Читать книгу Young Prince Philip: His Turbulent Early Life - Philip Eade - Страница 10

During the passage to Brindisi, several officers of Calypso vacated their cabins for Andrea and Alice’s family, and the crew fashioned a crib from a fruit crate for the eighteen-month-old Philip to sleep in. It was a rough crossing and some of them were sick, yet Andrea nevertheless struck the captain as ‘delightful, and so English’, and all the family were ‘rather amusing about being exiled, for they so frequently are …’¹ Their apparent insouciance belied the strain that they had been under.

On arrival in Italy, they continued by train, with the infant Philip crawling all over the carriage and licking the window panes, oblivious to the drama. At Rome, they thanked the Pope for his help in securing their release.² The British ambassador lent them 14,000 lire and private arrangements were made for their entry into France, as they had no passports either.³ An extra sleeping carriage was then attached to the overnight express to Paris, where they arrived on 8 December and went straight to the hotel apartment of Andrea’s brother Christopher. Thereafter a tense Andrea ‘denied himself to all callers’, instructing the hotel management that no one be permitted even to send up a card.⁴

Talbot had promised Plastiras and Pangalos to take Andrea straight to London – or else more executions were threatened – but there was nervousness in London about members of the Greek royal family suddenly turning up, especially while Parliament was sitting, and the prime minister (Bonar Law) wrote urging George V not to encourage them to settle in England.⁵ The king was only too happy to assent to this. As he saw it, he had already saved Andrea’s life, and bearing in mind the antagonism directed towards him the last time the Greek princes came to London, during the war, he felt that Andrea and his family should not ‘unduly estimate the inconvenience’ of remaining in Paris until after Parliament had prorogued.^6,7 While they waited there, Talbot went on ahead to London to make his report, and was promptly knighted by the king for his role in rescuing his cousin.

On 17 December, with Parliament in recess, Andrea and Alice and their family slipped into Britain at Dover, their arrival going unnoticed by the British press. Likewise, when Andrea went to see George V two days later,⁸ his visit was not advertised in the Court Circular. Their experiences over the past few months had visibly aged both him and his wife. Photographs from the time show the monocled Andrea looking far in advance of his years, his furrowed brow a manifestation of the ordeals he had been through, while Alice’s sister Louise was shocked at how worn out she looked compared to the previous summer, when she had come over for Dickie’s wedding.⁹

Still smarting at his treatment, Andrea told an American newspaper that he had

ample documentary material for an appeal, and when the right time arrives I hope to publish the facts. Then the people of my country can judge for themselves whether I was rightly convicted. At present all the evidence that reaches me is convincing that the Greeks as a whole disagree with what has happened. I believe I can say without egotism that the nation is in sympathy with me, and I am confident that, when hot passion and political prejudice have subsided somewhat and my statement of my case is placed before them, the people will decide in my favour.¹⁰

However, the American chargé d’affaires in Athens said that it was ‘a great mistake’ that Andrea and his brothers were ‘carrying on a kind of propaganda abroad against the present regime in Greece and abusing them quite openly wherever they go’. Not only did it annoy those in power and make them more hostile to the exiled princes’ nephew, the king, but it was also particularly ill timed at a moment when private promises had been extracted through diplomatic channels to respect Andrea’s property and possessions on Corfu.¹¹

Andrea was still undecided as to where they were going to live, but planned in the meantime to visit his brother Christopher in America.¹² As guests of his brother, he and Alice could at least expect to be well looked after, not least since Christopher’s wife, Nancy, was extremely rich, having inherited a fortune from her first husband, the tin-plate tycoon William B. Leeds, when he died in 1908.¹³

After spending Christmas with Victoria at Kensington Palace, Andrea and Alice sailed for New York in January 1923, leaving the two elder girls, Margarita and Theodora, with their grandmother in England¹⁴ and the two younger ones and Philip with their uncle, Prince George of Greece, and his wife, Marie Bonaparte, in Paris. In mid-Atlantic news reached them that Andrea’s brother, Constantine, had died in Sicily. The exiled king’s death had met with a subdued reaction in Athens. ‘A few weeping people were loitering outside the gates of the Palace the next day,’ reported the British counsellor, but otherwise, ‘tears were shed in private houses.’ His name, wrote the counsellor, had been inextricably linked in the minds of the Greek people with the dream of Constantinople, and at one time he had acquired a popularity unattained by any of the other kings of Greece. But parallel to this, ‘he was hated by a constantly varying number of his fickle subjects’ and ‘rightly or wrongly, he was accused of having sympathised entirely with Germany during the war’.¹⁵

