The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra(4)

The capital, Darmstadt, set in the oak-forested hills of the Odenwald, was deemed ‘a place of no importance’ in the eyes of the pre-eminent Baedeker tourist guide.3 Indeed, another contemporary traveller found it ‘the dullest town in Germany’, a place ‘on the way to everywhere’ – nothing more.4 It was built on a uniform plan of long, straight streets and formal houses populated by ‘well-fed burghers and contented hausfraus’, not far from the River Darmbach, and ‘the general absence of life’ in the capital gave it ‘an air of somber inactivity’.5 The older, medieval quarter had a degree of bustle and character, but aside from the grand-ducal palace, the opera house and a public museum full of fossils there was little to redeem the city from the insipid stiffness that permeated the Darmstadt court.

Princess Alice had been dismayed upon her own arrival there, for although her upbringing had been authoritarian it had been liberal, thanks to her father Prince Albert. For him, Alice was ‘the beauty of the family’, and she had grown up happy and full of fun.6

Her wedding day had, however, been totally overshadowed by her father’s premature death and her mother’s crippling state of grief.

The brightness of an all too brief childhood was soon further dimmed by painful separation from her beloved siblings, particularly her brother Bertie, all of which heightened her deeply felt sense of loss.

There was an air of sorrow about the princess that nothing would ever quite assuage.

Her new life at Hesse promised to be undistinguished. The old order that persisted there kept clever, forward-thinking women such as herself down.7 Virtue and quiet domesticity were all that counted, and Alice found the hidebound protocols at the Hessian court burdensome. From the outset, she suffered the frustrations of not 10

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being able to exercise her own considerable progressive and intel-lectual gifts. An admirer of Florence Nightingale, Alice would have liked to take up nursing, having more than demonstrated her skills during her father’s final illness in 1861. If this was not to be then there were other ways in which she was determined to make herself of use in her new home.

With this in mind she embraced a range of philanthropic activ-ities, including regular hospital visiting and the promotion of women’s health, fostering the establishment of the Heidenreich Home for Pregnant Women in 1864. During the wars of 1866

against Prussia and 1870–1 against France that stirred Darmstadt from obscurity and took her husband off on campaign, Alice refused any suggestion of taking refuge in England and took on the mothering of her children alone. But this was not enough for her crusading social conscience; during both wars she also organized hospital nursing of the wounded and founded the Frauenverein (Ladies’

Union) for the training of women nurses. ‘Life’, Alice resolutely told her mother in 1866, ‘is meant for work, and not for pleasure.’8

The duty that had ruled her father’s life had become the watchword of her own.

Alice produced seven children in rapid succession with the same kind of stoicism with which her mother had given birth to her own nine. But there the similarities ended; unlike Queen Victoria, Princess Alice was a practical, hands-on mother who took an interest in every aspect of her children’s daily lives, down to managing the nursery accounts herself. And, like her elder sister Vicky – and much to Queen Victoria’s ‘insurmountable disgust for the process’ – Alice insisted on breastfeeding several of her babies, causing the queen to name one of her prize cows at Windsor after her.9 Alice also studied human anatomy and childcare, in preparation for the inev-itability of nursing her own brood through childhood illnesses. There seemed to be no limits to her devotion as a mother, but she did not spoil her children; she allowed them only a shilling a week pocket money until their confirmation, after which it was doubled. She was an advocate of frugality, much like Queen Victoria, though in Alice’s case economizing was often out of brutal necessity. The house of Hesse was far from wealthy and Alice often knew the ‘pinch of 11

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FOUR SISTERS

poverty’.10 But at the Neues Palais, built during 1864–6 with money from her dowry, she created a warm home-from-home, furnished with chintz fabrics and unremarkable pieces sent from England and cluttered with family portraits and photographs.

Born on 6 June 1872, Princess Alix – the sixth child of the family and future Empress of Russia – was a pretty, smiling, dimpled girl who loved to play. They called her Sunny and from the start her grandmother looked upon her as a golden child. Alicky was ‘too beautiful . . . the handsomest child I ever saw’, thought Queen Victoria, and she made no attempt to disguise her favouritism.11

Although Princess Alice was much more closely involved in her children’s upbringing than many royal mothers, her various welfare and charity projects consumed a lot of her time, and her children’s day-to-day life was organized by their English head nurse Mrs Orchard.

Victorian values reigned in the plainly furnished Darmstadt nursery: duty, goodness, modesty, hygiene and sobriety, accompanied by generous amounts of plain food, fresh air (whatever the weather), long walks and pony rides. When she had time Alice walked with her children, talked with them, taught them to paint, dressed their dolls and sang and played the piano with them – even when little fingers, as she laughingly complained, ‘thrust themselves under hers on the keyboard to make music like big people’.12 She taught her daughters to be self-sufficient and did not believe in spoiling them; their toys were unostentatious and brought from Osborne and Windsor. Moments of idleness for the Hesse girls were always filled by something their mother deemed useful – cake-making, knitting, or some kind of handicraft or needlework. They made their own beds and tidied their rooms and there was of course always regular, obligatory letter-writing to Liebe Grossmama and regular visits to her at Balmoral, Windsor and Osborne. Other, more frugal family seaside holidays – of donkey rides, paddling, shrimping and sand-castles – were spent at Blankenberge on the treeless, winds -