The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (21 page)

Most officers were ‘buccaneering, swashbuckling types’, remembered Laura Foskett, an SOE secretary who shared Christine’s Zamalek pension for a while.
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Some had come in straight from the desert, still in tattered battledress; others were freshly posted and eager to see action. They came to Cairo for briefings, training, weapons, pay, rest – and sex. The city was virtually a garrison town. Most wives had been sent to South Africa for their own safety in 1940, and attractive female company was in huge demand. Invitations might begin with tea in Groppi’s large garden, or afternoon drinks on the shaded raised terrace at Shepheard’s Hotel. In the evenings there were romantic dinners at Mena House in the lee of the pyramids, and dancing late into the night at the Continental, the Turf Club, Mohammed Ali Club or the Kit-Kat on a boat moored on the Nile. ‘Your line of retreat to the powder room has been cut. Reinforcements sent to your aid have been intercepted at Groppi’s, where after a futile struggle they unconditionally put down their arms…’ read one flirty leaflet produced by the men of the ‘King’s Own 1st Pencil Pushers’ for their colleagues in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, the women’s voluntary corps better known as the ‘FANYs’. ‘There is no escape from this dilemma. You can’t go on talking forever, and sooner of later the whisky will give out. Mother is far, far away … Think it over … follow your worst instincts … SURRENDER CAN BE FUN’.
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Young, single and pretty, Laura Foskett surrendered happily, making love by moonlight at the foot of the pyramids – although, she admitted, ‘the sand could get in the way’.
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She was not the only woman in the city having fun. According to the novelist Olivia Manning, ‘Cairo … was like a bureau of sexual exchange’, and Christine’s husband, Jerzy Gi
ż
ycki, reported that while he was in Cairo around twenty nurses had to be evacuated to England because they were pregnant.
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‘There is nothing wrong with young couples sharing beds – especially in war time’, Jerzy wrote. ‘But one would think that nurses would be able to get some contraceptives and use them.’
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But although a ‘French letter’ and a tin of ointment was given to every soldier entering the inappropriately named ‘Berka’, Cairo’s notorious red-light district, young women like Laura Foskett had no independent access to such luxuries.

Christine became the focus of attention as soon as she walked around the pool at the Gezira Club in her peep-toe platform espadrilles and well-cut shirt and skirt. Guy Tamplin’s wife, Nina, described her as ‘unusual-looking perhaps, but certainly not beautiful’, though she had to admit that Christine ‘had a wide choice of admirers’. Even her own husband was ‘devoted’ to Christine, Nina admitted, although, she stressed, his feeling was ‘an emotion which transcended sex, and had its roots in admiration of her heroic qualities’.
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However, Douglas Dodds-Parker, an army captain who had been posted to the city to coordinate SOE activities in the Balkans, believed Christine ‘had some kind of magic in her that men could not resist’.
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‘She wasn’t really beautiful, but she was very attractive’, Margaret Pawley, another of the Cairo-based FANYs, agreed. ‘Men found her terribly attractive … but women would be rather fed up about the fact that she had such an effect on the men.’
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One young British officer, Michael Ward, used to watch her at the Club in the afternoons. She already had a reputation as a courageous agent, ‘so there was a certain atmosphere of glamour attached to her’ and, as she was ‘an attractive woman at that’, he introduced himself. After two or three dates, however, Ward realized that Christine ‘was hoping for something a little bit stronger’ than their innocent chats, and nervously made his excuses.
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Other officers were less circumspect.