Andrea and Alice arrived in New York dressed in mourning clothes. After they landed, Christopher took them straight up the Woolworth Building, at that time the tallest structure in the world, for a panoramic view of the city. Andrea bought models of it to give to his children and to the waiting reporters he enthused about New York’s skyscrapers. He also pronounced the outfits worn by American women ‘very neat indeed’. The reporters were curious about their small entourage – consisting of only a valet and a maid – and when one of them asked Andrea why he did not have a gentleman-in-waiting to attend to social matters, he laughed and replied: ‘I’m a democrat!’¹⁶

Andrea and Alice stayed in America for two months, during which time they travelled by train to Montreal to attend a memorial service for King Constantine,¹⁷ and also spent time in Washington, DC, and at Palm Beach in Florida with Christopher and Nancy – who did not let on that she was dying of cancer – before sailing back across the Atlantic on 20 March. As he prepared to board the Cunard liner Aquitania, Andrea told the press that he would not ‘risk the chance of being executed’ by going back to Greece.¹⁸ The prospect of living in Britain among a suspicious and rather hostile people did not greatly appeal either – George V would presumably have intimated to Andrea the difficulty of their staying there when he saw him in December – and so instead they decided to settle in Paris, which was already home to a cluster of Greek and Russian émigré royalty and would remain their base for the remainder of the decade.

To begin with they were lent a suite of rooms in a palais on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, but Andrea found he could not afford the household that came with it, so they soon moved across the Seine to a small lodge in the garden of 5 rue du Mont-Valérien, in the smart hilltop suburb of St Cloud, six miles west from the city centre and commanding spectacular views eastwards towards Montmartre and the Eiffel Tower. Both properties belonged to Marie Bonaparte, Princess George of Greece, the wife of Andrea’s elder brother, an intriguing figure known in the family as ‘Big George’. His eventful career had included a spell in the Greek navy – during which he acquired a quarterdeck vocabulary in four languages¹⁹ – and a period as high commissioner of Crete. Earlier he had saved the life of his cousin, the future Tsar Nicholas II, by parrying the sabre of a would-be assassin in Japan.

Marie herself was a restless, exotic woman, destined shortly to become one of Sigmund Freud’s leading disciples and benefactors, and thus central to the establishment of psychoanalysis and sexology in France. She was the great-granddaughter of Napoleon’s renegade younger brother Lucien, although her great wealth came from her maternal grandfather, François Blanc, who had accumulated a vast fortune from property in Monaco and as owner of the casinos at Monte Carlo and Homburg. She had been in love with the tall and handsome Big George when they married in 1907, she aged twenty-five, he thirty-eight, but she soon became disillusioned on account of his disinterest. For one thing, he refused ever to let her kiss him on the lips and their wedding night, she recorded, culminated in ‘a short, brutal gesture’ from him and an apology: ‘I hate it as much as you do. But we must do it if we want children.’²⁰ By the time Andrea and his family came to live in the grounds of their large mansion at St Cloud, where Marie had been born, Marie and George were spending much of their time apart, she carrying on with a succession of lovers, most recently the French prime minister, Aristide Briand, he often away in Denmark with his father’s younger brother Waldemar, ten years George’s senior and the love of his life.

George had formed this unusual attachment after being entrusted to his uncle’s care at the age of fourteen, when he enrolled at the naval academy at Copenhagen. Standing on the pier where his parents’ ship was preparing to depart, he had suddenly been overwhelmed by feelings of abandonment, feelings which had then been allayed when Waldemar took his hand and walked with him back to his residence. ‘From that day,’ Big George later told Marie, ‘from that moment on, I loved him and I have never had any other friend but him.’²¹ On their wedding night in Athens, according to Marie, George came to her room having first visited that of his uncle, and she later wrote to her husband that ‘you needed the warmth of his voice, of his hand, and his permission to get up your courage to approach the virgin’.²² Waldemar accompanied them on the first three days of their honeymoon and George cried as they parted at Bologna. In later years, their children would become so used to seeing their father together with his uncle that they took to calling Waldemar ‘Papa Two’.

