Kate (14 page)

It was a daunting experience for Kate. She had left St Andrew’s the previous summer after passing her Common Entrance examination and had spent two terms at Downe House, a boarding school a few miles from her home in Bucklebury, before her parents decided to remove her.

Now the retiring schoolgirl was once again facing with trepidation the prospect of starting a new school – her fourth in a decade. This always nerve-racking situation was no doubt made even more intimidating because her fellow pupils were drawn from the upper echelons of society.

It was a sign that everything Kate’s grandmother Dorothy had aspired to had been achieved by her daughter Carole. She had become solidly middle class, living in a traditional Home Counties manor house and educating her children at a very exclusive school.

Carole’s aspirations would prove to be the making of her daughter. Kate may have felt out of her depth when she joined Marlborough, but within a decade she had blossomed into a confident young woman, taking the world in her stride and dating the next but one in line to the throne.

Marlborough College, which has the motto ‘
Deus Dat Incrementum
’ – ‘God Giveth the Increase’, or ‘God Gives Growth’ – from 1 Corinthians 3:6, was founded in 1843 for the sons of Church of England clergymen and within a few decades it had become one of the country’s leading boys’ public schools. Although it now attracts the children of peers and socialites, former pupils, known as old Marlburians, are an eclectic bunch, including Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman, art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, round-the-world yachtsman Francis Chichester, actor James Mason, war poet Siegfried Sassoon, Conservative politician Rab Butler and singer Chris de Burgh.

Built beside the Marlborough Mound, an ancient man-made knoll thought once to have formed part of a Norman motte-and-bailey castle, the college is centred round a courtyard dominated by a Victorian Gothic chapel with stained-glass windows by William Morris. But the school campus, bordered by the River Kennet, is sprawled across the town. Today, the college has its own trout ponds and an observatory as well as extensive playing fields. There are eleven rugby pitches, seven soccer pitches, eight cricket squares, six grass hockey pitches, three lacrosse pitches, two volleyball courts, twelve tennis courts and a driving range.

It was in that sporty atmosphere that Kate would thrive. A keen sportswoman, she joined Marlborough six years after it became co-educational – although the school began admitting girls to the sixth form in 1968 – and moved into the girls’ boarding house Elmhurst, once a nineteenth-century private house. It had its own garden and purpose-built sixth-form wing and was a short walk from the central courtyard.

One of the first girls Kate met on her arrival was Jessica Hay, five months her senior, who showed her up to their dormitory, helped her to unpack her trunk and went with her to the dining hall for supper. Jessica remembers Kate as a shy and gawky teenager, and told the
News of the World
that her nerves would have been worsened by the older boys’ habit of publicly marking new girls out of ten, writing the figures on a napkin at dinner. Jessica recounted that Kate received only ones and twos.

Kate’s lack of confidence was also picked up on by another school friend, Gemma Williamson, who was in Mill Mead House, on the other side of the school grounds. ‘Catherine arrived suddenly during the middle of the year,’ she told the
Daily Mail
in an interview about their friendship. ‘She had very little confidence.’

Initially, Kate was terribly homesick at Marlborough and did not spend time with the other girls after eating her supper at Norwood Hall, instead hiding away in her boarding house studying and doing her homework, all the while missing her family.

Many of Kate’s fellow pupils were the offspring of earls, dukes and barons. One student, for example, was Sebastian Seymour, the son of the Duke and Duchess of Somerset, who went on to Cirencester Agricultural College, the traditional stamping-ground of upper-class farmers. The atmosphere of privilege must have been somewhat overwhelming, but the well-behaved schoolgirl gradually made friends – despite her unwillingness to rebel. Nicknamed ‘Middlebum’, a play on her name, she became known for her fun-loving behaviour, loyalty and reliability – although she rarely joined in the wilder antics. Jessica recalled that when her dorm mates held parties, getting drunk on bottles of wine and vodka that they’d sneaked in, Kate would watch from the sidelines. She did not drink or smoke but kept a clear head, maintaining a vigil for the house matron in case her friends were caught. Jessica told the
News of the World
: ‘I never once saw her drunk. Even after our GCSEs finished, she only drank a couple of glugs of vodka.’

