Daughter of Empire

by Pamela Hicks

  My mother longed to see the world. From an early age, possibly symptomatic of a repressed desire to flee her childhood, she had slept with a pocket atlas by her bed. So when my father’s job afforded her the opportunity to travel, she caught the bug. From then on, she was often away for long periods and for a while was not in England for more than a few weeks at a time. Even in 1924, when my sister Patricia was born, she partied in the South of France, leaving her baby daughter at home at just a month old. It seemed that she couldn’t stop herself indulging in this hedonistic way of life, the endless adventure and travel that so thrilled her. Fortunately my father was devoted to his new baby daughter from the moment she was born, a bond that was to last his lifetime and one that would extend to include me.

  My birth caused a good deal of trouble. When my father’s tour of naval duty in Malta came to an end, my parents and two naval friends set off for five days in Morocco. My mother, normally so sprightly, was pregnant with me, although it hardly showed. When my father had asked his C-in-C for some time off he had been told: ‘Pull the other one, Dickie! Don’t try that old sailor’s excuse with me; I only danced with your wife last night!’

  From Morocco, they crossed to Gibraltar so my father could return to his ship, HMS Revenge, for combined manoeuvres of the Mediterranean and Atlantic fleets. Never one to miss out, my mother had made plans for the time he was away: the chauffeur had driven her beloved Hispano-Suiza H6 from England and, roaring out of town, in the front seat, in neat cloche hat, dark glasses, flawlessly rouged lips and bright red nails, she felt on top of the world. As they climbed the mountains towards Malaga, however, the twists and turns left my mother feeling sick and exhausted, as did the train journeys onward through to Madrid and Barcelona. Finally making her weary way to the polo club to meet up with my father, who had come to join her and play in a tournament, she was all but finished off. After the match my parents went straight to their suite at the Ritz. In the early hours of Friday, 19 April 1929, my mother awoke with severe contractions. I was on my way.

  Despite my father’s best efforts, the hotel could only find an ear, nose and throat specialist to help them. In desperation my father telephoned his cousin, Queen Edna, in Madrid. She was away, but King Alfonso answered. ‘We’re having a baby,’ exclaimed my father. The King, a great womaniser, got the wrong end of the stick and replied, ‘Oh, my dear Dickie, I won’t tell anyone.’ ‘Tell everyone!’ implored my father. ‘It’s my wife. Edwina’s having the baby.’ ‘Leave everything to me,’ said the King, and rang off. Within half an hour the Royal Guard had the hotel surrounded. In the meantime a doctor had been found and dispatched to the local hospital to secure the necessary equipment and an English nurse, who appeared ‘like an angel’ and administered chloroform to deaden the pain my mother was experiencing. Downstairs, the doctor had returned from the hospital with an ominously large bag, but he rushed with such steely determination towards the entrance of the hotel that he was promptly arrested by the Royal Guards.

  My mother was by now haemorrhaging, so was unaware of the events that began to unfold beyond the hotel walls with the slapstick absurdity of one of my father’s favourite Buster Keaton movies. As the commotion in and around the hotel reached fever pitch, in Nice my parents’ great friend Peter Murphy had been roused at dawn by my father’s anguished phone call. He grabbed his driver and set off immediately. They drove non-stop for twenty-four hours, Peter telling endless stories to keep his driver awake, something that eventually began to tax even his brilliant skills as a raconteur, not to mention his driver’s ability to remain attentive for so long.

  In the early hours of the morning Peter and his driver finally entered Barcelona at such speed that they crashed, yards from the hotel, into a tram. Panting and bleeding, Peter hotfooted it up the stairs of the Ritz and burst into the room, shaken but triumphant. As heads turned away from my mother, someone shouted at him to ‘get off the carpet’.

  Then all eyes turned back to me. I had arrived safely and was wrapped in a beautifully embroidered layette that had been brought in by some local nuns. I lay in a crib made from a little dog basket: a solitary, happy presence, blissfully unaware of the noise and tumult of the family life into which I had just been delivered.