She ‘had many lovers’ according to Laura Foskett. One evening, Foskett later recalled, Christine was in bed with company when there was an angry banging on her door. Watching her partner produce a gun and aim it at the unwelcome intruder, an affronted Christine exclaimed, ‘You never told me you kept a loaded revolver under your pillow!’
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Nina Tamplin meanwhile remembered Christine turning up to meet her on the arm of ‘a splendid-looking Afghan major’, and afterwards boasting that ‘he would die for me’.
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Whatever the truth behind such stories, Christine did nothing to curb them. ‘She was an embroiderer’, Nina Tamplin felt, ‘not a liar ever, but she just had to cover her tracks.’
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‘She was certainly mysterious’, Margaret Pawley agreed.
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Whatever the truth, Andrzej still worshipped Christine, but he was beginning to accept that their relationship would never be exclusive. To the FANYs and SOE ‘cipherines’ at the Club it was clear that Andrzej was off-limits, but British officers like Ward were ‘rather surprised’ when they found out that Christine and the handsome but heavily built and moustached Andrzej were in any way an item.
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Christine and Andrzej also had a social life outside of the British enclaves. Although still regarded with suspicion by the Second Bureau, Christine now treated the allegations against her with contempt. She and Andrzej both had influential connections in the Polish military including Bobinski and Kopanski, and Andrzej had many Polish friends and ‘cousins’ serving as cavalry officers in the Middle East. There were surprising reunions too. One day the former Musketeer agent Michal Gradowski, ‘the Fox’, turned up in Cairo, bursting with stories to be shared over a drink, and even Prince Eddie Lobkowitz, whom they had once sheltered in Budapest, arrived for some rest and recuperation having received a bullet in his backside. Cairo had become, in Olivia Manning’s words, ‘the clearing house of Eastern Europe’.
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Exiled royals and their hangers-on, elected heads of state with their diplomats, officers, journalists and spies, all had arrived in Cairo to wait for the end of the war. Christine was soon moving in the most select circles, invited to drinks with Egyptian Jews connected to King Farouk’s household, and Muslim dignitaries including Prince Ali Khan, the socialite son of Aga Khan III, as well as to dinners with British, Greek, Yugoslav, and even Polish officers and agents.
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That spring a childhood friend of Andrzej’s, Zofia Tarnowska, arrived in Cairo. She was lent a luxurious villa by King Farouk’s uncle, who had often hunted on her family estates. Zofia was strikingly beautiful and had enjoyed a privileged and rather wild childhood in the Polish countryside, at Rudnik. ‘Ruda
ż
elaza’ means iron and, like Christine, Zofia proudly wore a family signet ring with a slice of iron embedded in its face. Like Christine, she too had a deep love of animals, had been expelled from her posh Polish boarding school for having too much spirit and had married young to escape the nest, although Zofia’s nest was rather better feathered than Christine’s had been. Zofia had married her cousin, Andrzej Tarnowski, who was now serving in the Carpathian Brigade and was also a close friend of Andrzej’s. But their marriage, always tempestuous, had been shipwrecked by the war and the deaths in infancy of their two sons.
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Arriving in Cairo to some degree liberated her from her traumatic past, and she seized the second chance. Perhaps she and Christine saw too much of themselves when they looked at one another, or perhaps Christine was jealous of Zofia’s pre-war friendship with Andrzej and suspicious that he might be secretly in love with her. Whatever the reason, it took the two women a while before they embraced as friends. Once they had done so, however, they became as close as either of their fiercely independent natures would allow.

Zofia was a society beauty who loved huge house parties and fashionable nightclubs. Christine preferred smaller occasions, where she could turn all the heads if she chose, but still have intimate conversations in a quiet corner. Zofia was intrigued by Christine, and full of admiration for her. She felt Poland’s loss just as keenly as her friend, and had even burned her passport in 1939 as a protest against being forced to flee. But she had never had any desire to serve in the front line. Instead, she founded the Cairo branch of the Polish Red Cross, helping to trace missing Allied soldiers and serving at the military canteen outside Shepheard’s Hotel. Christine, for her part, admired Zofia’s strength and determination, and the natural aversion to discipline that chimed with her own. They would be friends for the rest of their lives.

Although she enjoyed soaking up both the sun and the admiration on offer in Cairo, Christine was intensely frustrated at her lack of active deployment. She had seen the impact of Nazi occupation, understood the terror and risks her countrymen faced, and knew that she flourished in providing support to the resistance. The atmosphere in Cairo was ‘unbearable’, she now wrote to Kate O’Malley. ‘There are about 90,000 officers trying to have fun. You cannot imagine the way in which nobody here realizes the atrocities going on in the occupied countries, and the battles in the desert here are treated like a game. I am in despair. The offices are full of young, cheerful, unworried youngsters that see people like me as defeatists or spoilsports.’
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She also wrote repeatedly about her regret at not returning to Poland. Over there her work had reaped clear results, but in Cairo it seemed to be all talk. SOE wanted to move her – and Andrzej – on as well. ‘I can see no point whatever in leaving them in Cairo where they cannot be employed,’ Wilkinson wrote, ‘and where they are a potential source of disgruntlement.’
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In private conversations ‘disgruntlement’ was rephrased as ‘potential source of danger’, and it was clear that in London at least Christine and Andrzej were again being seen more as a liability than an asset.
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‘The perplexed question of X and Y’ continued to ‘cause embarrassment’ over the next few months.
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Yet at the same time Christine was bringing in some very useful local intelligence.