Kate’s confidence would have been boosted in 1997 when her sister Pippa arrived at the school, but instead of rebelling and exploring ways to break the rules, she concentrated on studying for her 11 subjects. Kathryn Solari, who was in her biology set, remembers: ‘Catherine was always really sweet and lovely. She treated everybody alike. She was a good girl and quite preppy – she always did the right thing – and she was very, very sporty. I wouldn’t say she was the brightest button, but she was very hard-working. I don’t think you would find anyone to say a bad word about her.’

Virginia Fowler, a former pupil who had a friend in Elmhurst, recalls her as always being kind to new arrivals. ‘She was always quite welcoming. She didn’t look down on the new girls like some of the other girls.’

The diligent teenager played hockey for the school, was in the first pair at tennis, was a keen netball player and cross-country runner and used to beat the boys at high jump, as she had done before at primary school. She was apparently awarded so many honours at speech day that she barely had a chance to return to her seat between presentations.

Charlie Leslie, a keen sportsman a few years above Kate, has described her to reporters as ‘an absolutely phenomenal girl’. She was ‘really popular, talented, creative and sporty’, he remembered. ‘She was captain of the school hockey team and played in the first pair at tennis,’ but despite her achievements, she was ‘very level-headed and down-to-earth’.

After taking her GCSEs, which she passed with flying colours, Kate returned home to Bucklebury for the summer holidays. It was there that she underwent a miraculous transformation.

It was on the first day of the autumn term in 1998, when she returned to Marlborough as a sixth-former, wearing the long skirt that was the uniform of the upper school, that Kate finally showed the steely determination to improve herself that had become a family trait. Gone were the wan cheeks, lanky hair and nerdy image. She had blossomed into one of the most attractive girls in the school.

‘It happened quite suddenly,’ Gemma recounted to the
Daily Mail
. ‘Catherine came back after the long summer break the following year an absolute beauty . . . She never wore particularly fashionable or revealing clothes – just jeans and jumpers – but she had an innate sense of style.’

It was that sense of style, as well as the transformation in her appearance, that would attract the boys in the school. But unlike her wilder classmates, she remained discreet and maintained her dignity, showing the good judgement and reserve that would make her an ideal consort for a prince. ‘It’s fair to say that Catherine wasn’t much of a party animal,’ Gemma said, adding that she believed Kate’s parents had ensured she had ‘a strong moral compass’. She recalled: ‘A group of us used to sneak off out to Reading to go out drinking but she would never join us. She used to giggle when we would tell her what we got up to, but it just wasn’t her thing.’

By this time, Kate’s friend Jessica was dating Nicholas Knatchbull, one of Prince Charles’s godsons, who was Prince William’s ‘shepherd’, or mentor, at Eton. She had met the heir to the Mountbatten fortune at the wedding of Tim Knatchbull, Nicholas’s cousin, and Isabella Norman, a friend of Jessica’s family. In another interview, with
The Mail on Sunday
, she delighted in talking about being introduced to the Queen and other members of the royal family, including Prince William, at her boyfriend’s family seat Broadlands, a Palladian mansion in the Hampshire countryside.

Unlike her school friend, Kate had yet to meet Britain’s most eligible schoolboy, but it seems she still dreamed of capturing the heart of her prince. Even in those days, Kate was nicknamed ‘Princess in Waiting’ – not then by an impatient press but by her giggly school friends as a joke. According to Jessica, she, Kate and another girl, Hannah Gillingham, who was in the same sports teams, used to hang out in the kitchen of the boarding house eating microwaved Marmite sandwiches, a favourite of Kate’s, and joking about the possibility of her marrying the prince.

‘We would sit around talking about all the boys at school we fancied,’ revealed Jessica to
The Mail on Sunday
, ‘but Catherine would always say, “I don’t like any of them. They’re all a bit of rough.” Then she would joke, “There’s no one quite like William.” . . . She always used to say, “I bet he’s really kind. You can just tell by looking at him.”’

