The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (51 page)

The dates fit, and Howe certainly knew both Fleming and Christine. Indeed he is one of several mutual friends who might have introduced them, including Aidan Crawley, Paddy Leigh Fermor and Colin Gubbins. Furthermore, Fleming was Christine’s type, upper-class, tall, fair and blue-eyed, and Christine is a perfect match for Fleming’s ideal woman as described by another biographer, Andrew Lycett: ‘thirtyish, Jewish, a companion who wouldn’t need education in the arts of love’.
28
She is also a good match for Vesper Lynd, the first ‘Bond-girl’, a dark and enigmatic European agent, perpetually caught between sunbathing and action, who serves as Bond’s love interest in the first 007 outing, the 1952
Casino Royale.
Lynd was ‘very beautiful … very beautiful indeed’, with black hair, ‘cut square and low on the nape of her neck, framing her face to below the clear and beautiful line of her jaw … her skin was lightly suntanned and bore no traces of make-up except on her mouth … On the fourth finger of her right hand she wore a broad topaz ring’.
29
A wireless expert who speaks French like a native and is in love with a Pole, she manages to combine being ‘full of consideration without compromising her arrogant spirit’, and believes in ‘doing everything fully, getting the most out of everything one does’.
30
Fleming teasingly referred to his Bond books as ‘autobiography’ and took many of his characters’ names and natures from the people he knew, reportedly including Colin Gubbins and Vera Atkins, so the idea of his using Christine and her childhood nickname ‘little star’ – given as ‘Vesper’, the evening star – is appealing.
31
‘Can I borrow it?’ Bond asks Vesper of her name at an early meeting, in the sort of in-joke that Fleming liked to play.
32

But if Christine was immortalized as the carelessly beautiful double agent Vesper Lynd, Fleming is more likely to have been inspired by the stories he heard than the woman in person. In later interviews and writing he would sometimes refer to Christine as being a ‘dark haired beauty’ or having ‘a fabulous record in wartime espionage’, but he never claimed to have met her, even in passing.
33
The name ‘Vesper’, meanwhile, came from an evening cocktail once served to Fleming at a mansion in Jamaica.
34
In fact the only known source for the much-quoted story of Christine’s affair with Fleming is McCormick, who claims to have seen the letter from Fleming praising Christine, and his supporting witness, an Olga Bialoguski (
sic
), who testified to McCormick that she was the sole person Christine confided in, and who is also untraceable.
*
McCormick had already written a history of the British Secret Service, and a ‘Spyclopaedia’, both of which mention Christine without reference to Fleming.
35
It seems that the opportunity to bring them together finally proved irresistible.
†

Whether or not Vesper Lynd was partly inspired by stories of Christine, memories of the real woman did live on. As well as the two known unpublished biographies by people who knew her, and Masson’s official version, there is a Polish novel by Maria Nurowska, whose father had known Christine in Poland.
‡
Xan Fielding and Patrick Howarth also dedicated their own war memoirs to Christine’s memory, and Howarth even immortalized her in verse.
36
More poignantly, not only Christine’s brother, but also Francis and Nan Cammaerts, Bill and Zofia Tarnowska Moss, and Jan and Mary
ś
Skarbek all named their daughters ‘Christine’, as too did Gwendolin Lees, a FANY Christine had known in Cairo; Wladimir’s son, Jan Ledóchowski; and even, most surprisingly, Dennis Muldowney’s half-brother, Jack Muldowney, who gave the name to his daughter, born in 1953, even though there had never been a Christine in their family before.

Only Jerzy Gi
ż
ycki tried to leave the memory of Christine behind, choosing not to attend her funeral, and staying in Canada until the mid-1950s. Ever a controversial character, after alienating the Canadian Polish community he settled in Oaxaca, Mexico, where he ended his days writing books on chess, cinematography and Chopin, godson of Christine’s illustrious forebear. Christine’s cousins, Jan and Andrzej Skarbek, both settled in Britain. Jan married Mary
ś
Tyszkiewicz and they had four children. Andrzej and his wife Shelagh also had four children, and after qualifying Andrzej became a pioneering psychotherapist who helped to develop psychotherapy services in the NHS. He later married the writer Marjorie Wallace, who went on to found the mental health charity SANE.

