ‘would only bring discredit to me and to any decoration that might be proposed for me’.
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But what really insulted Christine was the level of the honour. In an increasingly heated exchange of letters, Perkins thanked Christine for her ‘heart-throb’, and set out to be as frank in response. ‘In the first place’, he wrote, ‘you have not been decorated for sipping dry martinis in the bar of the Imperiale’.
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The ‘much coveted George Medal … an extremely good decoration’ had been awarded for her work in France. Other recognition had been delayed pending her naturalization to avoid unnecessary explanations to the new Polish government, he wrote, which would inevitably make any possibility of her eventual return home even more precarious. ‘I can well imagine…’ he continued tactlessly, ‘your feminine absence of understanding for such matters’.
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Christine was incensed. ‘If you saw [the men whose lives I saved] on 17 August 1944 at eight in the evening, you would bet that they valued their lives a little higher than the equivalent of an MC,’ she stormed, ‘which, after all, is offered almost automatically to anybody who ever jumped anywhere … Goodbye and thank you again, Christine’.
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It was perhaps a good thing that it was this letter that Christine posted, and not her first draft which had further complained, ‘It does seem to me rather extraordinary that Mrs Sansom has been given the George Cross for not giving away the names of people she was working with and yet it is proposed to give me the George Medal for saving people’s lives half an hour before they were due to be shot…’
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She had a point, but she had already said more than enough to put Perkins’s back up. ‘You should be more discerning in determining between your friends who are trying to help you, and those to whom the name Christine Granville means just another case to be dealt with in their “in-bin”’, he warned her.
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They were both getting fed up with this protracted correspondence, and Christine finally got down to the root cause of much of her anger. ‘I am rather tired, after six years of more or less active service with the firm’, she wrote bitterly, ‘of being treated as a helpless little girl.’
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Christine’s OBE (Civil Division), ‘for special services during military operations’, was formally announced in May 1947.
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Congratulations poured in from her friends around the world, including Aidan Crawley, Alfred Gardyne de Chastelain, George Taylor and Colin Gubbins, who reported on all the people asking after her at the Special Forces Club he had helped to set up in Knightsbridge, in London. Even Perkins sent his ‘humble congratulations’, and gave her a quick round-up of the press coverage in Britain, Egypt and Poland. ‘
The Daily Mail
is an easy winner in referring to you as a Beauty Queen!’ he wrote. ‘With all due respect to yourself and your charm, I must say I did not look upon you in that light, but perhaps my eyes were too full of your good work for the job as such to have any space left to notice your ravishing female beauty!’
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Other friends did, however, feel that Christine had been rather short-changed. ‘Her pay-off and decorations were not over-generous for one who had risked her life many times to save the Allied cause’, Laura Foskett wrote.
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But it was only Francis, who had been invited to put forward a list of people who deserved recognition and later described the way the government handled the whole question of honours as ‘unspeakably crass’, who understood how upset Christine was by both the level and civil status of her awards.
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Francis had not only proposed Christine for the military DSO, but argued that ‘for her work in France alone’ she deserved ‘the highest possible honour and the immediate gift of British citizenship’.
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‘Christine dear!’ he now wrote, ‘it must be worse for you than going to the dentist … The George Medal is a disgraceful insult!’
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Over a year later he was still trying to placate her, telling her it was ‘among the worst examples of injustice in a hopeless mess that has been made of decorations as a whole … a sickening and disgusting business’.
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Thoroughly disappointed, Christine looked for fresh horizons. ‘I want to start a new life, open and free and normal’, she wrote to Sir Owen O’Malley, now the British Ambassador in Lisbon.
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Aidan Crawley canvassed jobs for her in London, and John Roper, who had been posted to Greece, found her work in Athens. But then Michael Dunford, her former Cairo lover, wrote telling her that he had decided to settle in Nairobi, where he was working for the British Council. Remembering the dreams of African sunshine, horses and freedom that she had once shared with Jerzy, Christine wrote back, to Michael’s astonishment, saying that she would join him there. She arrived in Nairobi a few weeks later, and although she took rooms of her own at the New Stanley Hotel, from where she could watch the green and cream national buses on the main road out of town, the two of them were quickly an item again.

The New Stanley had been a social cornerstone for settlers in Nairobi for over forty years, watering many of the thousands of white émigrés who had arrived with the encouragement of the British government after the First World War, and later becoming famous when Ernest Hemingway propped up the bar in the 1930s. Now Kenya was once again a fashionable destination for European migrants, and Christine soon found herself at the centre of a large Polish émigré community, as well as being welcomed by Michael’s British friends. Among the Poles was Christopher Czyzewski, who had known Christine and her Lwów cousins when they were young, and had introduced her to his wife, Anna, in Cairo. The two women had got on well, Christine agreeing to act as godmother for her friends’ son when he was born in 1945, and they now developed a closer friendship.

