The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (34 page)

Once in the foothills Christine made her ascent alone, sticking mainly to the higher forest tracks above the roads. It was hot, and the climb hard going, but no more demanding than her hikes in the hills outside Algiers. The trees at first provided welcome shade, but as she climbed higher the snow-capped mountains shimmered in the heat and clouds of dust blew up along the paths. At one stage, Andrzej must have been intending to join her, because she sent a message to Brooks Richards saying that his leg would not be up to it. ‘The conditions now on the … frontier are too difficult for him,’ she signalled, ‘there are no means of transport at all and everything has to be done on foot.’
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Christine spent two weeks trekking back and forth across the mountains, which were rapidly becoming a battlefield, reporting back on enemy troop movements, resistance plans and general morale. Stopping at villages on both sides of the border she saw how unpopular the conflict had been locally. Whether they were French or Italian, people in the Alps were shaped by the same cultures and traditions, and sometimes even shared the same family names. Crossing the German lines, she noticed that the guards looked increasingly nervous; everyone knew the tide of the war had turned and the Wehrmacht troops had lost their certain faith in victory. ‘The morale in the German army is bad,’ she reported, ‘they know the war is lost. Propaganda is almost unnecessary.’
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Christine was always on the move, pushing herself to the limit, and glad to re-establish contact with her friends in France every few days, where she might stop for some ersatz coffee, made with ground acorns or grilled barley, or, better, some tea or a glass of local wine. It was in these kitchens and cafés that her stories began tumbling out. Once, she said, she had been stopped by a Nazi frontier patrol as she was openly carrying her SOE silk map of the area.
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Unable to run, or to hide what was in her hands, she calmly shook the map out and used it to replace the scarf tying back her hair. Paying no more attention to it she then greeted the soldiers in fluent French, persuading them that she was just a local village woman running errands in her sandals.

Her sangfroid paid off again one evening in Piedmont, on the Italian side of the Alps, when a border patrol caught sight of her with some French partisans some way ahead. They flung themselves under some dense bushes in a wood near the road, but were quickly sniffed out by the patrol’s vicious Alsatian dog, trained to bite and break necks. Christine quietly put her arm around the animal, and as she did so it lay down beside her, ignoring its handler’s whistles. Christine’s former lover, Wladimir Ledóchowski, later laughed at her pride in her ability to connect with animals, and the way that Christine would tell her dog-charming stories ‘right and left, to whoever was willing to listen’.
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Francis, however, was less cynical, believing ‘she had a magic with dogs’.
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‘A dog, like any human being, would simply be drawn to her like a magnet…’, he mused. ‘There are people like that who draw your eyes; she was an intensely compelling personality’ and ‘had a sort of electricity which was not only human but animal’.
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Gilbert Tavernier, who had been with her, however, thought that in this instance Christine’s compelling personality was supplemented by her quick thinking. She had been using chicken-fat to stop her heavy sandals from rubbing blisters on her heels, and had quickly smeared some on to her hands, giving the dog something good to lick while she whispered Polish endearments in its ears. Permanently switching allegiance, the dog remained with Gilbert Galletti for the rest of the war, only leaving his side to greet Christine by rolling at her feet whenever she appeared.

But perhaps the most repeated story is that Christine was once stopped by two Italian conscripts while she was guiding one of their partisan compatriots to the nearest Maquis group. Ordered to put her hands above her head, she slowly raised two live grenades, threatening to blow everyone up. Then she retreated into the trees, momentarily losing her partisan charge, who, fearing she had lost her nerve, was unsure whether to join her. Later Christine would cheerfully claim that she always preferred grenades to a gun. ‘With a pistol you can defend yourself against at most one person, with a hand-grenade – against five, perhaps ten’, she bragged when in the mood. ‘I always had hand-grenades.’
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Whether or not the story is true, and different versions have her giving her ultimatum in Italian or even German, neither of which she spoke with any fluency, it is clear that Christine had become an expert in the valuable art of bluff.

