The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (55 page)

37. Bill Stanley Moss, ‘Christine the Brave’,
Picture Post
, 13 September 1952.

38. Andrzej rushes to right the cross at Christine’s grave, Kensal Green Roman Catholic cemetery, London, June 1952.

39. Oil portrait of Christine by Agniela Pawlikowska, c.1952.

Appendix I: Christine ‘preferred dogs to children’: a note on Christine Granville’s childlessness
1

Christine Granville never had children. For a woman who seemingly had every opportunity, it is intriguing to consider why not. Certainly by chance or design she managed to have a cheerfully active sex life throughout the war and afterwards, when contraception was not reliably available, without any issue. This was a notable achievement. ‘There is nothing wrong about young couples sharing beds – especially in war time’, Christine’s second husband, Jerzy Gi
ż
ycki, wrote, supporting the idea that there were rather more relaxed rules around romance during wartime.
2
The results, however, were predictable. Jerzy noted that during just the months that he was in Cairo, over twenty nurses had to be evacuated to England because they were pregnant, and they had better access to contraceptives than most. This raises the question of whether Christine’s lack of children was a positive choice, that perhaps her lifelong passion for travel and adventure precluded any desire she might have had to have children, or conversely whether she already knew that she could not have children and this to some extent informed her outlook on life.

Christine’s cousin, Andrzej Skarbek, told me that it was ‘not in her nature to have children; she did not have maternal feelings. She was drawn to people of her own age and generation, but not so much to children’.
3
It is certainly true that Christine enjoyed her freedom, showed little interest in babies, and rarely visited friends after they had started a family. However, it is hardly unusual to find a friend’s baby dull or difficult, especially when you have none yourself. The most interest she seems to have shown in a very young child was when she commissioned a version of the Skarbek family coat of arms, worked in leather by Polish artisans, to hang above the cot of a Skarbek baby, and this feels more like a desire to pass on pride in the family than a wish to cheer the child. Even the young children of some of her friends, such as Richard Truszkowski’s daughter Diana, who met her several times, felt that ‘Christine didn’t like children, she didn’t approve of them’, and even that she ‘preferred dogs to children’.
4

And yet sometimes Christine went out of her way to spend time, and form relationships, with fairly young children, often going against the grain of expected behaviour to do so. In Cairo she visited the lonely daughter of an officer whose wife had died and who was, as a result, boarding at a Catholic school, a background not unlike Christine’s. Furthermore Anna Czyzewska’s daughter Suzanna, whom she befriended in Nairobi, remembered that Christine was ‘very sweet with children’, and the only one of her parents’ many house-guests who would seek her out, tell her stories and bring small gifts.
5
Christine’s interest in children might be described, then, as ambiguous or episodic, but she was certainly not opposed to them on principle, or unable to empathize with individual children. The only conclusion that can be safely drawn from all of which is that she was not disposed to talk about her feelings regarding children with her younger, male cousin, who had four children of his own.

Other people during my research suggested that Christine was not so much unwilling, as unable, to have children. One theory was that she had had a secret abortion in pre-war Poland that prevented her from getting pregnant later. If so, the secrecy was maintained: there is no evidence to support this theory. Others suggested that it is common for women enduring great stress, such as when conducting covert operations during a war, to stop having periods altogether. However, Christine’s special operations colleague John Anstey reported that when she was facing imminent departure from Algiers ‘we had the awful dilemma when at a certain time of the month, her physical condition and the moon coincided’, leading them to postpone her drop to her great frustration.
6
This would imply that Christine was not entirely free from her monthly cycle.

When Dennis Muldowney was in prison, having confessed to killing Christine, he underwent medical assessment to determine whether he was fit to stand trial. During this process, he asked one of the doctors whether a woman could have eight abortions. Explaining his interest, he said that ‘sexual intercourse took place often’ between himself and Christine, ‘and at no time were contraceptive precautions taken’ because she had reassured him that after eight abortions she knew that she would not become pregnant.
7
Although he had had a son from his marriage, Muldowney was wondering, he said, who was sterile, Christine or himself. The Polish word ‘
poronienie
’ translates as both abortion and miscarriage. Given Christine’s imperfect English, it is possible that she had meant a series of miscarriages, after which she firmly believed she could not carry a child. If this is true, it might have contributed to her rather more carefree attitude to sex than usual for her times, and perhaps also to her desire to keep her freedom rather than marry and fail to raise the expected family.

After her death, Christine’s autopsy revealed that while otherwise healthy, she had suffered from a fibroid uterus; that is she had a muscular layer of benign tumours in her uterus, sometimes caused by high levels of oestrogen. There is a correlation between this condition and reproductive problems such as infertility, miscarriage and early-onset labour, although a delay in having children can also contribute to cause these fibroids. It is possible, then, that although she may not have been aware of her condition, Christine did indeed suffer from a series of early miscarriages and, finding the silver lining, felt more able to take risks with her relationships than she might otherwise have done.