The house that Marie lent Andrea and his family was pleasantly surrounded by apple trees and gravel paths but had barely enough room for the family and their small staff. (It has since been demolished, along with Marie’s mansion, to make way for modern blocks of flats.) Philip’s sister Sophie later remembered that ‘there were always problems paying the bills’, although George and Marie’s son Peter was under the impression that his mother ‘paid all their expenses for years’.²³

The extent of the family’s penury at this time is unclear. On arrival in London, Andrea told one newspaper that he had managed to bring some money with him from Greece,²⁴ although Philip later doubted that he had ever received his army pension.²⁵ He had a small bequest from his brother Constantine, and before that he had inherited an annuity from his father as well as Mon Repos, where the Blowers and their unfriendly dogs had stayed on as caretakers, antagonizing the local population by denying them access to the only good bathing spot near to Corfu Town.

Andrea continually worried about the threat of confiscation hanging over Mon Repos, however, and in May 1923 he wrote to his saviour Gerald Talbot refuting the notion that he was going about criticizing the revolutionary government in Greece. ‘Since I am in Paris I see nobody and I go nowhere,’ he pleaded. However, he suspected that others

wish to believe or rather make others believe the story of my dark doings abroad in order that they may lay hands on my property. I am awfully sorry to bother you with all this, but you are the only one who can help me and I hope you can see your way to letting the Foreign Office in London know that I flatly and absolutely deny the charge of carrying on any kind of propaganda. It would be idiotic of me anyhow to poke spokes in [the British counsellor] Bentinck’s wheels while he is trying his level best to save my house in Corfu!²⁶

On the same day, he shot off another letter to Bentinck in Athens, expressing himself ‘astonished’ by the American chargé d’affaires’ suggestion that he had been spreading propaganda. ‘I cannot think where he gets his information from. I went to America to recuperate, and I can assure you that I did what I could to forget politics, revolutions and wars. When I was asked by newspaper men whether I had been imprisoned and in danger of my life, I answered in the affirmative because I could not very well tell them that I had been perfectly free … I’m afraid you will have to take my word for it.’²⁷

In the event, Mon Repos never was confiscated, although many Greeks continued to believe that it rightfully belonged to the Greek state, as it had originally been given to ‘the King of the Hellenes’, and was not transferable.²⁸ In 1926 Andrea leased the house to Dickie Mountbatten, providing a modest extra source of income, and in 1937, having won a legal case over its ownership, he sold it to his nephew, King George II.²⁹

Alice, meanwhile, had inherited a tenth of her father’s estate, but this had been substantially depleted by the Bolshevik revolution and the catastrophic inflation and currency devaluation in Germany – which effectively wiped out the proceeds from the recent sale of Heiligenberg Castle, where her father had spent his youth. She also received a small allowance from her brother Georgie. However, by royal standards, the family was certainly not well off.

Andrea was never comfortable about receiving handouts, but he was at least fortunate in having several close relations with considerable sums to spare. After Christopher’s wife Nancy died in 1923, the money she left took care of the children’s school fees and other items that Andrea could not afford.³⁰ Then there was Dickie Mountbatten’s new wife Edwina, who had inherited almost half of her grandfather Ernest Cassel’s estate, conservatively estimated at £6 million, and could thus be justly described as ‘The Richest Girl in Britain’.³¹ Edwina found subtle ways of helping without offending Andrea’s pride – when ordering clothes, she stipulated extra wide hems so that they could be later handed down to her nieces and adjusted if need be³² – and in 1924 she also took out an insurance policy for her nephew Philip.

According to his cousin Alexandra, as he grew up Philip was himself ‘trained to save and economise better than other children, so much so that he even acquired a reputation for being mean’.³³ Alexandra – whose version of events was later disputed by Philip – was the originator of the Dickensian legends portraying the boy in patched clothes, making do with no toys and forlornly staying behind after school on wet days because he had no raincoat.³⁴

Neither Alice nor Andrea had paid jobs in Paris. Alice volunteered in a charity boutique in the Faubourg St Honoré, called Hellas, selling traditional Greek tapestries, medallions and honey, with the proceeds going towards helping her fellow less fortunate Greek refugees. The shop did quite well, not least because its customers appreciated the novelty of being served by a princess.³⁵ Andrea tended to become restless and depressed when he had nothing to do, but, as an émigré Greek prince experienced only in soldiering, he was not especially employable in Paris. Instead he devoted much of his time to writing a personal account of the Greek debacle in Turkey, Towards Disaster, which was eventually published in 1930, translated into English from his original Greek manuscript by Alice. Designed to justify his actions at the battle of Sakaria and thereby redeem his reputation, the book’s indignant tone served more effectively to show how embittered he remained almost a decade after the events in question.

