The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (18 page)

positioned chairs against the wall, only for the younger two to come

rushing in from the nursery to join in until the next teacher saw

them once more demurely seated in their places.

The most important new arrival in the schoolroom was undoubt-

edly the twenty-six-year-old Swiss tutor Pierre Gilliard, so dapper

with his stiff wing collars, twirled moustache and goatee beard. He

began teaching Olga and Tatiana French at Peterhof in September

1905 while still in the employ of Stana, Duchess of Leuchtenberg,

and her husband. Gilliard travelled over from their nearby dacha at

Sergievka several days a week, running the gauntlet of endless secu-

rity checks in the process. He was unnerved to have the tsaritsa sit

in on his lessons until she was satisfied with their quality, thereafter a lady-in-waiting would attend as an informal chaperone. Gilliard’s

first impression of his charges was that Olga was ‘spirited like a

runaway horse and very intelligent’ and Tatiana, in comparison,

‘calm and fairly lazy’.25 He liked their frankness and the fact that

they ‘didn’t try to hide their faults’, and better still he found the simplicity of the tsar’s family a refreshing contrast to his stultifying,

‘desiccated’ life with the Leuchtenbergs, with all its tensions and

intrigues (the couple was in the throes of a scandalous separation

and divorce).26

*

After the summer sojourn at Peterhof, life at Tsarskoe Selo in the

autumn returned to its set routine. Nicholas was up long before his

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wife in the mornings, her ill health often preventing her from getting up till after 9. The children meanwhile ate breakfast in the upstairs nursery and had the plain food so beloved of English families –

porridge, bread and butter, milk and honey. Nicholas occasionally

joined them before heading off to his study for meetings with

ministers. Once they reached 8–10 years old the girls were consid-

ered well behaved enough to join their parents at the adult table

downstairs. Lunch, when guests or members of the entourage often

joined them, was always simple. With the children back at their

lessons Alexandra would spend the afternoons at her needlework,

or painting and writing letters till afternoon tea at around five in

the mauve boudoir, where she liked to have Nicky to herself if she

could and the children only came by invitation, in their best frocks

– though they could always come to her at any time if there was a

particular reason. Family supper, when the children were older, was

usually very modest, after which the evenings were spent with more

sewing, board and card games till bedtime, with Nicholas often

reading aloud to them all.27 No one ever saw the girls idle or bored

for Alexandra ensured that they were never at a loss for something

to do. When she had to be apart from them on official duties with

Nicholas, she sent them little admonitory notes: ‘Be sure to be very

good and remember, elbows off the table, sit straight and eat your

meat nicely.’28 She expected notes back from them – however brief.

A typical response to ‘Maman’ from Tatiana in 1905 in her best and

neatest handwriting went as follows:

J’aime maman, qui promet et qui donne

Tant de baisers à son enfant,

E si doucement lui pardonne

Toutes les fois qu’il est méchant.29
*

The most notable aspect of the tsar’s home life when details of

it made their way into the western press was how simple and

* ‘I love mama, who promises and gives so many kisses to her child, and so gently forgives her every time she is naughty.’ Tatiana has clearly copied this from somewhere else as, grammatically if referring to herself, it should be ‘qu’elle est méchante’.

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uneventful it was. People seemed surprised that the four sisters

enjoyed ‘only the healthy pleasures of ordinary children’.30 Reporters were impressed by the Englishness of their upbringing, with lessons

interspersed with lots of fresh air and exercise, all planned in advance to a fixed schedule. During the morning break between lessons at

around eleven, Alexandra would often walk or drive out in the park

with the children and one of her ladies – usually her now honorary

lady-in-waiting Baroness Buxhoeveden, whom they all called Iza, or

Trina Schneider. In winter she and the children would often go out

in a large four-seater sledge. At such times little Anastasia, already an irrepressible clown, would ‘slip down under the thick bear-rug

. . . and sit, clucking like a hen or barking like a dog’, imitating

Aera, Alexandra’s nasty little dog that was noted for biting people’s ankles. Sometimes the girls would sing as the sledge rolled along,

‘the Empress giving the key-note’ to which from under the bear

rug Anastasia would offer up an accompanying ‘boom, boom, boom’,

asserting ‘I’m a piano.’ 31

The Romanov girls were seldom ostentatiously dressed and even

on the coldest days they were never ‘muffled up in the prevailing

fashion’, so the
Daily Mirror
told its readers, ‘as the Tsarina has quite British ideas on the subject of hygiene’.32 With Anastasia now

four, Alexandra began dressing the girls in their own informal

‘uniform’ of matching colours, as two identifiable couples – the ‘Big Pair’ and the ‘Little Pair’ as she called them – a shorthand which,

however affectionate the intention, marked the beginning of a family

habit of referring to the girls collectively rather than as individuals.

The big pair and the little pair each shared a room, where they slept on simple, narrow nickel campbeds (of the portable kind used by

the army; a vestige of Nicholas’s own Spartan childhood). They took

cold baths in the morning and were allowed warm ones in the

evening. The older girls dressed themselves and Alexandra expected

them to make their own beds and tidy their rooms. The streak of

Lutheran puritanism in her ensured that their clothes and shoes

were handed down from one to the next. ‘The toy cupboards of the

imperial nurseries do not contain the host of expensive playthings

deemed indispensable in so many middle-class households’, observed

the
Daily Mail
, indeed ‘the splendid dolls sent by Queen Victoria
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to her great-great-grandchildren are only brought out on high days

and holidays.’33

Most notable to foreign observers was the degree of access that

the children had to their mother and father. Despite his heavy

workload Nicholas, from the first, had tried to be back from his

study in the evening to see the latest baby having its bath and he

always found time to play with or read to them in the evenings.

