Once ashore they took the train from Brindisi to Rome and then to Paris. Philip spent much of the journey crawling around on the floor, blackening himself from head to toe and even licking the windowpanes. His mother tried to restrain him, but Nanny Roose – ‘A divine person, much nicer than all the other nannies, we adored her,’ Princess Sophie recalled – kindly advised, ‘Leave him alone.’ From Paris, the family took the boat train across the English Channel and arrived in London, where they were given temporary shelter in Kensington Palace by Alice’s mother, the Dowager Countess of Milford Haven.

Thus, Philip left Greece for good at the age of eighteen months. He never lived there again and never learned to speak Greek, although as a young man he signed his name ‘Philip of Greece’. In reply to his official biographer Basil Boothroyd’s question about spending his childhood in the unsettled and unhappy circumstances of exile, Prince Philip dismissed it: ‘I don’t think it necessarily was particularly unhappy. It wasn’t all that unsettled.’

As far as he was concerned, he lacked for nothing and accepted his nomadic existence as completely normal, and his parents soon set up home on the outskirts of Paris. He had a strong family unit in the shape of four adoring sisters. Later, when he went to school in England and his sisters were married, he spent the long summer holidays with them in various German castles, often with his father. As a result, Philip saw much more of his father than anyone would suppose. Until the age of nine, when he was sent to school in England and his father closed the house in Paris and his mother was committed to a hospital in Switzerland after suffering a nervous breakdown, he never felt particularly different.

He was not. In those days, many wealthy mothers were deprived of the chance to look after their children and often retired neurotic and depressed to be ‘ill’ in their bedrooms for years. At that time, almost everyone that could afford a private education for their children sent them away to boarding school, particularly boys. Parents who lived abroad seldom saw their offspring, except for the long summer holidays, and did not play a hands-on role in bringing them up. Children can be so adaptable, accepting what happens to them as the norm and yet still idealise the remote figures of their parents. Philip seems to have been no different, but his move to an English school was going to open up a whole new path in his life.

Chapter 3

GROWING TOGETHER APART