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No royal princesses could have been closer than the daughters of Nickolas and Alexandra. There were four girls, born right after one another in succession to the Imperial couple. The formal picture above, was taken in Alexandra's Pallisander Room of the Alexander Palace, is obviously posed, yet it cannot conceal the closeness between the sisters. The two eldest, Olga and Tatiana shared one bedroom and the two youngest, Maria and Anastasia shared the one next door.
Their bedrooms were large and airy and furnished in a hodgepodge of furniture assembled from things found around the palace and gifts from relatives. Large folding screens, covered in floral fabric were used by the girls to partition off private sleeping areas. After they outgrew cribs the princesses slept on folding camp beds covered in blue ticked covers and each bed was marked with the name of its owner. Small icons were pinned to the striped covers which served as headboards. They slept on thin mattresses, under warm, blue blankets, monogrammed with their initials. On top were thin satin coverlets with the monogram of Catherine the Great, strange slippery covers that slid off easily. Camp beds were a tradition since the days of Catherine the Great who introduced the custom for her grandson Alexander and it became the rule from then on. Imperial children were taught from a very young age to endure hard beds and other relative discomforts - like cold baths and simple foods. The Grand Duchesses camp beds were light and easy to move. The girls moved their beds around their suite of rooms.
In summer when the upstairs rooms of the palace became hot
and stuffy they would set them up under the big open windows of
their rooms to catch the cool night breezes. At Christmas the
girls assembled their beds around the Yule tree in Alexej's playroom.
Here they could lie in the dark, watching the sparkling ornaments
and star-like lights as they drifted off to sleep.
Even though they could afford to have duplicate sets of beds,
these camp beds were packed-up and followed the girls as they
migrated throughout the year to Livadia, Peterhof and back to
the Alexander Palace. They even went abroad. Eventually, these
same camp beds followed them to Siberia.
The Grand Duchesses shared a large bathroom, with two bathtubs. One large tub from the reign of Nickolas I was silver-plated and was engraved with the names of everyone who had used it over the years. Nearby, a smaller one had been used when the children where infants. Lined up along the side of the large tub were big buckets for nursemaids to pour water over the children when they bathed. Later the girls did this for each other. The single toilet was behind a partition hung with watercolours and prints. An older, second bathroom was located on the stairs between the girl's Dining Room and their mother's chambers below, but it was mostly used by the Empress's maids after the new bathroom was built in 1902.
The girls lived upstairs separately from their parents. The 'nurseries' functioned independently of the rest of the palace and had their own servants. This is one of the reasons the girls came to create their own semi-official identity- 'OTMA' - as they sometimes signed themselves, using the first initial of each girls for a common signature. As they were growing up they had the typical spats of siblings over toys and dolls, which their nursemaids and governess vainly tried to arbitrate. When these tussles faded away with maturity the girls became quite good friends and enjoyed each other's company and companionship.
Languages were a potential source of confusion in the family and many foreign tongues could be heard in the palace. Although the girls were thoroughly Russian, they spoke English with their mother, Russian to their father and Alexsej, and both English and Russian among themselves. They felt equally comfortable in both languages. When they were infants they had an Irish Governess, named Miss Eiger. From her they acquired an Hibernian accent. Later, when the Empress began to groom her daughters for possible English marriages she brought in a 'proper' English tutor, named Sidney Gibbs, to help them with their pronunciation, which he labelled 'Scottish'. Isolated from the outside world, the girls developed a curious child-like way of speaking Russian, which some outsiders found disconcerting. When they were in their teens they were still using the phrases of the nursery among themselves giving the impression their development had somehow been arrested.
