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
FIVE
Orphan Child
However much Philip enjoyed his first school, his restless energy still made him a handful for his parents when he came home each afternoon. Another option would have been for him to board at the Elms, but Alice told him they could not afford the fees.1 She was nevertheless determined that her son remain active and stimulated, and she wrote to MacJannet at the start of the autumn term of that year requesting that he form a Cub Scout group. Alice explained to the headmaster that Philip was ‘too young to be a scout and his character and clever fingers will fit him well to be a cub, and the training would have such an excellent influence on him, in turning his great vitality to good use’. She would be ‘infinitely grateful’ if he could manage it as soon as possible.2
Alice’s letter has a slightly desperate tone, but she was not herself at the time. She was, as it soon became clear, on the verge of a serious nervous breakdown. The rapid deterioration in her mental state overshadowed not only Philip’s last year at the Elms but also the remainder of his early life. He has since always robustly played down the ramifications of his mother’s illness; however it can scarcely have failed to have had an effect on him.
Alice’s illness has often been described as a ‘religious crisis’, and indeed the most obvious sign of her decline was her increasingly eccentric religious fervour, and her attendant interest in spiritualism and the supernatural. As long ago as 1912 she had performed automatic writing at Tatoï with Andrea’s brother Christopher, placing a finger on a glass and then watching as it slid about the table, spelling out a message from the spirit world. Her mother later described how Alice read extensively about this then fashionable activity and practised it whenever she had an important decision to make. She grew more and more superstitious and was forever dealing herself cards to obtain messages.3 The murders of her aunts in Russia and the trauma of the family’s flight from Greece further steered her towards the spiritual, as apparently did her hopeless love for the mysterious Englishman in 1925, after which her biographer concludes that she turned to religion as a ‘safe outlet’ for her repressed feelings of unfulfilled desire.4
Another equally plausible suggestion is that Alice suffered from manic depression – or bipolar disorder.5 Besides her various spiritual interests, her wartime nursing activities had also been pursued with a fairly manic energy. As was her chimerical scheme to have Andrea installed as President of Greece – a plan hatched in 1927 after a chance encounter with an American banker, who persuaded her that Andrea’s presidency would not only suit moderate republicans and royalists, but would also boost the chances of Greece obtaining a large loan from the League of Nations. To this end, Alice dashed about canvassing politicians and diplomats, and even arranged an audience at Buckingham Palace with George V, who was horrified by her idea and promptly scotched it, observing tersely that ‘Ladies get carried away’, and that it would be ‘most unwise for Prince A to go near Greece’.6
In October 1928, a fortnight after she and Andrea celebrated their silver wedding anniversary at St Cloud, Alice quietly converted to the Greek Orthodox faith, a move that did not greatly alarm the Anglican members of her family, given that this was the church into which her husband and her children had been baptized. But the next spring, 1929, her behaviour grew more peculiar. She took to lying on the floor in order to develop ‘the power conveyed to her from above’7 and became convinced that she had acquired the power of healing with her hands, which she deployed to no obvious ill effect on Nanny Roose’s rheumatism and later at a small clinic. She could stop her thoughts like a Buddhist, she said, and was getting messages about potential husbands for her daughters, whose marriage prospects were beginning to preoccupy her. By November she was no longer speaking to her family.8
Realizing that she was ill, she took herself off with a maid to spend Christmas in a hotel at Grasse on the French Riviera, leaving Andrea, Philip and the girls to fend for themselves at St Cloud. She suffered from terrible headaches, barely ate and spent the best part of Christmas Day in a hot bath. Much of the time she felt thoroughly worn out and depressed; at other moments she was inappropriately elated and talkative. When she eventually came home, she declared herself a saint and ‘the bride of Christ’. She lay about the house with a seraphic smile and affected to banish evil influences with a sacred object she carried about with her.9
When her mother Victoria came over to visit in January 1930, she told her lady-in-waiting, Nona Kerr, that Alice was ‘in a quite abnormal state mentally & bodily’, and looking ‘frail & exhausted’. She had had visions of Christ and had told Andrea’s cousin Meg Bourbon that within