Prince William (24 page)

The van Cutsem party stayed in a magnificent tented camp – a far cry from the sort of tents William had occupied in Chile. This was the height of luxury: the tents were raised up on little stone decks, with proper beds and bathrooms and stunning views over the bush, which began just feet away. And for escaping the heat, there was a swimming pool. It was bliss. They went on early morning game drives, in open jeeps, wrapped in blankets against the cold, bouncing across the rough tracks in the grass, everyone's eyes peeled for the twitching of a tail in the half light, or the flapping of an ear that might reveal a herd of elephants emerging from the bush, or a cheetah quietly slinking through the trees. This is one of the best times of day to spot animals, before the sun comes up, and with it the heat, when they find themselves a shady spot to rest in after a night's hunting. Another good time is late afternoon. And because the animals don't see jeeps as a threat, provided no one makes a noise or a sudden movement, it's possible to get very close. William loved it.

But more exciting still was when Charlie Wheeler, one of Ian Craig's colleagues on Lewa, a fellow conservationist and another second-generation Kenyan, took them walking through the bush
for a day's expedition on foot, with camels. Armed with a rifle, he took the lead – everyone who leaves the safety of the camp, whether on four wheels or foot or horse, goes with an armed ranger just in case they meet an angry buffalo or get between a rhino and her baby. On this occasion they had two armed PPOs as well, although their training was more to deal with would-be kidnappers and assassins than hungry hyenas or malevolent bull elephants. Everything needed for the perfect lunch was carried on the camels, and when they stopped at noon in the middle of nowhere, a makeshift camp was conjured up in the bush and lunch was served as it might have been in a five-star hotel, with a troop of Africans to prepare and serve it. On their way back, the sun suddenly set; and in Africa there is no twilight. They went from sunshine to moonlight and unexpectedly walked into a herd of elephants. It's the sort of experience that either thrills or terrifies. Harry, aged twelve, was hanging on to Charlie's shirt but William was exhilarated. They rendezvoused with some vehicles and returned safely to camp, but the day and the holiday as a whole made a big impression on William and inspired a determination to go back.

When plotting his gap year he contacted Ian Craig and asked whether there was any work he might usefully do on Lewa. He planned to go first to Botswana, which Mark Dyer knew well, but then wanted to return to the place he had so fallen in love with, but he made it absolutely clear he did not want a joy ride. Ian assured him he would be usefully employed and welcomed him with open arms.

Charlie Mayhew is the founder and Chief Executive of Tusk Trust, a charity set up in 1990, dedicated to halting the destruction of Africa's wildlife. Five years later he hooked up with Lewa, where the guiding philosophy so perfectly matched his own, and he became good friends with Ian Craig and his family. Their concern was not only the wildlife; it was also for the local communities and the need to educate them so that they could appreciate and manage the assets they had and profit from the tourism they
brought. William heard about Tusk during this visit, and it was one of the first charities of which he agreed to become patron.

Charlie happened to be at Lewa the day William and Mark, shrouded in secrecy, arrived in March 2001. He was there with Ronnie Wood, the Rolling Stones guitarist and painter, plus a photographer and a journalist from the
Daily Mail
. Ronnie was a patron of Tusk and had painted a series of wildlife pictures at Lewa to raise money for the charity. The publication wanted to see Ronnie in situ and so Charlie had taken them all. Ronnie stayed with Ian and his wife, Jane, while the journalists were accommodated in a lodge.

‘Before I got there,' says Charlie, ‘Ian sent me an email or phoned and said, “You are leaving on such and such a date and you will be gone by 11 o'clock won't you?” This was so unlike Ian to be so precise, very unKenyan. I said, “Yes, okay, we'll be gone.” I was taking Ronnie up north for more interviews. When we arrived, Ian apologised and said, “You might have thought me a bit odd, but we've got William coming and the fact you've got a
Daily Mail
journalist in tow put everyone into a spin.” And as William flew in, we flew out and the poor journalist never realised that he had the biggest scoop under his nose.'

William and Mark stayed with the Craig family for a couple of months while he worked on the Conservancy and they became very close. It has long been asserted that the Craigs' daughter, Jecca, was an early girlfriend, but friend is much closer to the mark. The Craigs were another normal, easy-going family by which William was happy to be embraced on his trips to Africa. Jecca was like a sister to him and their son Batian like another brother. In Kenya he could disappear; very few people knew who he was, and those that did, didn't care.

‘You can see exactly why William has become so close to Ian Craig,' Charlie said. ‘I wouldn't say he's a father figure but they have a very close relationship. He's very down to earth and has a lovely family, a wife and two children. They've all become close friends and what's interesting about William and his friends is how
closely guarded they are and protective over that relationship and the privacy, and one can't help but admire it.'

‘William was much more relaxed when he came back the second time,' says Charlie Wheeler. ‘On that first trip his mother had just died and he was very quiet and reserved. This time he was a normal boy, and was treated like all the kids.' Charlie has two sons of his own of much the same age and his late wife, Carole, like most Kenyans, black and white, was completely unfazed by the royal tag. It meant nothing to them, which is at the heart of why Africa is so special to both William and Harry. It's the anonymity that they both crave. To her, William was just another boy, who should pull his weight, and she made no distinction between any of them.

While William was there, a big bull elephant had to be captured and transferred to another national park. He was causing huge damage on Lewa, breaking trees and being generally destructive because of the limited space. It was a major event in the local community and dozens of people were involved and lots of photographs were taken because the Craigs always liked to record these transfers. William was part of the operation and remarked that for the first time in his life, the cameras were not focused on him.

