Finding truth in facts and fictions, by Clare Mulley

As I understand it, biography is about finding out the truth about people and reporting back. This seems perfect work for me, as I am naturally nosy about - let’s say interested in - people and the world in which we live. However I quickly discovered that researching the life of a secret agent, as I did for my last biography, The Spy Who Loved, contains inherent difficulties. Many official and unofficial papers relating to Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, Britain’s first female special agent of the war, have been destroyed - on accident or by purpose - while others may remain unreleased. Furthermore agents like Christine were trained to cover their tracks, and not leave a paper trail. Christine certainly kept few records. Until I started my research there were only a couple of letters known to have been written by her.

Letter from Christine Granville to Harold Perkins, March 1945

The letter above is kept at the National Archives. It was written in March 1945 to Christine's SOE boss, Harold Perkins. Here she is volunteering desperately for a final mission: 

‘For God’s sake do not strike my name from the firm [SOE]… remember that I am always too pleased to go and do anything for it. May be you find out that I could be useful getting people out from camps and prisons in Germany just before they get shot. I should love to do it and I like to jump out of a plane even every day’.

I laughed when I read this, thinking at first that Christine was joking – but, no, she was absolutely sincere. When this letter was written, she had already given five years of voluntary service, repeatedly working behind enemy lines at huge risk to her life. Her desperate request here tells us so much about her, her determination, her love for action and service and, above all, her courage.

But letters, so wonderful at preserving the evidence of that most intangible thing, emotion, are notoriously unreliable for facts. Letters are often full of mistakes, opinion rather than fact, or attempts to mislead. During my research I found many more letters to and from Christine, and what I discovered was that while the facts often did not add up, Christine’s character did: she loved to tell a good story.

'Let Gold Eat Gold', courtesy of Countess M Skarbek 

Stories were always an important part of Christine’s life. Her father, Count Jerzy Skarbek, had brought her up with proud Skarbek family stories intertwined with patriotic Polish history. The etching above illustrated one of these stories, when the first Count Skarbek (with outstretched arm, right) refused to bow before a German Emperor (seated). Scorning the coffers of riches he was shown to try to buy his loyalty, the Count took off his own signet ring and threw it in the chest declaring ‘Let gold eat gold, we Poles trust our steel’, meaning their swords. He later helped rout the invading German mercenary forces. Listening to her father tell this tale, and many others, Christine quickly learnt how stories could be used for propaganda!

As a special agent Christine would later use her own stories to effectively cloud the details of her activities or motivations. I came across several versions of the same, wonderful story about her flirtatiously securing the unwitting help of a Wehrmacht officer to smuggle clandestine documents through train checkpoints in occupied Poland. Intriguingly however, in each version, the departure and destination train-stations were different. Perhaps Christine sensibly wished to keep her precise movements hidden, even years later. Certainly duty had required her to frequently change her name and identity, and arguably also her age and date of birth: fictions were part of her life. 

Sometimes, however, Christine simply seemed to enjoy not letting the truth stand in the way of a good story. This might explain some of the more colourful reports I found of her parachute descent into France in the summer of 1944. In his memoirs, Patrick Howarth, an SOE colleague, wrote that Christine indulged ‘in the most outrageous fantasies when talking to people to whom she was not disposed to take seriously'. Who can blame her? But the net result was that it was sometimes difficult for me to distinguish fact from fiction.  

Me, in front of Christine's childhood home, Trzepnica

To try to get to the bottom of things, I decided to retrace Christine’s steps, gathering evidence on the way - a process that Antonia Fraser calls ‘optical research’. First stop was Poland. The photo above shows me in front of Christine’s childhood home, Trzepnica, about an hour from Warsaw. It was wonderful to walk on Christine’s lawns, see the vast oak trees she loved, the house and the stables. My kind friend Maciek, who had come with me to translate, even managed to find the key to this now derelict building, so that we could look around inside.

As you can imagine, I got very excited and took photos of everything. At one point Maciek asked me why I was taking a shot of a blue plaque on the outside wall. ‘You never know what secrets it might hold’ I said in jubilation'. ‘It says…’ said Maciek dryly, ‘Please don’t play football on the grass.’

From Trzepnica we went on to Warsaw, where Maciek stayed with his aunt while I was lucky enough to have the use of a beautiful flat in the restored old town that belongs to Jan Ledochowski, the son of Count Wladimir Ledochowski, one of Christine’s close friends from the Polish resistance. 