  2

  It unsettles me how I can remember some elements of my early childhood with astonishing clarity while other, more important memories remain blurred, hazy images in my mind. For example, I can remember the long woollen gaiters I was made to wear as a child and my nanny’s crooked front tooth, but I cannot remember my mother ever spending any length of time with me in Adsdean, our old, rambling house near the Sussex Downs.

  As a young child I rarely saw my mother. During the day Nanny Vera looked after me in the first-floor Tower Room Nursery. She was the centre of my world and occupied me for hours: playing with me, taking me for walks, knitting clothes for my dolls and generally being my champion. I was kept away from my sister Patricia for most of the day so that she could concentrate on her lessons in the schoolroom with her governess, Miss Vick – Vicky. At least, that was one reason. The other reason was that Nanny and Vicky did not get on at all, were constantly at war about this or that, and therefore it was only at teatime that my sister and I were allowed to play together downstairs. We were always pleased to see each other and had a number of imaginative games on the go, a rich make-believe world of our own.

  The highlight of my day was getting ready for bed. As I went through each stage – having a bath, getting into my nightdress, brushing my teeth – I would start to buzz with excitement at the thought that one of my parents would come and visit me before I went off to sleep. My father loved to read or tell me stories, his voice mellifluous and comforting, and I would lie in a state of bliss as I drifted off to the sound of his words. And if my mother were in the country she would come in and say goodnight before she went out. I would listen out for the tinkling of the charms on her bracelet and after she had leant down and kissed me, I would lie awake and savour her scent for as long as it lingered in my bedroom.

  Sadly, my mother and my nanny got in the way of my father’s bedtime stories, for when I was about five he started to read Prenez Guard à la Peinture, in French. Nanny, who always wanted me to herself, had complained that it was making me upset as I didn’t understand what he was saying, and that gave Mummy the ammunition she needed. She was unhappy that Patricia fiercely adored my father and she didn’t like it that he and I had this special ritual. Suddenly he stopped reading to me at bedtime. I knew he was very busy with his work, but for a time I was bereft, marooned and uncomprehending.

  For all this, though, Patricia and I never felt unloved. We were caught up in our everyday life at Adsdean – our dogs and our ponies and the marvellous outdoors. I loved Nanny fiercely and we both adored our housekeeper, Mrs Lankaster, known as Hanky, who gave us engulfing, warm hugs. We were also favourites of the housemaids, Jessie and Dorothy. When Patricia was about eight, the height of her ambition was to be like Jessie. She commandeered a feather duster and followed her from room to room, intent on learning, taking in every detail of how and what to dust. She watched longingly as Jessie made up the fires, frustrated that she could not help. I harboured no such ambition and was more fascinated by an ivory-coloured dial on the door of the bedrooms which guests could alter to indicate what time they would like to be woken with tea and biscuits and have their curtains pulled back. I studied the dials intently and longed for the day when I would be tall enough to turn them myself.

  All this is not to say that we didn’t have a family life. We did – when my parents were at home – and on these special days we would all spend a great deal of time together outdoors, having lunch or playing with the Sealyhams. Patricia and I would take our parents by the hand and lead them to our own little garden, where we had planted seeds and labelled them. We would hold our breath, hoping that something might have grown or flowered so that we could impress our parents. Patricia was allowed to go riding with my fa
ther – that is, until she fell off Fairy and broke her arm – and we all enjoyed going for long walks with the dogs.

  There was, of course, a constant stream of guests and visitors, which made our house buzz with life. In spite of, or perhaps because of, his best efforts at my birth, King Alfonso of Spain had become my godfather. Back then godparents were not expected to take much, if any, interest after the christening of their charge, and many didn’t. Carmen, Duchess of Peñaranda, for instance (after whom I acquired my middle name), had been a good friend of my mother’s, but she ran off with a bullfighter soon after I was born and we never heard from her again. Cousin Marjorie Brecknock, a great character, simply denied she was my godmother. But King Alfonso, the Duke of Kent and Aunt Louise, Crown Princess of Sweden, were excellent godparents and I always looked forward to their visits – and when I was very small, their presents. For years I treasured the miniature matadors and bulls that King Alfonso gave me, as well as the gold bracelet with a rather unusual chick-shaped pearl given to me by Prince George, the Duke of Kent.