Otherwise, he took the children for long walks in the Bois de Boulogne or motored into the centre of the city to meet fellow exiles and hear about the latest depressing developments in Athens.³⁶

The death of Andrea’s brother King Constantine had done little to quell anti-royalist feeling in Greece and in December 1923 Colonel Plastiras succeeded in persuading the cabinet that the continuance of the Glücksburg dynasty was ‘a national stigma which should be blotted out’. King George II and his queen, Elizabeth, were thus required to leave the country in a steamer bound for Romania.³⁷ In February 1924, in the national assembly General Pangalos launched a scathing attack on Andrea, reiterating his responsibility for the defeat at Sakaria and saying he would have been executed but for the intervention of a ‘semi-official British envoy’ (i.e. Talbot) who had come to Greece with a ‘sackful of promises’.³⁸ On 25 March the revolutionary constituent assembly issued a resolution proclaiming Greece a republic, forbidding the Glücksburgs ‘their sojourn in Greece’ and authorizing the ‘forcible expropriation’ of all property belonging to the deposed dynasty.³⁹ Any hope that Andrea and Alice might be able to return home was effectively extinguished at this point.

Unable to return to Greece, they put down more permanent roots at St Cloud, where another of Andrea’s brothers, Nicholas, and his wife Ellen and their three daughters were also now living, as was Margarethe ‘Meg’ Bourbon, daughter of George and Andrea’s uncle Waldemar, and her family. On Sundays Big George and Marie would often hold family lunch parties together but otherwise Marie tended to live with her father in the centre of Paris while pursuing her career as a psychoanalyst. Left on his own next door, Big George would come over each evening, we are told, to say his prayers with Philip and kiss him goodnight.⁴⁰

Many of the earliest recorded glimpses we have of Philip are on holiday. In the summer of 1923, at Arcachon, on the coast south-west of Bordeaux, his aunt Louise found the two-year-old to be ‘quite too adorable for words, a perfect pet, so grown up & speaks quite a lot & uses grand phrases. He is the sturdiest little boy I have ever seen & I can’t say he is spoilt.’⁴¹

In the autumn of 1924, aged three and a half, he made his third trip to London, but the first one about which he could later remember anything. He was taken by train and boat from Paris by his nurse, and was met by Alice, who had gone on ahead to visit her mother, at Victoria Station. Philip was ‘very pleased and excited’, Alice recorded, and ‘discovered the first policeman by himself & pointed him out to me. Also the buses were his joy, & I had to take him in one this afternoon. Of course he made straight for the top, but it was too windy and showery to go there, but he was reasonable and went inside …’⁴²

Philip was about four when he and two of his sisters and Miss Roose first went to stay with the Foufounis family, staunch Greek royalists and fellow émigrés from the revolution, who had a farm just outside Marseilles. Philip became great friends with the children, Ria, Ianni and Hélène, and was treated as part of the family. Their newly widowed mother doted on him to such an extent that Hélène recalled becoming ‘terrified she would switch her affections completely from me to him … the little blue-eyed boy with the most fascinating blond-white hair seemed to have everything I lacked. In my mind he became a great danger, and I became ridiculously jealous.’⁴³ For her own part, Madame Foufounis later recalled: ‘He [Philip] was with us so often people used to ask, “Are you his guardian or his governess?” I was neither, yet much more. I loved Philip as my own.’⁴⁴

Philip also spent summer holidays with the Foufounises at Berck Plage near Le Touquet in the Pas-de-Calais, where he and his sisters would go to stay for up to three months at a time. The eldest Foufounis girl, Ria, was in plaster up to her hips for four years as a result of a bad fall, and Hélène later described how Philip would sit for long periods next to her bed talking to her, refusing to be lured away by the other children. One day a spectacularly insensitive guest bought some toys for all the children except Ria, explaining to her that ‘you can’t play like the others’. The others were stunned by this, none more so than four-year-old Philip, whose eyes ‘grew wider and bluer. He looked at Ria, who was trying very hard not to cry, then he ran out of the room and returned ten minutes later with his arms full of his own battered toys, and his new one, and he put them all on Ria’s bed saying, “All this is yours!”’⁴⁵

In other respects Philip was a boisterous, mischievous boy. Each day after lunch, he and Ianni would take Persian rugs from the drawing room through the French windows and lay them out in the garden for their siestas. One afternoon the boys disappeared with the rugs and after an hour’s search they were found walking from door to door down the road with the carpets on their shoulders, emulating the Arab salesmen they had seen selling oriental wares on the beach.

