Young Prince Philip: His Turbulent Early Life. Philip Eade

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СКАЧАТЬ remain active and stimulated, and she wrote to MacJannet at the start of the autumn term of that year requesting that he form a Cub Scout group. Alice explained to the headmaster that Philip was ‘too young to be a scout and his character and clever fingers will fit him well to be a cub, and the training would have such an excellent influence on him, in turning his great vitality to good use’. She would be ‘infinitely grateful’ if he could manage it as soon as possible.²

      Alice’s letter has a slightly desperate tone, but she was not herself at the time. She was, as it soon became clear, on the verge of a serious nervous breakdown. The rapid deterioration in her mental state overshadowed not only Philip’s last year at the Elms but also the remainder of his early life. He has since always robustly played down the ramifications of his mother’s illness; however it can scarcely have failed to have had an effect on him.

      Alice’s illness has often been described as a ‘religious crisis’, and indeed the most obvious sign of her decline was her increasingly eccentric religious fervour, and her attendant interest in spiritualism and the supernatural. As long ago as 1912 she had performed automatic writing at Tatoï with Andrea’s brother Christopher, placing a finger on a glass and then watching as it slid about the table, spelling out a message from the spirit world. Her mother later described how Alice read extensively about this then fashionable activity and practised it whenever she had an important decision to make. She grew more and more superstitious and was forever dealing herself cards to obtain messages.³ The murders of her aunts in Russia and the trauma of the family’s flight from Greece further steered her towards the spiritual, as apparently did her hopeless love for the mysterious Englishman in 1925, after which her biographer concludes that she turned to religion as a ‘safe outlet’ for her repressed feelings of unfulfilled desire.⁴

      Another equally plausible suggestion is that Alice suffered from manic depression – or bipolar disorder.⁵ Besides her various spiritual interests, her wartime nursing activities had also been pursued with a fairly manic energy. As was her chimerical scheme to have Andrea installed as President of Greece – a plan hatched in 1927 after a chance encounter with an American banker, who persuaded her that Andrea’s presidency would not only suit moderate republicans and royalists, but would also boost the chances of Greece obtaining a large loan from the League of Nations. To this end, Alice dashed about canvassing politicians and diplomats, and even arranged an audience at Buckingham Palace with George V, who was horrified by her idea and promptly scotched it, observing tersely that ‘Ladies get carried away’, and that it would be ‘most unwise for Prince A to go near Greece’.⁶

      In October 1928, a fortnight after she and Andrea celebrated their silver wedding anniversary at St Cloud, Alice quietly converted to the Greek Orthodox faith, a move that did not greatly alarm the Anglican members of her family, given that this was the church into which her husband and her children had been baptized. But the next spring, 1929, her behaviour grew more peculiar. She took to lying on the floor in order to develop ‘the power conveyed to her from above’⁷ and became convinced that she had acquired the power of healing with her hands, which she deployed to no obvious ill effect on Nanny Roose’s rheumatism and later at a small clinic. She could stop her thoughts like a Buddhist, she said, and was getting messages about potential husbands for her daughters, whose marriage prospects were beginning to preoccupy her. By November she was no longer speaking to her family.⁸

      Realizing that she was ill, she took herself off with a maid to spend Christmas in a hotel at Grasse on the French Riviera, leaving Andrea, Philip and the girls to fend for themselves at St Cloud. She suffered from terrible headaches, barely ate and spent the best part of Christmas Day in a hot bath. Much of the time she felt thoroughly worn out and depressed; at other moments she was inappropriately elated and talkative. When she eventually came home, she declared herself a saint and ‘the bride of Christ’. She lay about the house with a seraphic smile and affected to banish evil influences with a sacred object she carried about with her.⁹

      When her mother Victoria came over to visit in January 1930, she told her lady-in-waiting, Nona Kerr, that Alice was ‘in a quite abnormal state mentally & bodily’, and looking ‘frail & exhausted’. She had had visions of Christ and had told Andrea’s cousin Meg Bourbon that within a few weeks she would have a message to deliver to the world. ‘She wanders praying about the house at times,’ wrote Victoria. ‘She told Meg she was in bliss & to me too she said she is happy. I think she has anaemia of the brain from too much contemplation & starvation & is in a critical state.’¹⁰

      Among those to whom the family turned for advice was Andrea’s sister-in-law, Marie Bonaparte, who had recently undergone psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud with the object of practising herself. She had also been helping to finance a new sanatorium at Tegel, on the outskirts of Berlin, established by a fellow Freudian, Dr Ernst Simmel. Tegel was the first clinic in the world designed to use psychoanalysis to treat patients and it was there that Marie recommended that Alice should go.

      After several sessions, Simmel diagnosed Alice as ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ and suffering from a ‘neurotic-pre-psychotic libidinous condition’. During their discussions, she said that she believed that she was the only woman on earth, was married to Christ and ‘physically involved’ through him with other great religious leaders such as Buddha. Simmel consulted his friend Freud, who proposed ‘an exposure of the gonads to X-rays, in order to accelerate the menopause’ – the idea being that this would help to calm her down and subdue her libido. It is unclear whether or not she was ever consulted about this procedure, but it was carried out nevertheless. Shortly afterwards she began to feel better.¹¹

      As she felt stronger so she also began to feel bored, restless and homesick. At the beginning of April she discharged herself and went back to Andrea and the family at St Cloud. ‘I found everybody looking very well indeed and the season far more advanced than in Berlin,’ she wrote to her daughter Cecile. ‘The fruit trees are blossoming & the leaves beginning to come out, & the air is very mild & I must say I am truly delighted to be back after 8 weeks absence.’ She went on to say how nice it was of uncle Ernie ‘to invite us all for Easter & we are looking forward to it so much – I fancy Philip & I will come by train & the others by car, Fondest love & au revoir soon, your ever loving Mama.’¹² Up the side of the letter she had scrawled ‘God Bless You’ and in the top left-hand corner she had drawn a cross.

      However, it was soon clear to her family that she was little better than before she went away. In desperation, Andrea went to London and with Victoria saw two more doctors, who both advised that she should be interned in a secure sanatorium. ‘Andrea & I feel that it is the only right thing to do,’ Victoria told Nona Kerr, ‘both for Alice and her family. How hard it has been to come to this decision & what we feel about it you know. This Easter will be a miserable one.’¹³

      Victoria’s brother Ernie, the Grand Duke of Hesse, had asked the whole family to the Neue Palais at Darmstadt for Easter. However, what should have been a happy few weeks’ holiday was, as Victoria had foreseen, overshadowed by their anxiety about Alice.

      Soon after reaching Darmstadt, Victoria went to Heidelberg, the nearby picturesque university town, to consult a noted expert on insanity, Karl Wilmanns, about a suitable sanatorium for her daughter. Wilmanns recommended the Bellevue private clinic at Kreuzlingen on the south-western shore of Lake Constance, run by a pioneer in the field of existential psychology, Dr Ludwig Binswanger, who had studied under both Jung and Freud. He was especially interested in subjects with unusual creative ability – his patients included the expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the Russian dancer Nijinski, who was being treating at Bellevue for schizophrenia at that time.

      Victoria was reassured by the fact that the proposed clinic lay ‘in a fine park of its own & has 3 separate establishments for closely interned patients, semi-interned & a so-called free section where the patients can go into town etc with a nurse. СКАЧАТЬ