The Spy Who Loved: the secrets and lives of one of Britain's bravest wartime heroines

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told him that the Allies would be arriving at any moment and that she, a British parachutist, was in constant wireless contact with the British forces.

Upon hearing the news of the German invasion of her country, Skarbek and her husband travelled to London where she would offer her services as a spy. She moved to Algeria in preparation for a mission to France, but she was not immediately dispatched because SOE believed she was "too flamboyant to work undercover effectively". Masson eventually received the support of the group to publish a "scrubbed" version of Granville's life. The past cannot be told in just one narrative any more than the entire world can be viewed through just one lens pointed at just one angle. Countess Krystyna Skarbek (aka Christine Granville) arguably influenced the Second World War in Britain’s favour more than any other woman – as such she was later regarded as Churchill’s Favourite Spy.She was born Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek in Warsaw in May 1908 to a Polish aristocratic father, Count Jerzy Skarbek and his Jewish wife, Stephanie Goldfelder. Mike Palmer's short story "Crissie - A Last Hurrah" was published by Palmridge Publishing in 2022 ( ISBN 978-0953462131). She was killed in very suspicious circumstances at the age of 44, ‘Countess stabbed to death in London,’ wrote the New York Times. Although she was temperamental, we remained friends; I preferred to build a pleasant atmosphere full of fun and wild whimsy with her at a restaurant or dance hall table, rather than to dally with her.

With no place in a Soviet-backed communist Poland, she struggled to find stability and acceptance in post-war Britain. When Skarbek told her husband that she loved Kowerski, Giżycki left for London, eventually emigrating to Canada. In late February, Skarbek and Kowerski continued their journey in the Opel, first to Sofia, Bulgaria. And this, of course, is relative within historical fiction, as the choices an historical novelist makes – between fact and fiction – affect her authentic, realistic representation of her narrative.The novel also touches upon the beginnings of the Enigma machine – a story well known thanks to the movie The Imitation Game, highlighting Alan Turing’s achievements in breaking the Nazi codes of World War II. Skarbek arrived in the midst of a large operation headed by British major Desmond Longe of supplying by parachute the local maquis with arms and supplies. The hotel – which comprised two large and quite grand houses, built in the 1870s – was run by the Polish Relief Society to provide cheap accommodation for émigrés. Indeed, I like to find those small untold stories that perhaps are still hidden by the mainstream by trauma or shame, or both, and bring them to life for the reader; looking through multiple lenses of the past to recreate a history that is balancing on the edge of what is ‘true’ and what is ‘real’.