Princess Eugenie’s sons don’t suffer her childhood terror of the ocean.
The royal mother-of-two has sons August, three, and 16-month-old Ernest with her marketing executive husband Jack Brooksbank, 38, and has now opened up about their life together – and how they are far less fearful than she was of water when she was growing up.
She told Hello! during a visit to the ‘Blue: Art for the Ocean’ exhibition at Christie's in London: “They love swimming. The sea in Portugal’s a little bit rougher.
“So we’ve got our feet in, but Augie is a fish. Literally, he loves it and we have whales and dolphins all across the walls.
“We’re big ocean people.”
Eugenie, Jack and their boys divide their time between Britain and Portugal for his job, and the royal added August likes to read ‘The World’s Wildest Waters’ picture book about the ocean when he has breakfast.
She said: “I see it every morning when Augie’s eating breakfast, and he’s like, ‘Mama’, and then we go through it.
“The children have to find the creatures in the pictures in the book and the next page is all the facts about the cuttlefish, or the great white shark or the seal – and Augie loves it.”
Eugenie was on the committee which secured artwork being auctioned this week at Christie’s for the Blue Marine Foundation, for which she is an ambassador.
But she admitted on World Oceans Day in June she was scared of the sea as a child.
She said in a video posted on Instagram: “I was always quite scared of the ocean when I was younger.
“I dropped a jelly shoe in there and never came back, obviously. It’s something so wonderful and unknown that we really should be making sure that everything within it is looked after for generations to come.”