  In 1931, Alfonso, once described by the French newspaper Le Figaro as ‘the happiest and best loved of all the rulers of the earth’, had been forced to flee his palace in Madrid, when General Franco’s forces seized control in Spain and established the Second Republic. Always one to enjoy splendid surroundings, he chose my parents’ sumptuous penthouse in Brook House, overlooking Park Lane, as his place of exile. While my parents had always found the King to be an amusing companion, charming and lively, my father feared that his playboy image and serial adultery would prove his undoing, particularly as he was married to my father’s first cousin, Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg. Alfonso always won people over with his charm, however, and my father was no exception, so when he wanted a break from London, the King was welcomed at Adsdean. Brook House and Adsdean were large enough to absorb a king but when my father broke the news of his appointment to the Mediterranean Fleet – and that his house in Malta would be very small – before he could go any farther, Alfonso exclaimed, ‘Oh, my dear Dickie, how exciting! When do we leave?’ So the King went too.

  Our most regular visitor was my grandmama. She was accompanied by her devoted lady’s maid, Edith Pye – nicknamed by my father many years earlier as ‘The Pyecrust’ – who ensured her ‘Princess’ was correctly attired at all times. Handsome and animated, my grandmama always dressed in a white blouse neatly tucked into an ankle-length black skirt. Her hair was pulled back into a chignon and she wore a fob watch or several gold chains and golden snake rings on her chilblained fingers. She smoked incessantly, using a long glass cigarette holder stuffed with cotton wool to absorb the nicotine, and was rather skilful at taking part in two or three conversations, sometimes in two or three languages, at the same time. She loved a good argument – as my cousin Philip (who would later marry the present Queen) used to say, ‘not just arguments but arguments about arguments’ – and drew everyone, except my mother, who hated the incessant heated exchanges, into them. She was a tremendous reader, her memory razor sharp, her general knowledge encyclopaedic. It helped that she was related to or had met everyone who was anyone in recent history. Nothing was beyond her reach: if her sons were arguing a technical point of naval law, for example, she would break in despite their protestations and say something like, ‘Well, dear boys, if you look up King’s Regulations under Article 255, clause 4, you will find that . . .’ And they would look up the reference and discover that she was indeed quite right. She was incredible.

  She seldom spoke about the horrors of her past, the ghastly episodes in her life. Her brother Frittie, a haemophiliac, had died when she was ten, after falling from a window; her sister Marie and then her mother died of diphtheria and later her two sisters, Alix (the Tsarina) and Ella (the Saint) and her Russian nieces and nephew were murdered during the Russian Revolution. When Grandmama wrote to Arthur Balfour, the foreign secretary, to ask whether her nieces and nephew, then under house arrest, could come and live with her and her husband on the Isle of Wight, she knew the Tsarevich would not be allowed but hoped the little girls might. But her request was not approved. ‘The letter breaketh but the spirit maketh alive,’ she told us, when we asked about her faith.

  Even though the King had turned her into a marchioness, she was still a princess in the eyes of her family. My father always kissed her hand before kissing her on the cheek. As children we didn’t think much about her royal status, but on one mortifying occasion, after breakfast, Grandmama called my sister over and said: ‘Patricia, dear child, you know all my other granddaughters give me a little curtsy when they say good morning or goodnight.’ In point of fact we also kissed her hand and curtsied, but Patricia must have been a bit stiff-kneed that weekend. So rare was it for Grandmama to show any disapproval towards us that ever after my sister’s bob was so low she was almost on the floor.