One morning I came out of the flat at 9am to meet Maciek and head off to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, in search of more facts. As I emerged into the morning light a Wehrmacht officer in full uniform started shouting at me. Then he charged up and started jabbing at me with the perforated barrel of his hand-held machine gun. It was one of the most frightening experiences I have ever had. At first I thought, ‘OMG, I have just been arrested by the Wehrmacht’. Then I thought, ‘OMG, I have just completely lost my marbles’. Luckily Maciek soon arrived and managed to straighten things out. It turned out that, not understanding the polite Polish notice put through the door, I had walked into the middle of filming for a Polish WWII drama, ruining the take. But even this bit of fiction taught me something. I knew, rationally, that it must be something like TV filming, but I was still nearly crying to see that gun waved near my head. Christine, who was working for the British secret services, and was part-Jewish, was arrested several times behind enemy lines during the war, and always kept her cool, managing to talk her way out of danger more than once. Nothing could have brought home more clearly to me just how courageous this woman was, and what sang froid she had. 

Polish TV WWI drama being filmed

Among my primary sources for my last book were reports, awards and certificates held in British, Polish and French archives, and various public and private collections. These things all helped to build up a clear picture of when Christine worked where. But the fact is that there are emotional, as well as factual, truths. A good biography will reveal why people acted as they did, how they felt and what they believed, and ‘the truth’ - or perhaps I should say ‘the many truths’ - of someone, must be found in both the facts and the fictions of their lives.

IN SEARCH OF NEIL AGGETT – Dianne Hofmeyr

Historical fact? Or Historical fiction? It depends on who tells the story. I grew up with History books so slanted toward a single viewpoint that they were almost subversive, but at the time I believed they recorded the absolute truth.

When a young doctor of 28 was found hanging in his cell while under the 90 day Detention Act which allowed prisoners to be held without recourse to a lawyer or trial, and which could be re-instated for another 90 days as soon as the first ran out…. was this suicide? Was it assisted suicide? Or was it murder? Had his interrogators tortured and killed him and made it look like suicide, or had he in fact taken his own life?

What is fact? What is fiction? Either way he died in police custody.

In Parliament in South Africa, in 1982, the Minister of Police, Louis le Grange, announces… "the detainees in police cells or in prison cells are being detained under the most favourable conditions possible… All reasonable precautions are being taken to prevent any of them from injuring themselves or from being injured in some way or from committing suicide."

Two days later, Dr Neil Aggett is found hanging from the bars of the steel grille in his cell in John Vorster Square. He has spent 70 days in detention. He is the 51st person and the first white person, to die in detention. This is fact.

In the week after his death, 90 000 workers down tools and hold a national half hour work stoppage. 15 000 workers, more than 200 nurses in uniform from Baragwanath, the black hospital (hospitals were segregated then) where Neil worked, together with his friends and family follow the coffin on its seven kilometre journey from St Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg to the cemetery of West Park. The city comes to a standstill. No funeral for any South African statesman has ever made a greater impact. This is fact.

Beverley Naidoo's book, DEATH OF AN IDEALIST, explores the journey of the sports loving schoolboy who became a doctor and then an unpaid trade union organiser whose life ended so abruptly. The photographs in the book show a bright open-faced boy staring out from the page with his tennis and cricket teams. And later photographs of him with his friends on their vegetable co-operative, growing cabbages, looking like true 70's hippies.

A friend of Neil’s in the audience at the London launch of DEATH OF AN IDEALIST, said the following:

· The foundations of a civil society are based on individual accountability for moral, ethical issues. Neil’s fundamental idealism was to do good in the world and to live a simple and generous life.

· Neil’s story reflects the capacity an individual has to mobilize others out of apathy… an apathy that is becoming more obvious in present societies.

· Prisons are a world of total institutionalization, not only for detainees but also for the police who act behind impervious walls, where even good people are capable of bad acts.

Beverley Naidoo, who herself was banned from South Africa in her early 20’s and whose first youth novel about two children who travel to the city to find their working mother, Journey to Jo’burg, was banned in South Africa – a first for a children’s novel set there – has written a poignant story of a family bewildered by their son’s death and the political furore it caused.

DEATH OF AN IDEALIST is as much the story of a remarkable young man as it is a reminder that every generation needs its idealists. 

In Beverley Naidoo’s hands Historical fiction is explored against the template of Historical fact.

www.diannehofmeyr.com