Prince William (30 page)

FINAL YEARS OF FREEDOM

By William's final years at St Andrews he had long since given up the baseball cap. Head up, he walked tall and confidently through the town, popped in and out of shops, pubs and cafés with scarcely a second thought, and where he had once been a bit of a passenger in seminars and tutorials, he began to speak up. His tutors all noticed him growing before their very eyes and taking a genuine interest.

Having dropped History of Art, he was concentrating on more advanced physical geography, which he found much more exciting. ‘The bits of the course that got him most motivated,' says John Walden, ‘were those that had a social context. He did a course on HIV and AIDS and he got really interested in that because he could see in the outside world where that was an issue. He did a course with [Dr] Charles Warren [a colleague] on environmental management in Scotland – and they're a family with a country tradition – and he was really interested in that. The other piece of independent work was a review essay on some issue to do with big game hunting in Africa and the damage that that is doing to populations of big game.'

Charles Warren found William strikingly humble. ‘I formed a very high opinion of him as a man with his feet on the ground, earthed and normal; always a pleasure to deal with and interact with. He had no sense of entitlement, was never pushy. He was an outstanding young man by any standards but the fact that he's had all that privilege and extraordinary life, yet he was most normal. Whoever the people were that had a hand in bringing him up they deserve a lot of credit.'

When it came to roll calls, for security reasons William's name never appeared on any lists. Charles remembers William and another boy turning up late one day in the second year, and without looking up he said, ‘Names please.' William's companion sang out his name, while William kept his mouth firmly shut. ‘The look on his face said, “You're not expecting me to say my name, are you?” He was embarrassed, he hated standing out.'

In June 2004, Charles took fifteen junior honours students, including William, on a field trip to the Jostedalen ice cap in western Norway, which is the biggest and most dramatic in mainland Europe. It is one of the most beautiful places on earth, particularly at that time of year, with spring in the valley floor but snow still on the mountains; it is also one of the most remote. Their base was at a self-catering campsite that belonged to a small hotel in the tiny settlement of Gjerde, and every day they walked up the valley to the field site on the eastern flank of the ice cap to measure, record and map where the glaciers have been in retreat to establish the evolution of the landscape.

William came alive in those surroundings. No one knew where he was. The British media knew he was out of the country but they had no idea he was in Norway; there was not a photographer within hundreds of miles and Charles says he had never seen him so relaxed. ‘It was great to see; he was in an environment he loved – he loves wild places; we talked a lot about Patagonia, which he had also really loved. I had been a scientific leader on a number of Raleigh expeditions to Chile so I knew exactly the places he was talking about.' At night, over hearty stews provided by the hotel (where the staff were ensconced, while the students roughed it on bunks in wooden cabins, cooking breakfast and lunch for themselves), William let his hair down. ‘He's a born raconteur,' says Charles. ‘He told some highly entertaining anecdotes about the goings-on behind the scenes at royal dos – the imminent disasters and chaos. There is this image he painted of the swan effortlessly gliding past while lots of frantic paddling is going on underneath the surface of the water. He
told them in such an amusing and entertaining way, we were all in stitches of laughter.'

Unhappily the idyll was cut short. Protocol insists that if a member of the British Royal Family is visiting another country, even in a private capacity, the government has to be informed. Word filtered down from Oslo to the local policeman, and somewhere along the line, someone leaked it to the Norwegian press. The party woke up on day three to find the peaceful little settlement of Gjerde had become a media city. There were television trucks with satellite dishes and radio cars and print journalists and photographers crawling all over the place. ‘William's security people negotiated a deal that if he walked from the cabins down to the main street and they got their shot, they would all go away. Which they did, except for one independent guy who stuck with us, but finally William's PPOs lost him.

‘What struck me most was the change that immediately came over William. On went the cap, pulled well down, the head went down. You could see him putting on his psychological armour. I found it profoundly sad; it was a tiny glimpse of what happens to him every day of life; the intense weight of the world on his shoulders.'

Two days before the end of the trip William had to leave. He had sad news. His grandmother, Frances Shand Kydd, had died at her home near Oban on the Isle of Seil off the west coast of Scotland. She was just sixty-eight and had become a rather tragic figure. The last time she had appeared in public was at the Burrell trial as a witness for the prosecution, when under oath she had been forced to admit that she and Diana had been estranged for four months before her daughter's death. They had had no contact. Life had been very hard on her: she had endured an unhappy marriage, lost custody of her children when they needed her, her second husband, Peter Shand Kydd, had left her in 1986, her brother had committed suicide two years before and she had buried two children – the newborn son and Diana. It was not surprising that she should have turned to two of life's great comforters, religion
and the bottle. When she returned to Scotland after Diana's funeral she was trapped indoors for eleven days by reporters; and after the Burrell trial, she found she had been burgled in her high-profile absence and had her jewellery stolen. She had been living as a recluse for many years in a two-roomed bungalow, doing relentless charity work, supported by the local community in Oban and by the Roman Catholic church. She once said, ‘It takes very little to make you happy if you've had real sadness. It makes you take less for granted, and it's a very enriching experience, really.'

Her funeral at St Columba's Cathedral a week after her death was a large gathering of the Spencer clan. The Prince of Wales, her former son-in-law, was not there – according to the
Daily Mail
, because he had not been invited. The rift between the older generation had never healed and Earl Spencer's promise at Diana's funeral to be there for the Princes had turned out to be little more than rhetoric. He had pledged that their ‘blood family' would do all they could to steer their lives ‘so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you [Diana] planned.'

William, who had returned from Norway, and Harry, who had flown back from Africa, both looked immensely sad. They hadn't seen much of their grandmother in recent years but they had happy memories of times with her and holidays spent on Seil when they were younger. She and Diana had been alike in so many ways and she had been a reassuring link to their mother's memory.

