education and amassed one of the largest collections of pornographic books in private hands – an extensive library of ‘blue’ literature, photograph albums and marked catalogues for such enticing titles as Lady Gay: Sparkling Tales of Fun and Flagellation and Raped on the Railway – ‘a true story of a lady who was first ravished and then flagellated on the Scotch express’.29
The Milford Haven ménage was completed by their mentally retarded daughter, Tatiana, born in 1917, for whom they later retained an elderly woman to act as her companion.30 There were also extended visits from Nada’s younger brother, Count Michael ‘Boy’ de Torby, who had great charm and painted well, often on rice paper or silk, but whose bipolar illness occasionally rendered him ‘decidedly odd, mooching about’. He complained of all the ‘terrible pills fighting inside me’ and when he felt his depression returning he would say ‘I’m afraid I must go back’, and have to be rushed to Roehampton.31 All in all, Lynden Manor was unlike any home that Philip had previously experienced.
Alice was visited from time to time at Bellevue by various members of the family and at other times they kept in touch by letter. Three weeks after her admission, she learned that Philip would be going to prep school at Cheam in England that autumn and, according to Cecile, although initially nervous, he was now ‘thrilled’ at the prospect.32 In the meantime, Philip was to spend his ninth birthday with the Hessian side of his family at Wolfsgarten, which had originally been built as their hunting lodge yet was nevertheless equivalent in size and layout to that of an average Oxford college. He relished the more relaxed and jollier atmosphere he encountered, in contrast to the regime of his grandmother Victoria, who tended to be quite stern with him.33
On this occasion the family was gathering to celebrate the engagements of the younger two of Philip’s sisters. The youngest, Sophie, a very pretty girl, was not yet sixteen when she agreed to marry Christoph of Hesse, her handsome second cousin once removed, with whom she had fallen in love while staying with her great-aunt Irene at Hemmelmark on the Baltic. Thirteen years Sophie’s senior, ‘Chri’ was charming, extroverted and amusing. He had studied agriculture and spent the so-called ‘golden years’ of the Weimar Republic floating between various family schlosses, lending a languid hand to the running of their estates. He was a keen horseman and talented dressage rider, competing across Europe, but above all he was obsessed with flying and with motorcycles and cars – his passion was such that he would often sleep in a new car for the first few days after acquiring it. Recently laid off from a job in a factory producing engines, he was now reluctantly selling insurance in Berlin. While the marriage offered Sophie a welcome sanctuary after the break-up of her own family, for Christoph it represented a safe harbour after a series of stormy love affairs during the 1920s.34 There was nothing arranged about their union and it proved to be one of lasting mutual devotion, undiminished by his subsequent staunch attachment to the National Socialist cause.
In 1939, shortly after reporting for active service with the Luftwaffe, he would write to tell her:
I miss you and long for you. It is simply terrible. I am so depressed and so miserable that I shall be pleased to get away from this house [their Berlin-Dahlem home] in which we have spent those lovely happy years together and enjoyed having our little Poonsies [their children]. Oh darling if only you were here! When I enter the house I think how often the door used to open like with magic and then you angel were there waiting for me smiling or laughing and giving me a thrill of happiness I feel a lump in my throat to think of it. I love you, love you, love you, my angel, and you mean everything to me … lovingly as your old adoring Peech [Christoph].35
Philip came to know Christoph well while visiting Sophie during holidays in Germany before the war and years later described him as ‘a very gentle person, interestingly enough [in view of his politics], and very balanced actually. He was kind and had a good sense of humour. So he actually was the complete opposite of what you’d expect, I suppose.’36
Sophie’s eighteen-year-old sister, Cecile, meanwhile, had been snapped up by another cousin, Grand Duke Ernie’s twenty-three-year-old son and heir, George Donatus of Hesse, known in the family as ‘Don’, like Christoph an avid sportsman and a fan of fast cars and aeroplanes. Though in Alice’s estimation ‘such a sensible, dear boy’,37 he, too, was to join the Nazi party, in 1937, along with Cecile.
Alice felt understandably wretched at being excluded from all the celebrations and when she received flowers from her daughters as a token of their engagements she spent much of the day crying. Five days after Philip’s birthday, Cecile wrote to her from a ‘terribly hot’ Wolfsgarten, reporting that they had been bathing ‘everyday at least twice including Philipp [she used the German spelling of his name]’. Andrea had arrived looking ‘rather tired’ and in due course had left for Marienbad, the spa town in Bohemia, ‘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
