The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (20 page)

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officers following in a rowing boat at a discreet distance. At other

times he would go on deck to check the weather, discuss navigation

with the flag captain and inspect the ship’s company, or simply sit

with Alexandra, cigarette in hand, reading a book or playing domi-

noes with his officers.

Day after tranquil day passed, the air clean and clear and the

September sun low in the sky, but soon the nights were gathering

in and the first frosts descending. On 21 September 1906 the family

enjoyed their last day of ‘wonderful free-and-easy life’, as Nicholas ruefully described it.9 He loved Virolahti more than anywhere and

would have liked to build a summer retreat there or buy one of the

small islands. After the yacht docked at Kronstadt and the time came

to leave and go ashore the girls clung to each other weeping at

having to say goodbye to their special ‘family’ on board. Before they left, as on every trip they made in the
Shtandart
, the family gave generous gifts to all the crew.

*

By November 1906 the family was once more ensconced at the

Alexander Palace and, as always the girls loved being out in

the park. They liked to skate on the frozen ponds and cross over

the ice to the little house built in 1830 for the children of Nicholas I in the middle of the Children’s Island, where they could enter

their own fantasy play world.10 But their favourite winter pursuit,

enjoyed from the moment they were big enough to sit on their

father’s knee, was sledging down ice hills specially made for them.

That particular winter, they had the pleasure of a newly constructed

‘American hill’ – a 200-foot-long (61-m-long) artificial toboggan

run. A reporter from the
Washington Post
was fortunate to catch sight of them on it when reporting on security arrangements at

Tsarskoe Selo. A group of red-coated officials ‘covered with so many

medals they overlapped’ solemnly inspected the construction,

followed by the girls’ nannies who tested the run, after which the

three older girls, wearing thick bearskin coats ‘appeared in such a

tremendous hurry that they nearly upset the officials . . . and

screamed so loudly in Russian that their governesses reprimanded

them’. They then took their seats ‘without regard to precedence’,

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and ‘while the officials’ attention was momentarily distracted, they

gave the toboggan a push and whizzed down the hill without any

attendants. The governess screamed with horror, the little grand

duchesses with delight. They had evidently played the trick before.’

Thereafter the officials insisted on keeping hold of the toboggan

much to the disgust of the girls, who kept trying to slide down

unguarded. ‘The tenth journey was signalized by the Grand Duchess

Marya flopping down on the ice brink of the chute and attempting

the feat known to Coney Islanders as “bumps”.’11

The long dark days were further enlivened that winter by regular

visits from their Aunt Olga, Nicholas’s younger sister. Every Saturday she would take the train out to Tsarskoe Selo from her home in St

Petersburg. ‘I think I can say that they were awfully pleased when

I visited them and brought some change into their daily lives’, she

later remarked. ‘The first thing I did was to run upstairs to the

nursery where I generally found Olga and Tatiana finishing their

last lesson before lunch . . . If I arrived before the professors had finished the morning’s work, they would be just as delighted to be

interrupted as I had once been.’12 At 1 o’clock they would ‘rush

down the staircase leading from the nursery to their mother’s room’,

after which they would all have lunch, and then sit and chat and

sew in the mauve boudoir. A walk in the Alexander Park would

follow; after changing out of their coats and boots Olga and the

girls would often indulge in a spate of high jinks on the stairs. The light would be turned off as they descended and ‘someone would

lie down on one of the steps and when I trod on her she would

grab me by the ankle and tickle me or think of other tricks. There

was much laughter and screaming as we all rolled down to the

bottom of the stairs in a heap – knocking our heads against the

bannister on the way.’13

Over the years the girls would become closer to Aunt Olga than

any of their other female relatives; she was like an older sister and frequently filled the breach when their mother was ill, accompanying

them to public functions. ‘Someone had to be there to ensure that

the children behaved properly, stood up when necessary and greeted

people as they should – and anything else there was to look out for’, she later recalled. ‘In the end, it was taken for granted that I always
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had to come along wherever they went.’14 Olga was closest to her

eldest niece and namesake, who was only thirteen years younger

than she. ‘She resembled me in character, and that was perhaps why

we understood each other so well.’ But as time went on she could

not disguise her special affection for the seductively engaging

Anastasia, whom she nicknamed Shvybzik (a German colloquialism

meaning ‘little mischief’) in recognition of her incorrigible behav-

iour. The child had such courage, such a fierce love of life, and

embraced everything as a great adventure; Olga had no doubt that

of the four she was the most intelligent.15

Those Saturday games with their aunt were a time to be treas-

ured: ‘this was how we appeared at the tea table every Saturday

afternoon, happy, laughing and squabbling about all the dreadful

things “the others” had thought of.’16 As dusk fell the family attended evensong together and Aunt Olga would stay till bedtime, after

which she travelled back to St Petersburg. At the end of that year,

she persuaded Nicholas and Alexandra to allow her to stay the night

and take the girls back with her the following morning for the day.17

Here after lunch with Grandmama, Maria Feodorovna, at the

Anichkov Palace – where even Anastasia would be on her best

behaviour – they would then go to Aunt Olga’s to meet their favourite officers from the entourage, have tea, play games, enjoy music – and

dance – before one of the ladies-in-waiting would come from

????????????? to take them back home.

