The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (52 page)

However, it was the people who knew Christine and her friends, and their children, who provided me with the most vivid source of new stories and information. At an annual memorial ceremony in France I met resistance veterans who had fought alongside Christine in the Vercors. In Poland Maria Pienkowska, Andrzej Kowerski’s niece, showed me his medals and let me try on Christine’s coral necklace and the beautiful gold and ivory bracelet that Andrzej had once bought her. Sadly my hand was too large to fit through her wooden bangle – she must have been very slight. I also explored her childhood home in Trzepnica, central Poland, now covered in creepers, its beautiful stucco ceilings collapsing, and met the Roman Catholic parish priest who showed me the record of her baptism, but strongly advised me not to continue with the book. One evening over cherry vodka, after a long afternoon in the Polish National Institute of Remembrance, my Polish friend and translator Maciek Helfer and I realized that a few years after my mother had watched the sky turn red over London, where my grandfather was on voluntary night fireman duty during the Blitz, his grandmother had sat watching the sky burn over Warsaw during the Rising. My husband’s grandfather, meanwhile, had died fighting with the Germans at Stalingrad.

Back in Britain, Polish networks led me to Mieczysława Wazacz, who kindly shared her 2010 film on Christine,
No Ordinary Countess,
for which she had interviewed many of Christine’s friends. This in turn brought me to Nicholas Gibbs, a man with a great knowledge of public school, and secret agent, networks, which he generously talked through with me for several hours, all the while a small green parrot nuzzling his neck. A Second World War author and collector in Spain, Ian Sayer, who had known Andrzej Kowerski in the 1970s, tried to help me to trace his papers, unseen for nearly forty years. I was sent Christine’s school reports, her first marriage certificate, the press coverage of the 1930 Polish national beauty contest in which she had been honoured as a Star of Beauty, and her second husband Jerzy Gi
ż
ycki’s unpublished memoirs. Count Andrzej and Countess Mary
ś
Skarbek, Christine’s cousins, invited me to lunch and to look through family photograph albums. The children of her friends and colleagues in Budapest, Cairo, London and Nairobi pulled out letters, photos and unpublished autobiographies, and dusted off anecdotes, which they shared both over sandwiches and over the internet.

Requests made through the Special Forces Club, FANY newsletters, and an SOE Yahoo group, brought me reminiscences of wartime Cairo, dates with Christine, and illicit photographs taken of secret buildings. I met British FANYs who had worked alongside her in Cairo and Algiers, and Polish women who had known and worried about her in post-war London. I drank a glass of wine with Katharine Whitehorn, dear friend to Francis Cammaerts’s wife Nan, and had lunch with Zbigniew Mieczkowski, who had served in the Polish armoured regiments, and had lunched with Christine in the same restaurant, on the day that she was killed. SOE historians including Martyn Cox and Jeff Bines allowed me to hear recorded interviews with other officers and agents who remembered Christine. The O’Malley family generously shared a collection of letters written by Christine and Andrzej to Kate O’Malley, along with Kate’s account of Christine’s work in Budapest and funeral in London. A note on a family genealogy website even led to my being contacted by Steven Muldowney, the nephew of the man who murdered Christine in 1952, who shared his own family’s story.

But there were also numerous times when I arrived too late. Christine’s brother’s papers have been thrown away, stacks of letters and boxes of photos have been lost, their existence confirmed only in memories. And there are now very few people left who knew Christine personally. As time erodes the human coastline we are lucky that many of those who did know Christine wrote their own memoirs or agreed to be interviewed by the Imperial War Museum for their sound archive, for Mieczysława Wazacz’s 2010 documentary on Christine, or for other film projects such as Martyn Cox’s
Our Secret War,
and Channel Four’s
The Real Charlotte Grays.
But it was when I saw the most focused set of photographs of Christine, which slipped from a manila envelope in the Home Office folders in the archive at Kew, that I felt she had ultimately evaded me. These were the crime scene photographs, so sharp that they revealed every detail, from the single drop of blood on her fingers to the fillings in her teeth, and yet ironically what they showed most clearly was that she had already left.

There are still secrets surrounding Christine, as is perhaps right: a buffer to keep her from the real world in which she always inhabited the margins. But I hope that this book presents a more balanced picture of a remarkable woman who can only truly be seen in the context of her country, although it often excluded her, and her times, although she was in many ways ahead of them. I also hope that it at least catches the fierce independence, and slight vulnerability, of the woman who loved and was loved by so many, and the courageous and fiercely patriotic Pole whose greatest tragedy was perhaps that she would not live to see her country free again.

C
LARE
M
ULLEY

April 2012

1. Trzepnica manor house, 2011: Christine’s childhood home.

2. The Skarbek coat of arms on Jerzy Skarbek’s tomb, Pow
ą
zki cemetery, Warsaw.

3. The Skarbek legend, ‘Let gold eat gold’.

4. Christine, aged nineteen, as a ‘Star of Beauty’ in the Miss Poland national beauty contest, Warsaw, 1930.

5. Andrzej Kowerski, aged about sixteen.

6. Christine’s Polish identity card, issued in Warsaw, December 1928.

7. Jerzy Gizycki, Christine’s second husband, Washington, 1922.

8. Andrzej Kowerski.