Christine’s reactions to the pregnancies of her friends were only recorded twice. When her post-war London colleague, Izabela Muszkowska, told her she was pregnant with her first child, Christine exclaimed with alarm, ‘Oh my God, what have you done to yourself?!’
8
Her immediate thought was for her friend’s wellbeing. But when Zofia Tarnowska Moss told her of her first daughter’s birth, Christine asked only that the child might be called ‘Christine’, the ‘lucky name’ that had got her through the war unscathed.
9
For whatever reason, Christine perhaps knew that she would never pass on her name herself. If so, she would have been pleased to know that the Skarbeks are still proud of their family name, and Christine Isabelle Cole, née Moss, still thinks of her namesake with great admiration.

Appendix II: She ‘murdered me’ Muldowney said: a note on Dennis Muldowney
1

Dennis Muldowney murdered Christine Granville in a premeditated act of appalling brutality. He confessed to his crime, declined to submit any pleas in mitigation, and was sentenced to death after a trial that was reported to have lasted less than three minutes. Once it had been found that Muldowney was not acting as an assassin on behalf of any shadowy political organization, little further consideration had been given to his motives or to any possible mitigating circumstances. As a result the fascinating profile of Muldowney that had been built up by prison doctors, and through his own communications with the prison staff and his siblings, was largely disregarded.

In the weeks after Christine’s murder, Brixton prison’s principal medical officer decided that Muldowney was an ‘unreliable informant who seeks to dramatize his life’, but ‘not feeble-minded’, and so fit to stand trial.
2
This was an accurate assessment. Muldowney had sought to dramatize his life by his very association with Christine, and it was right that his statements should be treated with caution, but not that they should be disregarded entirely. Muldowney was quickly proved a liar, however, when he gave his date of birth as 1910, three years shy of his actual birth year of 1907. He had believed himself eight years older than Christine, had vainly presented himself as just five years older, but had, in reality, been less than a year her senior. What made this significant was that Muldowney’s lie about his age, unlike Christine’s, was discovered, casting further doubt over all his statements.

There is little doubt that Muldowney was given short shrift by the prison service, the medics, the courts, and the press covering the story. Throughout his case records his name is repeatedly misspelled, and other details are incorrect, suggesting little concern for accuracy. His statements about his damaged childhood, the neglect and abuse he had suffered for years, were dismissed, an officer noting only that he came ‘from a respectable working-class family’.
3
Emotive judgements about his character were recorded as fact. He is ‘a nasty minded exhibitionist’ Brixton prison’s medical officer wrote to his Pentonville counterpart a week before the trial.
4
Prison staff discussed the press coverage of his case with other inmates in his presence and, in court, after consistent lobbying by Andrzej and others, once Muldowney had left the dock a statement was read out directly rejecting his claim that he and Christine had once been intimate. With no defence to report, the press focused on Muldowney’s appearance, his ‘casual smirk’ in the dock, and his hands, ‘thrust deeply in the pockets of his fawn raincoat’, as if his mac were an indication not only of guilt, but of possible perversion.
5
He was also frequently presented as short, ‘undersized’ or ‘a goblin’, reflecting the popular view of him as a degenerate, although at five foot nine he was well above average male height at the time.

Despite having ruthlessly murdered a woman, Muldowney was shocked to find himself demonized. ‘I’ve still got some constitutional rights you know’, he stormed to his two half-brothers, Frank and Jack, and his half-sister Marie, when the papers published a private photograph of him.
6
These were rights that he had denied Christine, but they
were
rights, and it is questionable as to whether they had been fully respected.

There was almost certainly some truth in Muldowney’s claims about the nature of his relationship with Christine. She was ‘the only woman who would meet his constant sexual demands’, he told prison doctors, and they had lived ‘as man and wife’.
7
But she was also ‘very sadistic and had had many different lovers’, deliberately making him ‘her slave’ before breaking his heart.
8
Furthermore he claimed that Christine had dared him to kill her on three separate occasions, and that ‘it was she who put the idea into my head’.
9
Perhaps in a sense this too was true, and the weight of surviving the war, the daily grind of life in exile and the monotony and boredom that had replaced the thrill of resistance work had tempted Christine to flirt with danger again, risking only a life that had lost much of its value. In Muldowney’s letter to Frank, Jack and Marie he wrote that neither Christine nor he had looked forward to getting older. ‘Age – not for me!… The present cannot be avoided! The future can!’ he wrote, cheering his sentences with numerous exclamation marks, before adding: ‘A morbid philosophy? Much the same as Christine’s.’
10
They had loved each other, Muldowney said, but she was ‘a withering middle-aged woman’, and well aware that she was ‘getting a little rough around the edges’.
11
‘Christine, literally and metaphorically, asked for what she got!’ he ended. ‘I am sorry, but that’s the
truth!
’
12