Jessica was not the only girl in Kate’s year to mix in royal circles. Emilia d’Erlanger, niece of the 10th Viscount Exmouth, was one of Prince William’s closest girlfriends. The youngest of five children of Robin d’Erlanger, a chartered accountant and commercial pilot like Kate’s grandfather, and his wife Elizabeth, a regional director of Sotheby’s in Devon, Emilia, who was in Kate’s history of art class at Marlborough, was once touted as a possible bride for the prince. In the summer holidays after the lower sixth, she was invited by William on a ten-day cruise, hosted by Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, aboard a 400-ft luxury yacht, the
Alexander
, owned by the billionaire Greek shipping tycoon John Latsis.

While Emilia holidayed with the prince, Kate had to make do with the more prosaic company of her parents. She returned to school the following autumn and was made a prefect. ‘Catherine was a very hard-working, responsible girl,’ recalls former pupil William Garthwaite, who was in the same year. ‘She arrived late [at the school] and became a prefect. That says a lot. She did very well.’

Like most teenagers, the girls at Marlborough would spend hours gossiping about the opposite sex. But while some of the other girls lost their virginity, Kate was apparently made of sterner stuff. ‘She is very good-looking and a lot of the boys liked her,’ Jessica remembered in
The Mail on Sunday
, ‘but it just used to go over her head. She wasn’t really interested and she had very high morals.’

‘I got the distinct impression that Catherine wanted to save herself for someone special,’ Gemma told the
Mail
. ‘It was quite an old-fashioned approach . . . Not that anyone ever said anything to her, though . . . she was such a genuinely nice person that all the girls liked her as much as the boys.’

Although Kate stood out from the crowd as being a model of propriety, she reportedly had several admirers at school, with whom she may or may not have been romantically involved. One of the names in the frame was Charlie Von Mol, whom former pupils describe as ‘the school legend’. He was two years above Kate and shared her passion for sport – he was in the first rugby team. Jessica recalled an evening when Kate, after much deliberation, slipped off to the woods for a snog with Charles, but said that it seemed to her that ‘she just did it because of peer pressure’.

Two other boys at Marlborough have been named as former boyfriends of Kate, but in fact they may well have been platonic friends. There has been speculation that Willem Marx, the son of a Dutch father and English mother, who was a mathematics genius, may have been her first love. The two have remained friends and Willem, an oxford graduate who works as a journalist, has since squired Kate when Prince William is not around. She was photographed with him in May 2008 leaving the nightclub Boujis, where they had been drinking Crack Daddies – a champagne cocktail – and dancing until the early hours.

Another possible former boyfriend is rugby player oliver Bowen, who was in the year above her, although Jessica, talking to the
News of the World
, remembered the pair as being close, she thought the relationship seemed more platonic than romantic.

All this might make Kate sound like an over-serious ice queen, but old school friends have described her as ‘goofy’, and she clearly enjoyed a joke and had the same anxieties and preoccupations as any teenage girl. One schoolmate wrote in the leavers’ yearbook for 2000: ‘Catherine’s perfect looks are renowned but her obsessions with her tits are not. She is often found squinting down her top screaming: “They’re growing.”’

However, Kate’s demure behaviour and hard work at Marlborough certainly paid off, as she gained three A levels – A grades in mathematics and art and a B in English – meaning that she could go to the university of her choice. The question was which university to choose.

Chapter 14
A Florentine Interlude

W
andering along the cobbled streets of the medieval city of Florence, exploring its renowned art galleries, piazzas and churches, Kate Middleton marvelled at the beauty of the city that was the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance and inspired E.M. Forster to write his novel
A Room with a View
. Following in the footsteps of the book’s beautiful young heroine Lucy Honeychurch and her chaperone Charlotte Bartlett, the 18-year-old, who was a keen photographer, captured on film some of the architectural jewels of the Renaissance era.

A promising artist as well as a talented photographer, Kate had left Marlborough College that summer with an A grade in art at A level under her belt and a thirst to learn more about her favourite subject. Now, two months later, the teenage ingénue was living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, roaming the streets and studying the paintings and sculptures she loved.