Their various misdeeds earned them regular spankings from the Foufounises’ governess, a fierce – and, incidentally, kleptomaniac – Scottish woman called Miss Macdonald although known to the children as Aunty. Hélène described how on one occasion after Ianni and Philip had broken a large vase, Ianni received his usual beating, whereas Philip vanished. Hélène eventually spotted his frightened blue eyes behind a French window and heard him call out to Miss Roose: ‘Nanny, let’s clear.’ When Aunty heard this, too, she rushed towards Philip, who ‘straightened himself, looked her squarely in the eye, and said: “I’ll get my spanking from Roosie, thank you”.’ And he did.⁴⁶

Other holidays were spent at Panker, the Landgrave of Hesse’s summer house on the Baltic coast, with Philip’s Prussian aunt, Sophie, Constantine’s widow, and a collection of royal cousins, including the deceased King Alexander’s young daughter Alexandra, whose first memory of Philip was as

a tiny boy with his shrimping net, running eagerly, far ahead of me, over a white expanse of sand towards the sea, [then] splashing merrily in the water, refusing to leave it, running and eluding every attempt to capture him. Long after I have returned to my nannie and the waiting towel, Philip is still there until he is finally caught and dragged out forcibly, blue with cold, yelling protests through chattering teeth.⁴⁷

Like the Foufounises at Villa Georges, they kept pigs at Panker, and Philip loved feeding them, although he later professed to have ‘absolutely no recollection’ of an occasion recounted by Alexandra in which he was said to have released the pigs from their sties and herded them up to the lawn where they created havoc with the adults’ tea.⁴⁸

About an hour away from Panker, his great-aunt Irene (Victoria’s sister) and her husband Prince Henry had their country property, Hemmelmark, where Philip jumped off a hay wagon and broke a front tooth. ‘Of course he was a great show-off,’ his sisters Margarita and Sophie recalled. ‘He would always stand on his head when visitors came.’⁴⁹ By their account, as he grew older, he also became ‘very pugnacious and the other children were scared to death of him’.⁵⁰

Philip and his sisters also went to stay with their cousin, Queen Helen of Romania (daughter of their uncle King Constantine of Greece and deserted wife of King Carol), and her son Michael, at the dilapidated Cotroceni Palace near Bucharest, repairing in the heat of high summer either to their castle at Sinaia high up in the Carpathian Mountains or to the newly built Mamaia Palace at the mouth of the Danube on the Black Sea, which had quickly become the centre of a thriving resort, where Philip first experienced pony riding on the beach. Michael, a more taciturn child, was a few months younger. In 1927, at the age of five, on the death of his grandfather Ferdinand, he was proclaimed King of Romania under a regency. When he asked his mother the next day why people were calling him ‘Your Majesty’, she thought it best to tell him, ‘It’s just another nickname, dear.’⁵¹ Philip and his two elder sisters, Theodora and Margarita, stayed at Mamaia the next year⁵² but Michael’s new status seemed to make no difference to the children’s play ‘except that there were always many more people about’, wrote Alexandra, and the three of them never quite seemed able to wander off by themselves. Michael, though, ‘fully realised he was King and early adopted courtly little ways’, once telling Alexandra’s mother: ‘I am most pleased with Sandra. She suits me very well.’⁵³

The anecdotal evidence gives the impression that Philip saw little of his own parents in the course of his nomadic wanderings as a small child. While Victoria Milford Haven’s biographer asserts that Alice often travelled about with him and enjoyed ‘showing him things and watching his alert intelligence growing’,⁵⁴ her nerves had been badly strained by all the anxieties surrounding the family’s exile from Greece, and because of this the children were regularly packed off to friends and relations for long stints without their parents, while the family home at St Cloud was shut up. ‘Philip goes to Adsdean [Dickie and Edwina’s country home],’ wrote Victoria to her friend Nona Kerr in June 1926, ‘where they can keep him until autumn if desired, only for Goodwood week his room will be needed for guests, so if you [Nona] still would like & could have him & Roose that would be the time for his visit to you.’⁵⁵ Philip went regularly to Nona Kerr over the years and he took to calling her ‘Mrs Good … because she is good and that is the right name’.⁵⁶

There are several indications that from an early stage in their new life in Paris, all was not well between Alice and Andrea. Prominent among them is the story of Alice’s infatuation with an unnamed, married Englishman, whom she fell in love with in 1925 when she was forty and Philip four. According to the account given to Alice’s doctor by her lady-in-waiting, it never amounted to an actual affair, and Alice eventually gave up, consoling herself that they would ‘meet again in another world’. Her biographer suggests that in any case Alice’s strictly conventional background and ‘high moral principles’ would have prevented anything improper from happening, pointing out that ‘nothing in her life was flighty or flippant’.⁵⁷ However, the mere fact of this infatuation suggests that she and Andrea had already begun to grow apart.

