William and Harry (3 page)

Charles had first met Camilla in 1970 at a polo match in Windsor. He had been immediately smitten with the attractive and gregarious aristocrat but the following year had joined the navy and was sent on an eight-month naval tour of the Caribbean. By the time he returned Camilla was engaged to Andrew Parker Bowles, a captain in the Household Cavalry. Charles was crushed but determined to keep Camilla as a friend, and they remained close, moving in the same social circles and sharing a passion for fox-hunting. Diana, who was aware of their friendship when she first met Charles, became increasingly paranoid about Camilla during her marriage. When Charles disappeared, she would anxiously question their staff on his whereabouts. While the
public only saw her smile, behind closed doors she was miserable and later conceded that her second son was born into the end of their marriage.

On Saturday 15 September 1984 Diana gave birth to another healthy boy at the same hospital where William was born. Prince Henry Charles Albert David – to be known as Harry – was delivered at 4.30 p.m., and weighed six pounds, fourteen ounces. Charles, who had fed his wife ice cubes during the nine-hour labour, left Diana’s side to tell the waiting crowds the good news before returning to the Palace for a Martini. ‘The delivery couldn’t have been much better: it was much quicker this time,’ he said. According to Diana, who had known from an early scan that she was expecting a boy, her husband’s comments were rather more crushing. ‘Oh, it’s a boy, and he’s even got rusty hair,’ Charles is understood to have commented. To compound Diana’s distress, she was devastated when upon returning home to Kensington Palace, Charles sped off in his Aston Martin to play polo in Windsor Great Park. ‘Something inside of me died,’ Diana later admitted. The fairy-tale marriage was falling apart.

William had earned his nickname ‘Basher Wills’ with good reason. As he furiously pedalled his bright-yellow plastic truck along the upstairs corridor of Craigowan Lodge he let out a squeal of delight before crashing the toy into the wall for the umpteenth time. Harry, who had learned to walk and was quickly copying everything his older brother did, clapped his hands in glee and beeped the horn of his red tractor. His Christmas present from Granny was smaller but capable of doing just as much damage, and he raced from one end of the long narrow corridor to the other as fast as his little legs could pedal. The boys had been playing for over an hour under the eye of Nanny Barnes, and the evidence of their afternoon of fun was etched all over the wallpaper and skirting boards, which had been badly scuffed. As Nanny Barnes swept up chips of paint from the floor, Diana, dressed in jeans and a warm roll-neck jumper, for it was always cold at Balmoral, came upstairs. ‘Whatever will your grandmother say?’ Diana exclaimed as she scooped Harry into her arms and planted a kiss on William’s head.

Outside it was raining, and while the Queen had spent the afternoon riding across the moors Diana kept the children inside. William had a sniffle, and while the Queen’s advice for a common cold was to wrap up warm and brace the elements, Diana had insisted that both boys stayed indoors. Downstairs in her bedroom Diana had been flicking through the collection of magazines she had brought with her from London. She had spent most of the morning on the phone regaling her friends with the utter boredom of the New Year holiday while Charles had spent the morning salmon-fishing. Yet another barbecue had been planned for dinner that night, and Diana was not sure if she could think up a new excuse not to be there. Barbecues were the Duke of Edinburgh’s forte, and the weather, no matter how inclement, never put the Windsors off their picnics, which were either enjoyed outside in the summer months or in front of a roaring fire in one of the outhouses on the royal estate during Scotland’s wet and windy winters. It never ceased to amaze Diana that with a staff of hundreds the Queen would insist on washing up every plate and utensil before returning to the main house after dinner, having given the household the night off.