Throughout this period, Christine was sending back information on troop movements to Galletti and Francis, and identifying the partisan bases to receive arms drops and be linked up with the new ‘Jedburgh teams’: groups of specially trained British SOE, American OSS and French resistance leaders, being dropped in under Operation Toplink. She also arranged to provide what supplies she could by mule to local Maquis who were harassing those German convoys that ventured along the vulnerable mountain roads. She was in her element. ‘We need as many Jedburghs and Missions as possible, and for God’s sake do not wait until the war is over’, she signalled to Brooks Richards in late July, her familiar tone conveying both her natural inclination to command and her renewed belief in the importance of her role. ‘Send at least one Jedburgh … to each department and instruct them all to listen to “Roger’s” orders.’
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The Toplink Jedburgh teams started arriving over the next few days. The first, Leonard Hamilton and Paddy O’Regan, parachuted in on 1 August. The naturally good-humoured O’Regan had been given false papers identifying him as a pig dealer, and had deliberately frowned for his photograph, hoping that it would make him ‘as fascist looking as possible’.
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Hamilton, who looked twenty-five although he was in fact forty, towered over him, and as he tended to stand assertively, with his hands on his hips, O’Regan felt that he never seemed like anything other than a resistance fighter. With them came a French wireless operator, and two Italians, lieutenants Ruscelli and Renato. ‘One a little Sicilian with the heart of a lion, the other a large Neapolitan Teddy Boy with the courage of a consumptive mouse’, O’Regan commented after Renato had drawn his revolver on the Frenchman who ran to gather him in.
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As Christine was in the Alps, Francis, ‘smiling, slim, competent, alert and energetic’, came to welcome the men himself.
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All of them were detailed to support Paul Hérault. Sitting together in a farmhouse kitchen that evening, with large cups of milky coffee that had been warmed over the fire, O’Regan thought how strange the moment was, ‘a world within world’.
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The next morning he, Hamilton and their team were woken early, piled into an old truck fuelled by a log-burning stove, covered with a tarpaulin, and driven to the Italian frontier with a gendarme ahead on a motorbike, and occasionally a couple of bicycles hitched behind. Eventually they arrived at Galletti’s base. After a few hours of drinking they set off on what they thought would be half an hour of light climbing up to the Maquis camp. Four hours later O’Regan began to stumble, and Galletti had to carry his jacket, equipment, and eventually the humiliated new officer himself, into the camp.

O’Regan was not just tired; he had contracted dysentery. When he woke he found that Hamilton and the Italian officers had gone ahead up the Col-de-la-Croix, a high Alpine pass, leaving him behind to recover. He borrowed a shaving kit, washed in a stream, and caught a lift down to Bramousse, where he was delighted to meet not only Francis, but Christine. ‘I jumped off my motor cycle and we kissed enthusiastically’, O’Regan remembered.
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For him, Christine was ‘the gayest and most alive person I have ever met’. She was also an inspiration. ‘With women like that around,’ he said with an inward sigh, ‘there was nothing to do but bottle up one’s incompetence and go through with it.’
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Christine was delighted to see O’Regan, but she was ‘dead tired’ herself. She had come straight from La Rosière, in the heart of the Alps, where she had been trying to track down the elusive Italian partisan leader, Marcellini, to arrange for him to coordinate plans with the Toplink teams. Walking over the Mont Genèvre pass, and through German lines, she had heard sustained gunfire. The Nazis had been forced north through Italy by the Allies pressing up past Rome, and they were now conducting an effective clean-up operation in the Alpine area with the aim of securing the mountain passes. Realizing that Wehrmacht troops must be facing significant resistance close by, Christine followed the noise and quickly found herself in the middle of a major skirmish as a large Wehrmacht division laid siege to Marcellini’s temporary base. This time the Italian partisans held their ground triumphantly. As the enemy retreated Christine clambered down from her vantage point. The partisans welcomed her by shooting into the air. She had succeeded in making the first Allied contact with Marcellini.

