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Frederika did not mind at all. She loved being allowed to ride on Florence streetcars, leaping up to give her seat to the elderly while she herself clung to a strap. Generally hatless, informally dressed and never too neat ("I don't believe Frederi-ka's seams were ever straight," said one teacher), the German princess seemed in many ways as American as her schoolmates. They called her "Freddy" and even "Fried Egg," and often gathered in her room to help her wrestle with the groaning accordion she sought to master.
Loyal Pepperpot. At one point, the school body was almost equally divided over the merits of a book on sex which had somehow found its way into the sacred precincts. Some of the girls, after a diffident look, decided the book was "icky." Frederika took the firm stand that anybody who thought a book like that was icky was pretty darn icky herself. A more serious controversy raged over the politics of Adolf Hitler, whom Freddy at first defended with all the stridency of most German youth of her generation. Girlish arguments over Hitler occasionally ended in tears at Miss May's, but as the school year went on, Frederika read articles in British and U.S. magazines about the Nazi regime. At the end of the year, she was full of doubts. "Freddy was terribly interested in world affairs," says one of her school friends. "She had a pepperpot of a mind, and she was very loyal to Germany, but we always understood that her defense of the German government was simply a defense of her homeland."
It is likely that both Freddy and her schoolmates at that time cared less about the political situation in Europe than about Freddy's reason for visiting her two "aunts"' (actually second cousins) at the Villa Sparta, just a short walk from school. The reason: the presence at the villa of the aunts' younger brother, Crown Prince Paul of Greece.
Frederika and Paul (another relative of Queen Victoria) had first met when she was only ten. Frederika boasts to this day that she fell in love with him at first sight.
Whatever the facts, the romance had from the first the full approval of all the royal families concerned—the Hohenzollerns, the Hanovers, the Glücksburgs, who rule Greece, and even the Windsors, who, as rulers of Great Britain, must pass on the betrothals of all potential heirs to the British throne. On Jan. 9, 1938, two years after Frederika left school, she and Prince Paul were married by the Archbishop of Athens. Some 60 representatives of Europe's royal houses stood by to see the Crown Prince carry his bride off to his brother's palace in a golden coach.
A Two-Platoon System. As Crown Princess of Greece, Frederika of Hanover was nearer to occupying a real throne than any member of her family had been for generations. But the shaky throne of the Glücksburgs was no stable institution like the one which long-lived Victoria had kept them from mounting in England. Some 3,000 years before, the ancient Greeks had cast out their hereditary rulers and set up the world's first democratic government. During all but one of the many centuries since the collapse of those democracies, the Greeks have lived as conquered peoples under the rule of foreign emperors, caesars and sultans.