HARRY

Harry was never university material. He had covered himself in glory as a sportsman at Eton and had been Parade Commander in the Combined Cadet Force, but academically he struggled. When he left school at eighteen he had just one goal in life: to join the Army. But first came a gap year of his own, which he and Mark Dyer devised between them. They went to Australia, Africa and Argentina, and it was during the trip to Africa, to the tiny mountainous Kingdom of Lesotho, which has the third highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the world, that Harry discovered where his true talents and passions lay.

The people in this beautiful but impoverished country were slowly being wiped out. In 2000, King Letsie III had declared the pandemic a ‘national disaster' and the country's ‘number one enemy'. There were then an estimated four thousand orphans and vulnerable children in a country of just 1.8 million, most of whom were in denial about AIDS. Harry's itinerary was arranged by the King's brother, Prince Seeiso, but he spent some of his two months in the country working with AIDS orphans in the Mants'ase Children's Home in Mohale's Hoek. He was incredibly moved by the plight of the children. He played with them, he taught them English, he built rooms, put up fences, painted walls. All the children loved him but, in particular, one little four-year-old boy, who followed him like a shadow, wearing a pair of big blue wellington boots Harry had given him. In another home, a ten-month-old baby girl, raped by her mother's boyfriend and so badly damaged she had to have her womb removed, lay motionless in his arms; she
couldn't even cry. Witch doctors tell men that they will be cleansed if they rape a child, the younger the better.

For all his hell-raising, Harry has a deeply compassionate side to him and the most remarkable affinity with young children. He found it impossible to walk away from these children when his time was up, step onto an aeroplane and get on with his life of plenty without doing something positive to help.

During his first week in the orphanage, a photo call had been arranged for the media and one of those who went out to Lesotho was Tom Bradby, ITN's royal correspondent. He had also done some filming of William during his gap year and was a familiar figure at royal events; he had come to know Mark Dyer very well, and both Mark and Colleen Harris identified him to William and Harry as the presentable face of journalism – someone they could trust. They did various bits of filming together and he got on well with them both. After the photo call, he persuaded Harry to let him make an exclusive documentary about Lesotho to highlight the country's plight. The result was an extraordinarily powerful and touching film called
The Forgotten Kingdom
, which was shown on ITV in Britain in 2004 and sold to America for a large amount of money. An appeal was launched off the back of the film and all the money raised was used to found Sentebale (which means ‘Forget me not'), Harry's charity, of which Prince Seeiso is co-patron.

Some of the shots in the film were taken by Harry himself with the video camera he used to record his gap year. Tom had looked through all the tapes to find suitable clips for the documentary, and finding a lot of it very funny, offered to edit them into a video as a present for Harry. The next time Tom saw William, William said he had seen the video and thought it was great, so Tom offered to do the same for him. Trusting Tom completely, as Harry had done, he handed over all of his own, very private, tapes, which Tom spent several days turning into a video. Having crossed the Rubicon, Tom was then trusted with all sorts of confidences and both Princes would ring and ask his advice from time to time.

Harry's oldest and possibly best friend, Henry van Straubenzee, whom he'd known since his first day at Ludgrove, had also planned to work with children in Africa on his gap year. He was heading for Uganda, where his elder brother Thomas, William's contemporary and close friend, had gone on his gap year two years before. But Henry never made it. He was tragically killed in a car crash just before Christmas 2002 at the age of eighteen.

Henry had spent the first few months of his gap year between Harrow School and university working at their old prep school. He was going to Newcastle to read business studies, sponsored by the MoD, having won an army scholarship. After Newcastle, he would go to Sandhurst, and possibly his father's old regiment, the Royal Green Jackets (now the Rifles), continuing a family military tradition that hadn't been broken in over 150 years. His future was mapped out for him. More immediately, he was going home to Hertfordshire and after Christmas was flying to Uganda. The term was over and they were having a farewell Christmas party that had gone on way past midnight. In the early hours the sound system gave out, so he and a friend nipped down the school's long narrow drive to borrow a CD player. His friend was at the wheel and in the fog on the way back, doing no more than 27 mph, the car hit the only tree in the driveway. Both boys had been drinking, neither was wearing a seat belt and the car was old and had no airbag on the passenger side. Henry was killed instantly and his friend gravely injured.

He was the first friend of William and Harry's generation to die and both were intensely shocked and upset. They had lost their great-grandmother earlier in the year, also Princess Margaret, and while both deaths were immensely sad, they had had a good innings and neither of them had been well. Henry was young, handsome, healthy, mischievous and happy, with everything to live for. His death was as sudden and senseless as their mother's.

They knew the van Straubenzees intimately. The boys all stayed at each other's houses. The Princes had been on family seaside holidays with them. For years, Henry's parents, Alex and Claire, had taken a house on the cliff top at Polzeath in north Cornwall,
as they still do, and every year they took a gang of boys, each of their three sons inviting their closest friends. William and Harry were always part of it – William as Thomas's friend and Harry as Henry's. They went surfing with boogie boards – William always going out further than anyone else ever dared – and shrimping in rock pools; they played French cricket on the flat sandy beach, and barbecued and partied into the night. Thomas and Henry had been to stay with William and Harry at home and on holiday more times than they could count. And if Diana was not there, Tiggy would look after them all. They'd been to Highgrove and, before Diana's death, to Kensington Palace, which they adored because Diana was always such fun. Thomas Straubenzee is one of the very few friends the Princes have now who knew their mother. The brothers had been on the super-luxurious
Alexander
, the third biggest yacht in the world, which the late Greek shipping tycoon, John Latsis, used to lend the Prince of Wales. They had wonderful, wild
Boy's Own
holidays in the Mediterranean, jumping from the highest deck into the sea.