Wladimir Ledóchowski settled in South Africa, where he worked as an engineer, journalist and author, criticizing apartheid and reporting on the progress of the Communist regime in Poland. Keeping his word to Andrzej, however, he never published anything on Christine. He became involved in the anti-apartheid movement and through this, Wladimir and his wife formed a strong friendship with the author Nadine Gordimer, who later remembered his ‘fine dialectical mind and bright spirit’, and suggested that ‘he died, perhaps, from an overdose of avidity for life’.
37

Francis Cammaerts lived to be a very distinguished old man. By 1948 he had become the first director of the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges, a UNESCO body set up to support the post-war enthusiasm for cultural exchanges and international bridge-building. Later he became a member of the Committee for World Peace, and worked in education in Britain, Kenya and Botswana. Although he loved his family he also craved independence and finally settled in southern France, where he died, aged ninety, his life celebrated by the whole village. He was, according to his nephew, the writer Michael Morpurgo, ‘a much honoured and much loved man’.
38

Andrzej Kowerski-Kennedy lived in Germany, but kept a flat in London. ‘For the most part he spends his time travelling about the Continent in fast cars, of which he has two, staying with friends, of whom he has legion, or in small hotels, of which he seems to know one especially good one in any town, village or hamlet in which he happens to find himself’, Bill Moss wrote in 1956.
39
Andrzej maintained his love of fast cars throughout his life and was still proudly driving a blisteringly fast red Ferrari in 1975.
*
Although he never married, and always kept the Aniela Pawlikowska pastel sketch of Christine on his bedroom wall, he found love again, sharing his life with Angela von Koelichen, to whose sons he also became close. Always laughing and joking, he was dearly loved by all the young people who knew him, including his niece Maria, to whom he gave Christine’s few pieces of dress jewellery including the gold and ivory bracelet he had once bought her. Christine’s family signet ring, however, he gave to her cousin, Jan’s daughter Elizabeth, as she was considered the wildest of the next generation of Skarbek girls. Bill and Zofia Tarnowska Moss’s daughter, Christine Isabelle, also adored Andrzej, whom she remembered always arriving in a Porsche full of presents. When, aged six, she asked why he had a wooden leg, he told her he was a pirate, and when she looked at his ‘twinkly, twinkly eyes and wonderfully bristly moustache’ and told him she wanted to marry him, he told her to eat more porridge so she would grow up quickly.
40
He rarely talked about the Christine she was named after and whom he had once hoped to marry. Andrzej died of cancer in Munich in December 1988. He was seventy-eight. In accordance with his last wishes, his ashes were flown to London and interred with Christine. A memorial plaque was added to the foot of her grave: ‘a humble and faithful position’ some have commented, but also a deeply romantic gesture.
41

It is not known whether Andrzej ever saw the finished Aniela Pawlikowska oil portrait of Christine. In 1971 the Shelbourne Hotel came under new Polish management who cleared out twenty years’ worth of junk from the storerooms. Among the finds was Christine’s heavy shipping trunk, still unlocked and full of clothes and papers, her SOE wireless set and standard-issue commando knife. Leaning against it, lost for twenty years, was the finished portrait.
*

My Search for Christine Granville: a note on sources

Researching the life of a secret agent entails inherent difficulties. Christine herself kept few records; I have seen only eleven letters actually written in her own hand, and one of these was just a note scrawled on the squared paper used for coding radio messages. Many official and unofficial papers relating to her have been destroyed by accident or on purpose, while others may remain unreleased. Those papers that are available are often contradictory. Letters are notoriously unreliable, and reports and interrogations often had a hidden agenda during and after the war. Even when first-hand testimony is available, Christine herself was not above telling a good story, and sometimes a very blunt lie, from her use of a commando knife to her date of birth, so it is sometimes hard to discriminate between fact and fiction. I am not the first to struggle with these problems. There have been three previously published biographies of Christine, and two unpublished. Of these, two are self-proclaimed ‘fictional-biographies’, although they are both based on first-hand accounts.

