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