‘already much fatter and browner’. Philip was
quite blissful … U Ernie and A Onor gave him a new bicycle for his birthday and he rushes about on it all day. In the evening from the moment he has finished his bath till he goes to bed he plays his beloved gramophone which you gave him. He got really lovely presents this year. Dolla and Tiny gave him pen-knives, and Don a big coloured ball for the swimming pool, and I gave him a rug to lie about on in the garden. He is very good and does just what A. Onor tells him.38
In another letter, Cecile described how ‘Philipp appeared in his uniform and looked adorable, everybody was delighted, especially A Sophie who worships him’.39
Alice was especially grateful to Cecile for describing her son’s birthday, ‘particularly thoughtful of you … as no one else has done so’,40 and she remained eager for news of him, urging him the next month to ‘write me a postcard and tell me what you are doing’.41 Around the same time Philip’s former nanny, Nana Bell, herself wrote to Philip: ‘I know how difficult it is to write letters on holiday [but] you must write to your dear Mama often.’42
Philip was taken to see his mother a handful of times over the next two years, and otherwise received only occasional letters and cards from her. For the five years after that, from the summer of 1932 until the spring of 1937, he neither saw nor heard from her at all. He was subsequently at pains not to overstate the effect of all this. ‘It’s simply what happened,’ he told one biographer. ‘The family broke up. My mother was ill, my sisters were married, my father was in the South of France. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does.’43 Yet while he was never one to make a meal of the various vicissitudes that came his way in life, being separated from his mother for five years at such a critical stage of his upbringing must have left its mark on him. It is certainly true that he grew extremely fond of his grandmother, and of Georgie and Nada, and was deeply appreciative of the homes that they provided for him, but at the same time they could never fully make up for the one he had lost. When, years later, an interviewer asked him what language he spoke at home, his immediate retort was, ‘What do you mean, “at home”?’44
As far as Philip’s future wellbeing was concerned, it was fortunate that he had previously felt loved by both his parents and his nanny, and that he was thus a self-assured and happy child. According to the child psychologist Oliver James, this would have protected him to some degree from the psychological fallout of his mother’s breakdown and his father’s subsequent absence. ‘It would mean there was a kernel there, the basis for him to have been able to develop a more intimate and decent personality than is generally believed.’ However, James would still be inclined to question
whether having been part of a close family and having the whole thing smashed to pieces might have rather diminished his capacity to have faith in intimacy or love or closeness. The impact of having a mother go mad on you is to make you scared and also possibly fearful that the same thing is going to happen to you. If you throw in the disappearance of his father and being packed off to boarding school, which were pretty scary places in those days, you have a triple whammy, and there’s a fairly high probability that he would have developed what psychologists call a highly defended personality. That’s to say he doesn’t want to know about his emotions or other people’s emotions and he’s basically in survival mode – either he develops a pretty hard-nosed approach to life or he cracks up. He has to develop a false self to hide behind in order to avoid people knowing what he’s really feeling, and for himself, as he doesn’t want to know what he’s really feeling either. Obviously he was very handsome and no doubt he developed a very charming and attractive persona because he was probably all too aware that was necessary. But people like that, unless they’re very lucky, live in isolation all their lives although they don’t even know they’re doing it.45
Philip would perhaps take issue with this analysis. However, in years to come, deprived of the constant loving attention of his parents, his emotional reserve would become as noticeable to friends as his bluff, controlled, no-nonsense exterior. His tendency to hide his feelings also meant that his occasional bouts of sensitivity and touchiness could take even those who knew him well by surprise.
SIX
Prep School Days
Boarding school offered one solution to the sudden dissolution of Philip’s family life. Andrea had wanted to send his son to school in England, hoping that he would receive a better education there than the harsh Greek military one he had experienced, but the actual choice of Cheam, England’s oldest prep school, was made by Philip’s new guardian, Georgie Milford Haven, whose father Louis had been sufficiently impressed by the manners of two Cheam old boys serving with him in the navy to send Georgie there, although not his younger son Dickie.
Georgie had in turn sent his son David to Cheam, and when Philip arrived his cousin was two years above. Listed on the register under his courtesy title, Earl of Medina, David was the only titled boy at the school at that time, although generations of nobility had attended the school since its foundation in 1645. One mid-nineteenth-century headmaster, Robert Tabor, had even gone to the trouble of devising graded modes of address for his various charges: when speaking to a peer, he would begin ‘my darling child’; with the son of a peer, it was ‘my dear child’; and with a commoner simply ‘my child’.1 The more illustrious Cheam old boys included one prime minister, Henry Addington, one speaker of the House of Commons, two viceroys of India and Lord Randolph Churchill, the father of Winston, who was ‘most kindly treated and quite contented’ at the school, according to his son.2
Perhaps not surprisingly, no great fuss seems to have been made of either of the royal children at the school while Philip was there, although, if anything, more was made of David Medina, as being more obviously one of the English royal family and aristocracy, whereas Philip was deemed to be foreign and therefore somehow slightly inferior.
Philip’s time there coincided with the school’s last years at Tabor Court in the Surrey village of Cheam, before the railway station and encroaching urbanization prompted the headmaster to sell up and move his school to its present site in the midst of the Berkshire countryside. His headmaster was Harold Taylor, a cheerful clergyman with a deep-seated affection for his boys. Forty when Philip arrived, Taylor was a product of Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge, a fine all-round athlete – albeit a heavy smoker – powerful swimmer and fearless horseman. He had served as a chaplain during the war in France, returning with shell shock and a military OBE. The boys called him by his initials, pronounced HMS T in line with the school’s strong naval tradition and his rolling gait which was said by some to resemble that of a ship in heavy seas.3
After buying Cheam in 1921, Taylor and his vibrant wife Violet had insufficient funds to improve the spartan living conditions – prison-style beds, communal baths, ‘dog baskets’ to store the boys’ clothes – but they set about making it a more humane place in other ways. Boys with experience of the previous regime of Arthur Tabor were soon remarking on the ‘incredible change to friendliness’ after the Taylors took over. Philip himself retained fond memories of such school characters as Jane, the warm-hearted housemaid who scrubbed the boys’ backs at bathtime and made sure that their ears were clean; Major C. H. M. ‘Chump’ Pearson, Taylor’s unofficial deputy who ‘was far from scrupulous about his dress and habits’ and often taught lying back on the radiator with his feet on his desk; and W. J. ‘Molly’ Malden, the most popular of the masters, partly on account of his all-round athletic prowess, partly because he drove fast cars and flew a Puss Moth.4
Taylor himself took games very seriously, but, with only seventy boys to choose from, Cheam struggled to compete against other schools. On the bus home from away matches the mood was often sombre as the headmaster brooded over yet another heavy defeat.5 He had more success organizing non-sporting exercises for the whole school, such as pumping out the school swimming pool with an old manual fire-engine pump or beating for pheasants in the woods at Headley.6
For all his bonhomie, Taylor was also a staunch disciplinarian, declaring sloth, dirtiness and untruth to be deadly sins, and resorting to corporal punishment at