In April 1942 she warned Guy Tamplin of a rumoured assassination plot – ‘a rather violent accusation’ – indirectly linked to Józef Retinger, one of General Sikorski’s more controversial personal advisers.
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By May she was regularly being asked to report on Polish officers and Second Bureau personnel. Libel not being a key concern in espionage, her comments were often refreshingly frank. Damning one Polish officer who had been described by SOE as ‘tall, athletic and good-looking, with charming manners’, Christine reported that ‘his brother has for many years adorned a lunatic asylum’, and implied that ‘he might do worse than join him’.
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Her wry style was not unwelcome. ‘Source venomous but probably good, ie Willing’, reads the comment at the bottom of a report on the bruised pride of a Polish general in Tel Aviv.
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However gossipy her reports might seem, it was clear that the British valued them, and they now tried to keep her in Cairo. SOE headquarters had moved to Rustum Buildings, a block of flats on the edge of the Nile so covert that every taxi-driver knew it as ‘Secret House’, and shoeshine boys and other street vendors would stand outside shouting ‘Chocolates! Cigarettes! OBEs!’
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At first Christine was offered secretarial jobs; unsurprisingly, she refused them. Aidan Crawley, who was also now in Cairo, lobbied on her behalf, saying that she was not ‘the type that can abide office work’ and wanted ‘work with risk’.
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Andrzej also wanted work with risk, but he too had been out of action since their return from Syria. His leg had still not received medical attention and was now badly swollen and irritated by the sand that infiltrated between his stump and his prosthesis, causing considerable pain. In March he underwent an operation to remove another three centimetres from his stump. It took him a further month to be able to move about again on crutches, after which Christine and Kate O’Malley connived to get replacement parts for his artificial leg sent from London.

During her hospital visits, Christine met an old friend. In September 1941, when she and Andrzej had been posted to Syria, Wladimir Ledóchowski had been dispatched further west, with the Polish Carpathian Brigade, to help relieve the Allied forces defending Tobruk in Libya. The end of Wladimir’s left elbow had been blown away and he was lucky not to have had his arm amputated. As it was, surgery left one arm shorter than the other, and locked as straight as a stick. Although he loathed the sympathy he detected among many of his visitors, imagining them gossiping about him at the hospital gates, he was touched by Christine’s visit. ‘She looked at me with tears in her eyes’, he wrote in his journal.
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A few weeks later Christine sat around a table at the Mena House restaurant with her two crippled lovers, all of them staring resolutely through the windows at the pyramids. Wladimir raised a glass of wine to their reunion, but it was a miserable occasion. ‘Stiff?’ Christine asked him, looking at his sling. He nodded. ‘So the war is finished for you?’ ‘Just about’, Wladimir answered.
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And that was the end of the conversation. Although Wladimir would always cherish the memory of his months with Christine in Poland and Hungary, it was obvious to him that there was no longer anything between them. For Christine, however, the self-knowledge that came from this meeting was even clearer. She became absolutely determined that the war should not be over for her.
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Britain was now in the awkward position of having both guaranteed Poland’s pre-war borders and committed to support Russian interests. Gubbins had a long-standing distrust of Soviet intentions, but with typical frankness Wilkinson summed up the thoughts of many when he told Tamplin, ‘my own feeling is that it is high time we stopped molly-coddling the Poles’.
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With British encouragement, General Sikorski was pursuing a pragmatic policy of rapprochement with Russia. Many senior Polish officers were critical of this position, and Sikorski now had to contend not only with occupation at home and war abroad, but with growing dissent among his own forces. Opposition was particularly strong among those who had experienced Soviet hospitality first hand, or who knew some of the nearly 20,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia who had been interned by Stalin and were still unaccounted for. ‘The situation of the Poles in Russia is really very horrifying…’ even Wilkinson admitted, and ‘clearly not a very good argument in favour of Sikorski’s policy of rapprochement’.
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