Kate (8 page)

Both siblings continued with their music. Kate sang in school concerts and played the flute and piano. “There was one occasion when Catherine was playing a game and Pippa was in a concert, so Michael and Carole split up so they could both support the girls,” recalled Mrs. Patching. “I remember once they played a duet on the piano in one of our house concerts, which we had on a Sunday and Michael and Carole were there for that. I seem to remember a giggle after the first couple of bars; they'd made a mistake and cheekily turned to the audience and said, ‘We think we better start again!'”

Both girls were on the First Hockey team with Hannah Gillingham, Alice St. John Webster, and Emilia d'Erlanger, all boarders in Mill Mead House. “The girls all became close and we would have a lot of fun together,” said their hockey teacher, Jon Copp. “I used to tease them and challenge them. I remember Emilia was quite a character and cheeky from the start. She put a snowball down my neck in the first term. Alice
St. John Webster was a bundle of energy and Hannah Gillingham was one of the school's best hockey players. They gelled as a group and became great friends. We used to have pizza parties at the end of term to celebrate our wins.”

The only unhappy spell at Marlborough came when Kate was forced to stop playing hockey. She had discovered a lump on the left-hand side of her head. Evidently concerned, the school called Carole who rushed Kate to their doctor. The lump was considered potentially serious, and Kate was operated on within a few days. Mrs. Patching recalled, “I can remember the incident and her having an operation. I don't recall anything happening on the hockey pitch [field] that had anything to do with the lump,” she said after some of the media reported that her scar might have been the result of a sporting accident. “Catherine had the operation during her term time. She was back at school very soon afterwards. As usual, nothing was too much of a big deal for her. You could never accuse Catherine of being a drama queen, but Carole was very worried, as any mother would be.”

One former pupil said that the operation “was pretty serious” and alarmed everyone, as it happened shortly after the tragic death of a fellow pupil, Hugo McDermott, from a brain tumor. “Catherine and Pippa were very kind to Hugo's brother Ed who was also at the school when his brother died, and they got involved with some fund-raising,” recalled a former student. The operation left Kate with a small scar on her hairline that is still visible today, though it mostly stays hidden under her hair. Privately, she and William—who uncannily also bears a scar on his head from being struck by a golf club at age nine—are said to refer to their wounds as their “Harry Potter scars.”

It was a brief moment of concern amid an otherwise very happy time. “It was like a big happy family in Elmhurst,” said Miss Gall. “We would do things like bake cakes and watch videos.” As she made her way through her school days, Kate made friends for life. As well as her hockey friends, she was close to Susanna Housden in her house, and Catriona Lough and Gemma Williamson, who both boarded at Mill Mead House. The girls would catch up in “Court,” the principal meeting place by the main school building and the hub of the school. On weekends, they were allowed to take tea at the Polly Tea Rooms in the town center. In the evenings, they would relax in the common room of their house, which had its own TV and a small kitchen—known as a “brew”—where Catherine would make her favorite microwaved Marmite sandwiches. Sometimes the Patchings, whose children, Bethan and Daniel, were in Catherine's year at the school, would host barbecues for the pupils. “The Patchings and Mrs. Gall were totally wonderful, like surrogate parents,” recalled former Elmhurst pupil Alex Martin. “We had dorms in the first two years, which gave the house a family feel, but mainly it was all the extras the Patchings arranged—spontaneous barbecues on weekdays in the summer after prep, trips to the cinema on Saturdays, weekends away in the Wye Valley camping and canoeing, an annual house walk and sleep over in a barn. The Patchings would welcome us into their home and were always around for a chat.'

As she gained in confidence and maturity, Kate was seen as one of the school's most promising students, and as such she was given more responsibility than most. She was made a “guardian” for new pupils in the first year—a job that she took seriously. Having experienced what it was like to feel
overwhelmed and unhappy in a new school, she was perfectly positioned to help others who might have been homesick and apprehensive. “She would take care of the newcomers. You could see that Catherine wasn't a threatening character, the new girls could talk to her and approach her, they felt comfortable with her,” said Mrs. Patching.