The princess had spent the last few evenings having supper with the boys in the nursery, but the Queen and Prince Philip were desperate to spend some time with their grandchildren and had insisted they all ate together that night. They adored the time they got to spend with William and Harry, and when Diana had insisted on moving out of the main house into Craigowan Lodge a mile away the Queen had been crestfallen. Diana, who privately complained to Charles that she felt suffocated at Balmoral, had needed some space. Knowing it was best not to
antagonise her daughter-in-law, the Queen obliged and had offered the couple the use of Craigowan, where she resides when Balmoral is open to the public. When Princess Anne and her children Zara and Peter came to visit, which was at least twice a year, they always stayed in the main house, but Diana was different, and now that they had left, the house was suddenly terribly quiet. ‘The Queen was so upset when Diana and the boys moved to the lodge,’ recalled her cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson. ‘She said, “Why did they have to move? There are so many corridors for them to race down here and it’s so quiet now they have gone.”’

While the Queen had noticed that William had become quite a handful, she adored her grandsons and encouraged them to let off steam at Balmoral. The boys were free to roam and explore every nook and cranny of the house so loved by Queen Victoria, who bought the estate in 1854. The turrets and sinuous corridors provided hours of fun for the young princes, who loved to play hide-and seek with their father. When they got older their grandfather taught them how to salmon-fish, and the boys would spend hours yomping with him through the wild Scottish countryside, Harry atop Charles’s shoulders and William working hard to keep up with Prince Philip’s brisk pace. They were happy days and an extension of William and Harry’s life at Highgrove, where they escaped the hustle and bustle of London at the weekends.

Charles had bought the 347-acre estate in Gloucestershire in 1980 for over £750,000 from Maurice Macmillan the Conservative MP and son of the former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and he adored the Georgian house. It was just 120 miles from the centre of London and had the added bonus of a
working farm. Conveniently for Charles, as Diana later acknowledged, Highgrove was just a stone’s throw from the Parker Bowleses’ residence in the town of Allington, near Chippenham.

The prince and princess would arrive in their chauffeur-driven cars – Charles alone and Diana with the nursery – on Friday night. During the early days life at Highgrove was happy enough. The princess pottered around in the house with the children while Charles would spend hours in the gardens, tending his impressive beds of hydrangeas, sweet peas and roses, and while away afternoons wandering among the pear and plum trees discovering new herbs for his chefs Mervyn Wycherley and Chris Barber to incorporate in their recipes. Although a traditional country house, Highgrove is less grand and much smaller than you might expect for a royal residence. The cream-coloured property comprises two studies, a drawing room, dining room and kitchens on the ground floor, with two floors, primarily living quarters, upstairs.

The impressive grounds, opened to the public every summer, are a mixture of landscaped gardens and overgrown wilderness, reflecting the Prince’s taste. Charles once said he had put his ‘heart and soul’ into Highgrove, and accompanied by his beloved Jack Russell terrier Tigger and her puppy Roo, he was at peace. He desperately hoped both of his sons would inherit his passion for gardening. ‘I’ve yet to see which child will take to gardening,’ he once said. Thoughtfully he had reserved two small plots of land for William and Harry and invested in child-size tools so that they could tend the garden with him. While Harry loved to dig, as they grew up both boys were more interested in playing war games in their miniature military fatigues than becoming gardeners. While Charles gardened the boys would play army
games in their tree house, which had a real thatched roof and windows that opened and shut. They kept rabbits and guinea pigs, which they fed with carrots their mother had chopped, and the highlight of many weekends was diving into a special play pit full of plastic balls that Charles had created in one of the sheds on the estate. When they played hide-and-seek or big bad wolf this was the most popular hiding place, and the boys would shriek with excitement as their father dived into the colourful sea of balls to pluck them out in time for tea.

When they were tucked up in bed on the top-floor nursery, Charles liked to entertain. Diana, who was a good decade younger than most of Charles’s friends, found she had little in common with his country set. She liked his skiing companions Charles and Patti Palmer-Tomkinson and his old friend from Cambridge Hugh Van Cutsem, a millionaire farmer and pedigree bloodstock breeder, and his Dutch-born wife Emilie, but given the choice preferred to share informal suppers with Charles in front of the television. She did however look forward to visits from her future sister-in-law Sarah Ferguson and Charles’s younger brother Andrew.