As Czyzewski had been seconded to Nairobi from the Cairo-based Polish General Staff, his family lived in army quarters just outside the city. Of their many regular guests, Christine was the only one who bothered to spend any time with their children. She was particularly fond of eight-year-old Suzanna, who she entertained with invented stories about a cat, and once gave a small watercolour of a mother cat feeding her kittens. Another time she invited Suzanna, with her mother, for tea at the New Stanley, plying her with cakes until she was sick. Michael was also good with children, once taking Suzanna to meet Tyrone Power when he briefly visited Kenya. Everyone seemed to think that Christine, slight, attractive but perhaps a little fragile in her simple, well-cut clothes, and the terribly nice, pipe-smoking Michael, tall and fair beside her, made a wonderful couple. It was obvious that Michael adored her, and together they would go out riding, drag hunting and shooting, sometimes bagging antelopes for their meat. In the evenings they joined in the endless round of parties or spent quieter nights together at the cinema and the city’s many bars.

But Christine was never entirely divorced from Europe and her past. Christopher Czyzewski was involved with resettling or repatriating the Polish refugees arriving in Kenya, and Christine would join in the heated discussions about the ethics of returning Poles to Communist Poland. Like many others, she also helped organize food parcels to be sent home. She had had no more news of her brother, and could only hope that he and his family were living quietly somewhere, unaffected by the press attention she had recently received for her decorations. The Polish émigrés all felt that their country had been betrayed by Churchill at Yalta and, given her direct service for the British, Christine was particularly bitter about it. She started losing weight, and sometimes suffered from bad dreams and stomach pains that her friends believed were brought on by stress. With this fresh and sympathetic audience, however, Christine began to bring out her war stories again, including tales that she had once slept with a man on a rescue mission, and had stabbed another. ‘I hate guns, so noisy’, she told Anna Czyzewska when she asked about the knife on her mantelpiece, the only ‘ornament’ on display in her room. ‘This weapon is swift and deadly, and I have made good use of it on many occasions.’
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But even her new friends realized that ‘she just told you what she wanted you to know’ as she reconstructed her own history, including many stories about her ‘extremely rich’ first husband, but never a mention of cuckolded Jerzy.
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To distract her, Michael took Christine out of town as much as possible. Soon after she arrived they had travelled to the Belgian Congo, but it was the open spaces of Kenya that really caught her imagination. Nairobi was surrounded by game parks where they could see herds of impala crossing the road in single file, leaping over the tarmac, and sometimes baboons, or hippos wallowing in the shady water of tree-lined rivers, and occasionally lions with their cubs. Further out, the slopes around Kilimanjaro provided some of the most beautiful farmland in the world, where sisal, alfalfa, sweetcorn, avocados, citrus fruits, pineapple and mangoes were harvested. Christine was entranced and cautiously started to dream of a new future. She applied for permission to live and work in Kenya, and while waiting wrote letters to friends sketching out plans to ‘start something of my own’, perhaps a dairy farm or ‘a tea shop at a crossroads’; anything that would give her ‘the feeling of belonging to something or somewhere’.
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Then perhaps, she wrote to Sir Owen, he and Kate could stay with her ‘for ever and ever and
we all will be happy!!!
’
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But a few weeks later the Colonial authorities, drowning in residency applications, turned hers down.

With immaculate timing, Christine now received an envelope from the High Commissioner’s office, containing a gilt-edged invitation to a ceremony at which her George Medal and OBE were to be presented to her by the Governor of Kenya, Sir Philip Mitchell. ‘Bloody bastards’, she spat.
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In what Michael called ‘typical Christine fashion’, she quickly made it known that she was not about to accept honours from the king’s representative in Kenya when His Majesty’s Government regarded her as an unsuitable resident.
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It was only when, to avoid an embarrassing incident, she was granted permission to stay, that she agreed to accept the awards. Engraved around the rim of the George Medal were the words ‘Madame Christina Gi
ż
ycka’, but the OBE on its civil ribbon, ‘For God and the Empire’, was for the British Christine Granville.
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She was also presented with the War Medal 1939–1945, crowned stars for service in Africa, Italy, France and Germany, and the 1939–1945 Star. Along with the Croix de Guerre, with one star, the Vercors Combatants’ Medal, and her British parachutist’s cloth wings, it made an impressive collection. To these Christine would add the commemorative gorget in the shape of a shield, depicting the Polish eagle protecting a Madonna and child – the Musketeers’ badge that she and Father Laski and others had once held in secret. The design was remarkably similar to the token she had been given as a child visiting Cz
ę
stochowa with her father. As a British agent, Christine was never honoured by Poland, either by the Polish government-in-exile or the Communist regime in her homeland, but perhaps she felt she carried something just as precious with her in this little Polish talisman, a reminder that she had always fought for the free Poland of her youth.

Michael now took a job heading the new Kenya Tourist Travel Association, and Christine correspondingly applied for a job as a ground stewardess with Kenyan Civil Aviation. During another unfortunate interview, however, despite her residency permit she was asked why she was travelling on a British passport, and why she did not therefore return to her own country. Kenya was awash with Polish refugees seeking work and Christine was seen as just another immigrant, second-class again. Infuriated, she returned to the offices with a lawyer the following day, and asked her interviewer to repeat his statements, but inside she was sick of such battles.