In later life Olga Nikolaevna reflected on those happy ‘red-letter

Sundays’ with her nieces before the war. The extraordinary closeness

and self-sufficiency that was the mark of the four Romanov sisters

persisted, as too their touchingly childlike innocence about the

world. But it was a strange hothouse atmosphere in which to grow

up. ‘My nieces did not have any playmates,’ Grand Duchess Olga

wistfully observed, ‘but they had each other, and probably did not

miss them.’18

*

Over in England, although it was four years since she had left her

post, Margaretta Eagar had not forgotten her former charges. Now

living in straitened circumstances, running a boarding house in

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Holland Park, she still wrote to the girls from time to time and sent gifts on their birthdays. But sitting in her drawing room, as she

often did, gazing at the many treasured photographs in silver frames

that she had of them, she was pining for news. Margaretta hated

the London fogs; her life, she told Mariya Geringer, was ‘
horrible

. . . I wish I were returning to Russia. I do not think I shall ever

be happy in this country.’ Sending Tatiana birthday wishes in June

1908, she wistfully commented: ‘I suppose you still have cakes and

almond Toffee. How good they used to be!’19

No doubt the girls were missing her too, for since Margaretta’s

departure at the end of 1904, the absence of a governess’s discipline had begun to have a detrimental effect. With so much natural energy

and a huge curiosity about the world, the girls were increasingly

boisterous. Alexandra was often too busy or indisposed to supervise

her daughters herself, leaving them under the supervision of Trina

Schneider. Modest and devoted Trina might be but she was clearly

feeling the strain, as too was the girls’ exasperated general nursemaid, Mariya Vishnyakova, to whom they gave the constant run-around.20

In March 1907, therefore, Alexandra made the decision to appoint

Sofya Tyutcheva – who had served as a lady-in-waiting at Peterhof

the previous summer – as maid of honour cum governess to the

girls, with responsibility for helping them prepare their lessons and to chaperone them on walks and other excursions. Sofya came on

the recommendation of Grand Duchess Ella, and had an old-school

pedigree, as granddaughter of the famous Russian poet Fedor

Tyutchev, and a strong conservative streak. She was a stickler for

good behaviour and took her role very seriously, but it was a chal-

lenge: the girls ‘wouldn’t listen and tried every which way to test

my patience’, she recalled. She appealed to Olga: ‘You have an

influence over your sisters, you’re the eldest and can persuade them

to listen to me and not play up so much.’ ‘Oh no,’ Olga had replied,

‘then I would always have to behave myself, and that’s impossible!’

Sofya could not help thinking Olga was right, that it was hard for

one so young to have to be forever setting an example to her siblings, though she later overheard her reprimanding Anastasia for her

mischievous behaviour by saying ‘Stop it, or Savanna [Tyutcheva’s

pet name] will leave, and then it will be even worse for us!’21

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That same year another new female friend entered the girls’ lives

in the shape of Lili Dehn, whose husband, a lieutenant in the Guards

Equipage, was already a favourite with the family. The girls took to

Lili immediately, for just like Aunt Olga she was willing to join in

their often silly and very physical games, and would even race down

the slide in Alexey’s downstairs playroom with them. While others

outside the close family circle had already suggested that the four

sisters were ‘Cinderellas who were entirely subservient in family life owing to the attention paid the Tsarevitch’, Lili found this was far

from the truth.22 Alexandra loved her daughters; ‘they were her

inseparable companions’. But there was no denying that the lives of

the four sisters were very sheltered: ‘They had no idea of the ugly

side of life’, as Lili recalled. The general assumption of the world’s press certainly was that the Romanov children lived stunted lives,

hidden away for their own safety ‘in a land which resembles a great

powder-magazine’; that they had to be ‘guarded by regiments of

soldiers and thousands of highly paid spies’. Yet sufficient informa-

tion was emerging by 1908 for the world to have a sense that Olga

was ‘a very interesting girl, highly imaginative, and fond of reading’.23

More than that, she had a natural aptitude at arithmetic and read

better in English than in Russian.24

The four sisters in fact all spoke good English, and had received

additional tuition since 1905 from a Scotsman, John Epps.25 His

legacy, however, was a strange Scottish twang acquired by Olga and

Tatiana that their uncle Edward VII remarked on when the families

met briefly in 1908 (it has also been suggested they had an Irish

accent picked up from Margaretta Eagar).26 To replace Epps, Sofya

Tyutcheva suggested an Englishman named Charles Sydney Gibbes,

a Cambridge graduate who had been teaching in St Petersburg for

several years. She sent a note to Alexandra’s secretary, enclosing a

testimonial from the director of the Imperial School of Law where

Gibbes had lately been running courses in modern languages, and

which praised him as being ‘extremely talented’.27

When Gibbes took up his post with the imperial family in

November 1908, Sofya Tyutcheva introduced him to thirteen-year-

old Olga and eleven-year-old Tatiana. He thought them ‘good-

looking, high-spirited girls, simple in their tastes and very pleasant
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to deal with’. Although they could be inattentive at times, ‘they were quite clever, and quick when they gave their minds to it’, but the

atmosphere induced by the presence of Tyutcheva as chaperone

made those first lessons somewhat tense.28 Gibbes also gave occa-

sional, separate, tuition to Maria, who struck him as sweet and

compliant and with a gift for painting and drawing. The arrival in

his classroom in 1909 of the whirlwind that was eight-year-old

Anastasia changed everything. Gibbes later tactfully remarked that

she was not always an easy child to teach but like everyone else, he

was won over by her effervescent charm and her quirky intelligence.

Gibbes thought her ‘fragile and dainty . . . a little lady of great