In 1927, aged six, Philip started at a progressive American kindergarten housed in Jules Verne’s former home – a rambling old St Cloud mansion (also since demolished) at 7 Avenue Eugenie just above the Seine, opposite the western end of the Bois de Boulogne, and shaded by the large trees which gave the school its name, the Elms.⁵⁸ His uncle Christopher paid the fees.⁵⁹

The accounts we have of Philip’s time at the school all emerged after his engagement to Princess Elizabeth and thus they may have been embroidered with the benefit of hindsight. One of his teachers, though, remembered being struck by the young prince’s precocious sense of responsibility.⁶⁰ Having walked to school with his nanny, she recalled, he usually arrived there half an hour early, and he would fill in the time cleaning blackboards, filling inkwells, straightening the classroom furniture, picking up waste paper and watering the plants. Another tale was later told how, on his first day, some of the other boys had demanded that Philip ‘fight it out’ with another new boy. After a brief scuffle, he whispered to his opponent, ‘Are you having fun?’ When the other boy admitted he wasn’t, Philip said ‘Let’s quit’, which they did.⁶¹

By all accounts, he settled in quickly, although he was teased for having no last name. Asked to introduce himself in class he insisted at first that he was ‘just Philip’, before eventually awkwardly admitting that he was ‘Philip of Greece’.⁶² The school’s founder and headmaster, a thirty-one-year-old native of New England, Donald MacJannet, known to the boys as ‘Mr Mac’, later recalled the young prince as exuberant and sometimes rowdy yet at the same time polite and disciplined: he regularly repeated the mantra learned from his elder sisters: ‘You shouldn’t slam doors or shout loud’. He ‘wanted to learn to do everything’, including waiting at table,⁶³ his mother having taught him that ‘a gentleman does not allow a woman to wait on him’.⁶⁴ He also appeared to take for granted his mother’s insistence on hard work: Alice made him do extra Greek prep three evenings a week, and asked the school to set him a daily exercise for the holidays.

When Philip first arrived at the Elms, Alice had told the headmaster that her son had ‘plenty of originality and spontaneity’ and suggested that he be encouraged to work off his energy playing games and learning ‘Anglo-Saxon ideas of courage, fair play and resistance’. She said she envisaged him ending up in an English-speaking country, perhaps America, so she wanted him to learn good English. Philip later recalled that at that time ‘We spoke English at home … but then the conversation would go into French. Then it went into German on occasion … If you couldn’t think of a word in one language, you tended to go off in another.’ Alice also wanted him to ‘develop English characteristics’, although she was thwarted in this for the time being.⁶⁵ For one thing, Philip’s two best friends at the school were Chinese – Wellington and Freeman Koo, sons of the prominent diplomat V. K. Wellington Koo, then ambassador to Paris, later foreign secretary, acting premier, interim president of China and ultimately judge at the International Court at The Hague. Their mother, Hui-Lan Koo, was one of the forty-two acknowledged children of the sugar king Oei Tiong Ham and much admired in 1920s Parisian society for her adaptations of traditional Manchu fashion, which she wore with lace trousers and jade necklaces.

The two Koo boys had each been robustly introduced to Philip at the Elms as ‘Ching Ching Chinaman’⁶⁶ but they proved well up to looking after themselves, and their knowledge of jiu-jitsu came in useful whenever Philip found himself outnumbered in playground tussles. He often spent the weekend at the Koos’ residence in Paris, where, invariably spurred on by Philip, the boys all ran steeplechases and played other raucous games amid the Chinese embassy’s precious artefacts. The ambassador’s wife admitted to Alice that however much they enjoyed having her son to stay, they were always a little relieved when the time came for him to go and nothing had been broken.⁶⁷

Other friends at the Elms during his time included his Franco-Danish cousins Jacques and Anne Bourbon, who later married King Michael of Romania. But the majority of his classmates were American and Philip picked up something of their drawl and learned to play baseball before he played cricket. He coveted anything that came from the New York department store Macy’s and was only too pleased to swap a gold bibelot given to him by George V for a state-of-the-art three-colour pencil belonging to another boy.⁶⁸