The first biography of Christine was written by Bill Stanley Moss, her friend and a fellow former SOE agent. When he started work on it, Moss was already well known as the author of
Ill Met By Moonlight,
an account of his and Paddy Leigh Fermor’s successful mission to kidnap the German general Heinrich Kreipe on Crete during the war, and there was talk of turning Christine’s story into a screenplay for a film to star Winston Churchill’s actress-daughter, Sarah, in the title role. However, Christine’s soul-mate and posthumous protector, Andrzej Kowerski, rejected the manuscript. The whereabouts of Moss’s draft is now unknown, but his daughter, Christine Isabelle (named after Christine), invited me to see his notes, full of humour and opinion, along with his collection of papers relating to Christine, including some unlikely love letters, Andrzej Kowerski’s Polish passport and Christine’s false French identity papers.

Count Wladimir Ledóchowski, another war hero and one of Christine’s Polish lovers, started his account of Christine twenty years later. The unfinished manuscript presents a very lyrical and critically admiring picture of Christine, and was also rejected by Andrzej. Ledóchowski’s son, Jan, kindly gave me a copy of the manuscript among other papers (and lent me his Warsaw flat during my research, outside which I was held up by the Gestapo during a Polish film shoot one afternoon). Although subtitled ‘A Biographical Story’, it is clear that Ledóchowski undertook thorough research, both on location and through interviews with people now deceased.

The first published biography was Madeleine Masson’s
Christine: A Search for Christine Granville,
which came out in 1975. Masson had met Christine on a passenger ship in 1952, just before she was killed. Twenty years later her biography was mainly informed by Andrzej Kowerski, and the circle of male friends who had known Christine during the war and stayed in touch with each other after her death. The resulting book is invaluable for presenting Andrzej’s perspective on Christine. Unfortunately he wished to present her in what he considered a good, rather than necessarily true, light.

Some years later came the Polish author Maria Nurowska’s novel,
Miło
ś
nica.
Although often dismissed as pure fiction, the book was informed by three primary sources: interviews with some of Christine’s London friends; Wladimir Ledóchowski’s manuscript; and the recollections of the author’s father, who knew Christine before and during the war. Maria met me in Zakopane to disentangle fact from fiction, and told me how struck she had been with the overlap between Ledóchowski’s account and her father’s own memories.

A final publication,
Krystyna Skarbek: Agent with Many Faces,
by Colonel Jan Larecki, a former intelligence officer with the postwar Communist government in Poland, is a helpful facts-and-stats account of Christine’s life with a few new theories of its own. Colonel Larecki agreed to meet me, in Warsaw, to discuss stories and sources. It is not often in life that I have had my hand kissed by a chain-smoking, espresso-drinking, former Communist spy, and afterwards I had to think hard about just how charmed I had been.

It is still sometimes suggested that there is another published portrait of Christine, found in Ian Fleming’s first Bond outing, the 1952
Casino Royale.
The story that Christine and Fleming had an affair is appealing. She was certainly his type, and his descriptions of the dark and enigmatic Eastern European agent, perpetually caught between sunbathing and action, fit Christine well. But although Fleming and Christine had several mutual friends, and he talked about her after her death had made her momentarily famous, there is no reliable evidence that the two ever actually met. A more evidence-based, if still fictionalized, account of Christine appears in Kate O’Malley and her mother Ann Bridge’s novel,
A Place to Stand,
based on their wartime exploits in Budapest.

The National Archive in Britain has many files on Christine, her colleagues and operations, which have been released over the last few years, and the Freedom of Information Act enabled me to access some more. Other documents are available in the Imperial War Museum, which also claims to have her gun; the Special Forces Club, which has her picture of a Madonna; and the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, which has the only known oil portrait of Christine, as well as her wireless radio, commando knife, medals and a few documents including her 1949 pocket diary. The Liddell Hart Archive at King’s College London contains papers relating to Christine’s work in France and Italy. There is considerable contextual information in the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust in London, the National Institute for Remembrance, and the Central Military Archive both in Warsaw, and the Vercors museums in France. Many more private archives yielded further nuggets of information, as did a fabulous range of secondary-source British, Polish, French and American books, translated by good friends in all these countries, including Maciek and Iwona Helfer, Jan Ledóchowski, Christopher Kasparek and Albertine Sharples.