Kate studied hard, sitting for various exams for the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) in the summer term of 1998. Intending to make the most of her freedom afterward, she and her friends took part in a school hockey and rugby trip to Argentina. Returning home, Kate and her family spent the remainder of the summer in the sun-kissed Caribbean. When she went back to school for the lower sixth in September to study for the first year of her A-levels (the academic track), it was obvious to everyone that sixteen-year-old Kate had undergone something of a metamorphosis. “It happened quite suddenly,” Gemma Williamson recalled. “Kate came back after the long summer break an absolute beauty. Although she was sporty, Kate was very feminine, too. She always had a lovely willowy figure, but now she had filled out and the color was back in her cheeks . . . every boy in the school fancied her rotten.” With her honed figure, blonde highlights, and attractive dimples, she was suddenly top of the “Fit List,” ahead of Alice, Emilia, and Pippa. “We had fit lists that the boys pinned on the walls. Kate was at the top,” said a former pupil. Denise Allford also recalled being bowled over by Kate's transformation when she came back to St. Andrew's to collect James, who was about to start at Marlborough. “Carole had taken the girls shopping on the King's Road for the day. Pippa was always a tomboy, but Catherine
had lost her braces and looked stunning. She was wearing makeup and looked amazing.”

As a sixth former, Kate no longer had to wear a uniform; instead, she was allowed to wear a long black skirt that she could team with a jacket—so long as it was tailored. Even then she favored simple classic designs and had a collection of blouses and sweaters from the high street store Jigsaw. She also had a penchant for gilets (waistcoats), which were fashionable at the time. For the first time she also used makeup—only a hint of blusher and a lick of mascara. Always lithe because of her love of sports, Kate had filled out physically. One entry in the school's yearbook read, “Catherine's perfect looks are renowned . . . but she is often found squinting down her top, screaming, ‘They're growing!'”

Although the girls and boys at Marlborough had lessons together, there were strict rules when it came to socializing. Mrs. Patching allowed boys into the boarding house, but any visits had to be cleared by her in advance. Kate never took advantage of Mrs. Patching's liberal attitude, and according to those who knew her well, she wasn't particularly interested in having a serious boyfriend until she got to the sixth form. Being educated with boys for most of her life, Kate was relaxed around them and had plenty of male friends. She got along particularly well with some of the boys in her year: Hugh Macdonald-Brown, Mrs. Patching's son Daniel, Hugh Twort, and Andrew Coventry. She had her first kiss with Woody, the elder brother of her friend Alice St. John Webster. Their innocent relationship involved nothing more than some harmless smooching behind the Mound, a renowned landmark at the heart of the college grounds, where, according to Arthurian legend, Merlin's
bones are buried. Woody was in the year ahead of Kate, and they had gotten to know each other through Alice. A boarder in Cotton House and captain of the rugby and tennis teams, Woody was remembered by one former pupil as “popular and kind.” With his athletic physique and boyish good looks, he had caught Kate's eye. But the relationship was short-lived, and even when she developed a crush on Willem Marx, a dashing floppy-haired boarder, Gemma Williamson felt that Kate was hanging back: “I got the distinct impression that Kate wanted to save herself for someone special. It was quite an old-fashioned approach, especially at Marlborough, where half of the pupils were already having sex.”

Kate was still a virgin, and she did plan to save herself for someone special. At school, it was Pippa who was more popular with boys. “She could hold her own in any social situation. She was bright, pretty, sweet and always tanned,” recalled one of their contemporaries. “Even though Kate was older, it was Pippa who got talked about more. She was more light-hearted and up for a party, whereas Kate was reserved and didn't like to drink that much. Pippa was never short of male attention.” Pippa dated several boys at the school, including one of Marlborough's best rugby players, but Kate didn't have a serious boyfriend, though according to her dorm mate Jessica Hay, she harbored a crush on the teenage Prince William. “She would joke, ‘There's no one quite like William.' She had a picture of him on her wall,” Miss Hay told the
Mail on Sunday
. But Kate laughed off the story in her first-ever interview years later: “No, I had the Levi's guy on my wall, not a picture of William.” Indeed, when William came to Marlborough for interschool events, Kate was more interested in playing hockey than waiting at the goal line on the hockey field above Wedge-wood,
where some of the girls congregated to gawp at the prince. Others would gather outside Mill Mead, where the buses parked, so they could chase after the boys as they drove off. But not Kate. “There was a little bit of spying by some of the girls, but Catherine was busy playing hockey,” said Mrs. Patching. “Afterwards, she would host a table for the away team. She and William may have bumped into each other then, because the home and away teams all ate in the dining room.”