Francis wrote that Christine ‘realized at once the possibilities of Marcellini as a leader, and did all she could to help him’.
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He in turn informed her about German troop movements across the mountain passes, showed her his groups’ positions and, as he prepared for a strategic retreat, implored her for help in the form of arms and reinforcements. Christine then hurried back to Galletti’s base, having to pass German lines under fire, with several small bits of paper hidden around her person detailing Marcellini’s news, positions, and urgent need for ammunition, shoes, uniforms and ‘packed meat’.
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Perhaps prompted by this last request, Francis insisted they eat steak for lunch before asking Christine to hike back through the pass with him and O’Regan, to pass her strategic information on to Hamilton and his team. A driving mist had by now blown in across the valley. Halfway down they met two Italians coming up who warned them that the Germans were not far behind. Francis didn’t believe it, and they pressed on. When they were the best part up the other side they found Hamilton and his officers haring back down, having been forced to retreat by approaching Wehrmacht soldiers. Unlike Christine, Hamilton had not found Marcellini, only scattered pockets of Italian partisans in retreat. Together they now climbed wearily back, Christine and Francis ‘almost passing out’ according to O’Regan.
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While they rested in a ruined ski hut, depressed and cold, the impressive Hamilton, who had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Italy on a previous mission, before walking 600 miles to rejoin Allied lines, went off and returned with some meat and rice. Christine then briefed the whole team on the news from Marcellini. Eventually they made it to an Italian village at one o’clock in the morning.

By now Christine, who was still in skirt and sandals, was soaked and shaking. She changed into some dry trousers donated by a villager, and joined the others to eat potatoes and eggs in front of a blazing fire. O’Regan sat so close that he singed his beret. It was here that Christine learned that on the first of August, the same day that Hamilton and O’Regan had been dropped into France, the civilian population of Warsaw had risen up with the underground Polish Home Army in a courageous attempt to drive out their Nazi occupiers. Their aim was to free the city ahead of the advancing Russian troops, so as to be able to welcome them as Allies and equals rather than as liberators to whom they would be indebted. For a moment the courage of her countrymen, and the real possibility of Polish liberation, filled Christine with unspeakable hope. What little news she heard of the desperate turn of events in her home country over the next few weeks only heightened her determination to share the fight and help rout the common enemy in France.

The next day they set off again, climbing up past the snowline to the deserted village, high in the Alps, that Galletti had recommended both for their HQ and as a possible site for arms drops. The calm and beauty of the ruins in the snow made a deep impression on Christine, who spent some time in the little chapel while the others set up camp. Seeing them together that evening, O’Regan decided that Christine was in love with Francis. They almost certainly shared a bed again that night, in one of the ruins. The following morning O’Regan set off with his wireless operator, and a note of introduction from Christine to Marcellini. ‘Commander, I present to you the English Commander who works with me and is head of the British Mission’, Christine scrawled in blunt pencil across a sheet of the squared notepaper they carried for coding. ‘I regret I cannot keep working for you myself as my work calls me elsewhere. I hope you meet and get all the help … you desire. Goodbye and “in bocca al lupo”, Pauline’; the last literally meaning ‘in the mouth of the wolf’, a pleasingly appropriate idiom for ‘good luck’, given their surroundings.
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Aware that more Jedburgh teams were due to be dropped into the fields below, Francis and Christine now returned to Galletti and his group at Bramousse. On 4 August, Havard Gunn, still proudly kilted beneath his flying suit, had been parachuted in with a French officer, Christian Sorensen, and the teddy-bear Christine had given him in Algiers. After a short reunion, during which he discreetly showed Christine the flattened remains of the bear that had taken the full impact of his landing, Gunn set off to work further south at Colmars. Sorensen, however, had injured his leg on landing, and was forced to stay in Seyne. Three days later John Roper arrived. Roper had fallen for Christine in Algiers and had last seen Francis as a schoolboy on the rugby pitch at Harrow, making him one of the few people in France who knew ‘Roger’s’ real name. The two men now embraced each other in a mountain valley in occupied France, and Francis was delighted to see his old friend’s ‘engaging smile’ again.
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With Roper came John Halsey and Robert Purvis. Christine ‘was on top of the world’, Purvis noted, thriving on her work and forming great friendships wherever she went.
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‘The work done by all this personnel was invaluable,’ Francis later added, ‘but in most cases they only had a fortnight or so in which to do it.’
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The Allied landings in the south of France were now scheduled for 15 August, so the pressure was on.