Both parents set their children high moral standards; Alexandra was

inspired by the popular American Presbyterian minister, James

Russell Miller, whose homiletic pamphlets such as
Secrets of Happy
Home Life
(1894) and
The Wedded Life
(1886) sold in their millions.

She noted down many quotations from Miller on the joys of married

life, on children as ‘God’s ideal of completeness’, and on parental

responsibility for the formation of their characters within a Christian and loving home. ‘May God help us to give them a good and sound

education and make them above all brave little Christian soldiers

fighting for our saviour’, she told her old friend Bishop Boyd

Carpenter in 1902.34

In 1905 and approaching her tenth birthday, Olga already had

an inherent awareness of her position as the eldest and loved giving

a military salute to soldiers standing on guard as she passed by. Until Alexey was born people had often greeted her as their ‘little empress’

and Alexandra underlined this by demanding that her ladies kiss

Olga’s hand rather than offer more impulsive expressions of affec-

tion. Although she could be boisterous with her sisters, Olga already had a serious side. There was an earnestness and integrity about her

that would have served her well, had it come to it, as a future tsaritsa.

From the start Alexandra invested a level of responsibility in Olga,

constantly reminding her of this in little notes: ‘Mama kisses her

girly tenderly and prays that God may help her to be
always
a good loving Christian child. Show kindness to all, be gentle and loving,

then all will love you’, she wrote in 1905.35

It was clear to Margaretta Eagar that from a very young age Olga

had inherited her mother’s and her grandmother Alice’s altruistic

spirit. She was highly sensitive to the plight of others less fortunate than herself; driving in St Petersburg one day she had seen a

policeman arrest a woman for being drunk and disorderly and had

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begged Margaretta that she be let off; the sight of poor peasants

falling on their knees by the roadside in Poland as they passed in

their carriage also unsettled her and she wanted Margaretta to ‘tell

them not to do it’.36 Not long after Christmas one year when they

were out driving, she had seen a little girl crying in the road. ‘“Look,”

she exclaimed, in great excitement; “Santa Claus could not have

known where she lived”; and she had immediately thrown the doll

she had with her out of the carriage, shouting “Don’t cry, little girl; here’s a doll for you.”’37

Olga was curious and full of questions, Once when a nursemaid

reprimanded her for her grumpiness, saying that she had ‘got out

of bed on the wrong foot’, the following morning Olga had pertly

asked which was ‘the right foot to get out with’ so that the ‘bad

foot won’t be able to make me naughty to-day’.38 Cranky, scornful

and difficult she certainly could be, especially during puberty, and

her flashes of anger revealed a dark side that she sometimes found

difficult to control, but Olga also was a dreamer. During a game of

I-spy with the children Alexandra had noticed that ‘Olga always

thinks of the sun, clouds, sky, rain or something belonging to the

heavens, explaining to me that it makes her so happy to think of

that’.39 In 1903 at the age of eight she made her first confession,

and soon after her cousin’s tragic death that same year developed a

fascination with heaven and the afterlife. ‘Cousin Ella knows, she

is in heaven sitting down and talking to God, and He is telling her

how He did it and why’, she insisted to Margaretta Eagar when

once discussing the plight of a blind woman.40

Tatiana at eight years old was pale-skinned, slender and with

darker, auburn hair, and eyes rather greyer than the sea-blue of her

sisters. She was already arrestingly beautiful, ‘the living replica of her beautiful mother’, with a naturally imperious look enhanced by

her fine bones and tilted-up eyes.41 On the surface she seemed an

extraordinarily self-possessed young girl, but she was in fact emotionally cautious and reserved, like her mother. She was never hostage

to her temperament as Olga sometimes could be and unlike Olga

– who had a volatile relationship with their mother as she grew

older – Tatiana was unquestioningly devoted; it was she in whom

Alexandra always confided. She was the most polite and deferential

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at table with adults and proved to be a natural-born organizer with

a methodical mind and a down-to-earth manner that her sisters

could not match. No wonder her sisters called her ‘the governess’.

Whereas Olga was musical and played the piano beautifully, Tatiana

was a gifted needlewoman like her mother. She too was deeply

altruistic and sensitive to what others did for her. On once discov-

ering that her nursemaid and Miss Eagar were paid for their services

because they had no money of their own and needed to earn a living,

she came to Eagar’s bed the next morning and got in and cuddled

her, saying ‘Anyway, you are not paid for this.’42

The third sister, Maria, was a shy child who suffered later from

being piggy in the middle between her two older sisters and her

younger siblings. Her mother may have coupled her with Anastasia

as the ‘little pair’ but as time went on Maria occasionally found

herself adrift from Anastasia and Alexey – the more natural little

pair – and she sometimes felt that she did not get the love and

attention she craved. Her strong physique made her seem rather

ungainly and she had a reputation for clumsiness and boisterousness.

Yet for many who knew the family, Maria was by far the prettiest,

with her peaches-and-cream complexion, her rich brown hair and

an earthy Russian quality not possessed by any of the other children; everyone remarked on her eyes that shone ‘like lanterns’ and her

warm smile.43 She was not especially bright but had a real gift for

painting and drawing. Mashka, as her sisters often called her, was

the least affected by any sense of her station. She ‘would shake hands with any palace attendant or servant, or exchange kisses with chambermaids or peasant women whom she happened to meet. If a servant