William and Harry adored their uncle, who was a real-life navy pilot and had fought in the Falklands War. He would entertain them for hours with his war stories and Harry especially was mesmerised. During the summer holidays their cousins Zara and Peter would come to visit, as would their maternal grandmother, ‘Granny Frances’, who William and Harry adored. Diana was at her happiest when she and her mother could take tea on the terrace and watch the children playing by the swimming pool soaking the royal detectives with their long-range water pistols. They were happy days.

While she claimed to love the countryside, Diana was in truth far happier shopping on Sloane Street. She once confided to Highgrove’s housekeeper Wendy Berry, ‘It’s constantly raining there and Highgrove can be such a chore. The thing is that the children enjoy it, and I go because of them. It’s important that they can have somewhere like that to go at weekends.’ Instead of joining her husband in the gardens she would stay inside and watch her favourite soaps on the television or chat on the telephone for hours on end to her girlfriends back in London. If the weather was fine she would take the boys into Tetbury with her protection officer Sergeant Barry Mannakee for company. To outsiders it was a picture of domestic bliss, but to those who knew Charles and Diana it was apparent that the twelve-year age gap between them was beginning to cause problems.

Everything about their personalities was different, and they clashed over the simplest things. Diana wanted to listen to pop music and watch movies with her sons, while Charles preferred listening to classical music and being outdoors. While Diana loved nothing more than flicking through
Vogue
magazine and coming up with new ideas for her wardrobe, Charles would be poring over a philosophical tome in his untidy study, where magazine cuttings and half-finished letters littered the carpet. By 1986 the prince and princess were sleeping in separate bedrooms. Diana blamed Charles’s snoring and said she got a better night’s sleep in her own room, which was littered with soft toys and photographs of William and Harry. To the millions of royalists who still wanted to believe in the fairy tale all seemed well, but behind the scenes the marriage was in serious trouble.

* * *

Summer hung on into September and it was warm enough for shorts when Prince William arrived for his first day of nursery on the morning of Tuesday 24 September 1985. As he tottered up the stairs, the three-year-old prince clasped his Postman Pat flask in one hand and his mother’s hand in the other. It was William’s first day at Mrs Mynors’ nursery school, situated in a pretty tree-lined avenue in west London a stone’s throw from Kensington Palace. The Queen had expected William to be educated at home in keeping with tradition, but Diana wanted both her sons to mix with children their own age. It was all a part of her plan to raise the princes as ordinary boys and show the House of Windsor that it could be done successfully. On this occasion Charles was in agreement that William, who could be spoilt and difficult, would benefit from mixing with his peers – known as Cygnets, Little Swans and Big Swans at the school.

Diana had allowed William to choose his own outfit, and they had arrived on time, as had the hundreds of photographers who had gathered outside the school gates to take pictures. Diana’s wish to integrate her sons in modern society had disadvantages as well as advantages and it was with growing concern that the Queen noted that every stage of her grandsons’ young lives was now chronicled in the media. If William had a new haircut or Harry acquired a tooth, it would somehow find its way into the papers. By now William was accustomed to the omnipresent cameras. Unlike Harry, who shied away from the long lenses, William relished the attention and played up to the ‘tographers’, as he called them. With a wave he had already mastered, the prince smiled broadly before boldly marching through the front door.

Diana would drop William off each morning and collect him in the afternoon, having rearranged her diary around the school run. ‘He was so excited about it all,’ she recalled. ‘He just adored other children. He’s very much an organiser, which probably might be useful in future years.’ Like any mother, she had been anxious about William settling in, but the prince was popular with his new friends, who had no idea that their fellow Cygnet would one day be king and barely noticed the protection officer who accompanied William twenty-four hours a day and sat quietly at the back of the classroom keeping a close eye on his young charge.

When it came to playtime, William, already aware of his princely status, left his fellow pupils in no doubt as to who was in charge. When he got into a scrap, a common event for the boisterous youngster, he would draw his play sword and challenge his opponent: ‘My daddy’s a real prince, and my daddy can beat up your daddy,’ he would shout.