The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville by Mulley. Clare Page B
Authors: Mulley. Clare
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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.
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,
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,
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