  Grandmama smoked a Russian brand of cigarettes called Balkan Sobranie. She kept her glass holder and cigarette case in her petticoat pocket, so would be forever lifting her skirt to get them. She would prod the nicotine-stained cotton wool out of the holder and stick it back in her petticoat, then light another. When she ran out of cigarettes, she groped at her skirt and pointed to my sister or me, saying, ‘Ah, my dear child . . .’ and we would scamper to her room to fetch some more. As I went up the front stairs and along the top to her room, I would hear her coughing and continuing to talk, and coughing and continuing to talk, and by the time I came down again with the cigarettes she was just completing her story. When she decided to cut down, she simply cut the cigarettes in half – which meant we had to go up twice as often to collect the replacements.

  Patricia and I would have tea in the billiard room at our own table by the fire. If our parents were at home, they would sit at the other end of the room, drinking tea and conversing loudly. We would wait patiently for our grandmother to extricate herself from several arguments, then she would come over to sit in a chair by the fire as my sister and I huddled close by on the fire bench to listen. She would then read to us – usually a chapter of Alice in Wonderland – reminding us succinctly what had gone on before while opening the page that she had marked with a bay leaf. After a short pause she would announce the chapter title and the story would begin. The words were so colourful in our minds because she was such an amazing mimic: each character was given a different and sometimes exotic accent, and we would marvel at how small and polite Alice seemed, and jump with fright as the duchess roared. When the chapter came to an end, she would replace the bay leaf and close the book with a smile. We really didn’t want her to stop but we didn’t dare complain. Instead we thanked her, said goodnight, kissed her hand and curtsied as we were taken upstairs to bed.

  Grandmama’s presence at the heart of the family meant that we often had the pleasure of another visitor, Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveen. ‘Isa’ had been lady-in-waiting to the Russian Tsarina and had remained with the family when they were under house arrest during the Revolution. Released by the Bolsheviks, probably because they thought she was Polish and they feared an international outcry, she and the family’s foreign tutors remained in Russia, desperately hoping to be able to help the Tsar’s family. She explained, her voice always cracking at this point, how helpless she felt, powerless to do anything to save them. Eventually, it became clear that if she wanted to stay alive, she had to flee. I always felt so sad when she got to the bit in her escape story that involved the Tsarevich’s little dog Joy, who had escaped into the street and been rescued by some Czech military officers. They had taken him with them to Omsk, where by great good fortune he was reunited with Isa. Although the dog was traumatised and by now half blind, he had barked incessantly, his tail wagging with excitement, at seeing Isa, clearly expecting the Tsarevich to appear behind her at any moment. When Isa had to leave, Joy remained by the door for a whole day, pining and crying, and he never did recover his spirits. I used to listen to this story and then go and hug our dogs, telling them how much I love
d them, promising they would never suffer the same fate.

  After several months, Isa made it to Europe, having travelled across Siberia and east to America. She ultimately settled in England and Grandmama made a little money over to her for being her secretary, although as my grandmother had very little money herself, I suspect it was really my mother who made the allowance. My mother also took care when having her dresses made to have generous hems and large turnings left at the seams so that they could be let out for the impecunious Isa when my mother had finished with them. While Isa looked svelte in the photographs of her younger self at the Russian court, since coming to England she had indulged her sweet tooth and become rather large.

  We loved Isa’s visits because she had a wonderful sense of self-deprecation, which she needed, as she was always getting into scrapes, having accidents and generally meeting with bad luck. Her stories were legendary and ridiculous and always had Patricia and me in stitches. My absolute favourite was the one recounting when she had been in the congregation of her Russian Orthodox Church and, after praying, she had sat up sharply only to feel loose hair tickling the back of her neck. Quick as a flash she pushed it up into her hat and secured it tightly with a large hairpin. A second or two later, she became aware of a voice very close to her ear whispering: ‘Madam, would you kindly release my beard.’ We girls would laugh and clap our hands even though we had heard this story many times before. Grandmama would smile patiently, though not without amusement.