That was a major part of the magic of Africa for William. It was somewhere he could go where no one knew who he was, and those that did, didn't care. He was just another guy, and according to Charlie, ‘He was in paradise. Lewa's a very dynamic place. There's always something exciting going on. It's thrilling for an adult, let alone a kid; and there's an element of danger. Yet it's not just fun for fun's sake, it's doing something worthwhile.'

A couple of monuments remain to mark William's two months in Kenya in the spring of 2001. First, he built the bird hide at Lewa. The initial attempt sank into the swamp, much to the amusement of the Kenyans; his second attempt survives to this day. He also built a flying fox, otherwise known as a foofy slide, across a deep, death-defying gully at Lake Rutundu in Mount Kenya National Park, a two-hour drive south of Lewa. It is one of the remotest places on the planet, accessed through several miles of
single track – and at times trackless – forest and scrub; the sort of place where if you slipped off the path (easily done) or ran out of fuel, you might not be found for months. But when you finally reach the lake and the two-hut lodge above it, you realise it was worth the journey. It is one of the most breathtaking places – and because of the high altitude, literally breathtaking.

It was also the place where William took Kate Middleton – and his mother's diamond and sapphire ring – in 2010 and proposed marriage to her. He took her there no doubt to show off his amazing piece of handiwork with the flying fox. Or perhaps the place where he actually presented the ring (we shall never know exactly) was at Lake Alice, another ten thousand feet higher and an even more heavenly place and well worth the climb. What history does not relate is whether Kate risked life and limb and crossed the ravine in William's flying fox, which has a large safety sign beside it (widely disregarded) saying that it is for luggage only, or whether she took the safe option, and walked down to the bottom of the ravine and up the other side.

THE OLD GREY TOWN

William arrived at the old university town of St Andrews in September 2001 and was almost immediately embroiled in an upsetting and ugly row that was not of his making. Colleen Harris had extended the deal with the media; in what was called The St Andrews Agreement, William would make himself available for a photo call when he arrived, and thereafter for an informal chat once a term. In return, he would be allowed to continue his education undisturbed by the media.

Unsurprisingly, he was nervous about starting university. None of his friends had chosen St Andrews and home and family were a very long way away. It was a great choice, in which Andrew Gailey had played a significant role, it having been one of his alma maters. Other strong advocates had been James and Julia Ogilvy. James Ogilvy is the son of Princess Alexandra (a cousin of the Queen) and Angus Ogilvy, and he and Julia, who was a trusted friend of Diana's, met as students at St Andrews and subsequently married. They have since bought a house there and work nearby and, like many former students, have huge affection for the town. All three of them had obviously been agitating in favour of the place and the year before William started, they brought him for a quiet and unofficial look around. William liked what he saw.

St Andrews is familiar to most people from watching the Open Golf Championships on television. It's a picturesque coastal town, small enough to be a community, with a good reputation for the subjects he wanted to study. It is Scotland's oldest university, founded in 1413, and the third oldest in the English-speaking world. It is
also now one of the best, but neither its age nor its credentials make up for the fact that it is a long way from anywhere and there are no trains or planes within easy reach. Beautiful and ancient though it is, it is a one-horse town with a limited amount to do – and the reason, no doubt, why it has the highest rate of student marriages of all universities in the UK (my own, as well as the Ogilvys' and Prince William's being among them).

A year before his arrival, only two people at the university knew that William had chosen St Andrews. They were Colin Vincent, who was acting principal at that time and William's academic adviser, and David Corner, a medieval historian, who as secretary and registrar at the university looked after his non-academic welfare. They both knew that William would be filling in the name of only one university on his UCAS application form. But the press, for some reason, thought he had applied for Edinburgh, which proved very convenient for St Andrews in allowing his application and everything else that followed to proceed quietly.

Like every other student, his place was dependent on achieving the required A level grades – which he did – and once those were through Brian Lang, the future principal, and David went to Eton to see Andrew Gailey and others to discuss security and how best to handle William's arrival and the relationship in general.

What none of them expected in the sleepy town of St Andrews was a terrorist attack. Within weeks of the announcement that he'd be starting in September 2001 (coincidentally the year of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States), the university received a series of parcels that purported to contain the deadly virus anthrax. They came, it transpired, from a Scottish liberation group in protest over a Scottish university admitting an English Prince.

They turned out to be hoaxes but each one had to be taken seriously. ‘I had one secretary,' recalls David Corner, ‘who said, “If I get another one and have to take my clothes off in the department again, I'm going to charge for it.”' The procedure was that anyone who might have been contaminated was put into quarantine until they had clearance from Porton Down, the germ warfare
laboratories in England, where the substance had to be sent. Feeling sorry for the press office team quarantined in the police station, David popped in to see how they were, taking the principal, Brian Lang, and the boss of the company brought in to handle the tabloids. ‘We walked in and the desk officer said, “Och, they're fine,” and brought them out to meet us, which deemed us contaminated, so the boss of Beattie Media, the principal and I were locked up for three hours in the police station!'

On the Friday before William's arrival for his first term, David was asked to join him and his father for the evening, at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. ‘I think already some degree of nerves had set in; and I think he [William] thought it was going to be terribly formal, and it was quite the opposite.' David could not be less formal himself. He is a cheerful, Moses-like figure with wild white hair and beard; rumour has it he owns a tie but it's seldom seen. He had already been to St James's Palace to talk reassuringly to the Prince of Wales about what William could expect at St Andrews. Like all Scottish universities – but different from most universities in the UK – students do a four-year honours degree, but rather than studying one subject in ever-greater depth as the years pass, they start with three different subjects in the first year and narrow them down.

‘They had decided that this was not going to be a weekend about William going to St Andrews; it was William and his father visiting Scotland, so they did things like going to a housing estate in Glasgow, going to a dance studio in Edinburgh and eventually they turned up at St Andrews with Dad carrying the suitcase and putting him in his hall of residence.'