Painfully shy and acutely aware of his unwanted celebrity, William was known for keeping his head down, self-consciously trying to avoid the attention he attracted. He was still coming to terms with the trauma of losing his mother two years earlier in a tragic car crash in Paris. Like all her friends, Kate had followed the story closely, deeply saddened by the princess's death, which had prompted an outbreak of mass mourning around the world. The loss to Prince William and Prince Harry was almost unbearable, and when William returned to school, he threw himself into his studies as a distraction. He had pleasantly surprised his teachers at Eton when he passed each of his twelve GCSEs, excelling in English, history, and languages. Throughout his school life, William was well aware of how different he was. He would joke on the weekends that he was “off to WC,” which baffled his friends at first until they realized he didn't mean the toilet, but nearby Windsor Castle “to see granny.”

With her stunning transformation, it wasn't long before Kate caught the eye of the best-looking boy at the school and began dating Harry Blakelock, an upper sixth former, in the fall of 1998, when she was in the lower sixth. It was her first proper romance and Kate was smitten. Tall, incredibly good looking, and popular, Harry had a reputation for being quite
a catch among the girls. “It was well known that Kate was dating Harry when he was in the upper sixth, although it has stayed a secret until now. They were together for most of Harry's final year,” recalled a friend and former pupil. “Harry was a boarder in B1 and he was very sporty and captain of his year's rugby team. He was an excellent scrum half and a good cricketer. He played in the First Eleven, and he was also very good at hockey. He was what you'd call a model pupil—top of his year and very clever. Kate was in the lower sixth and it was her most serious relationship at Marlborough. It fizzled out when he left school and took a gap year [year off].” Kate was heartbroken, according to her friends. She desperately wanted to make the relationship work, but Harry was planning to travel overseas and they both agreed it would be quite impossible to be in a relationship when they would be on opposite sides of the world.

The summer of 1999, before she started the upper sixth, was one of mixed emotions for Kate. She was crushed and bruised from the breakup with Harry, but her attention soon turned to new possibilities. Her friend Emilia d'Erlanger had introduced Kate to some of her out-of-school friends. The niece of the tenth Viscount Exmouth, Emilia was fantastically well connected and part of William and Harry's friendship group, known as the “Glosse Posse,” so called because most of the aristocratic “members” resided in Gloucestershire, where the Prince of Wales has his country house, Highgrove. The Glosse Posse would meet on weekends and during holidays when they were invited to Club H, William and Harry's “den” in the cellars of Highgrove. Complete with a set of turntables on which they played vinyl records, a bar stocked with nonalcoholic beverages, and a portrait hung in the bathroom of
their ancestor Edward VIII, who threw the monarchy into chaos when he abdicated in 1936, the get-togethers were a great deal of fun.

Being so close to Emilia and Alice, who was also a member of the exclusive group, it was only a matter of time before Kate met William, and that summer they were introduced. “We all knew as teachers that that year group was moving in royal circles, they were friends,” recalled Mrs. Patching. Another of Kate's teachers described Kate as “on the fringe” of the royal set. “I was aware that William was friends with Mark Tomlinson and Emilia d'Erlanger. It doesn't surprise me that she met William while she was at Marlborough. It was certainly within the bounds of possibility, put it that way.”

Their very first encounter is not something Kate has ever spoken about; indeed, it has always been believed that Kate first met William when they were freshers (freshmen) at St. Andrew's. When she returned to school in September, there was much talk about the summer holidays. Alice told friends that she had met up with William and that he had asked for her number, but Kate kept quiet about their own meeting and threw herself with gusto into her final year.