Spare (16 page)

She gasped…then laughed.

Then…opened the door a bit wider.

Chels and I learned
an important lesson. Africa was Africa…but Britain was always Britain.

Soon after we arrived back at Heathrow we were papped.

Never fun for me, but not a shock either. There’d been a few years, after Mummy disappeared, when I’d hardly ever been papped, but now it was constant. I advised Chelsy to treat it like a chronic illness, something to be managed.

But she wasn’t sure she wanted to have a chronic illness.

I told her I understood. Perfectly valid feeling. But this was my life, and if she wanted to share any part of it, she’d have to share this too.

You get used to it, I lied.

Thereafter, I put the chances at fifty-fifty, maybe sixty-forty, I’d ever see Chels again. Odds were, the press would cost me another person I cared about. I tried to reassure myself that it was fine, that I didn’t really have time for a relationship just then.

I had work to do.

For starters, I was facing the entrance exams required for the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

They took four days, and they were nothing like exams at Eton. There was
some
bookwork,
some
written stuff, but mostly they were tests for psychological toughness and leadership skills.

Turned out…I had both. I passed with flying colors.

I was delighted. My trouble concentrating, my trauma over my mother, none of that came into play. None of that counted against me with the British Army. On the contrary, I discovered, those things made me all the more ideal. The Army was
looking
for lads like me.

What’s that you say, young man? Parents divorced? Mum’s dead? Unresolved grief or psychological trauma? Step this way!

Along with news that I’d passed I received a report date, several months away. Which meant I’d have time to gather my thoughts, tie up loose ends. Even better, time to spend with Chels…if she’d have me?

She would. She invited me to come back to Cape Town, meet her parents.

I did. And liked them instantly. They were impossible not to like. They enjoyed funny stories, gin and tonics, good food, stalking. Her father was bear-sized, broad-shouldered, cuddly, but also a definite alpha. Her mother was petite, an amazing listener, and a frequent bestower of epic hugs. I didn’t know what the future held, I didn’t want to put any carts before any horses, but I thought: If you designed in-laws from the ground up, you couldn’t do much better than these guys.

There must have been
something in the air. Just as I was embarking on my new romance, Pa announced that he’d decided to marry. He’d asked Granny’s permission, and she’d granted it. Reluctantly, it was reported.

Despite Willy and me urging him not to, Pa was going ahead. We pumped his hand, wished him well. No hard feelings. We recognized that he was finally going to be with the woman he loved, the woman he’d always loved, the woman Fate might’ve intended for him in the first place. Whatever bitterness or sorrow we felt over the closing of another loop in Mummy’s story, we understood that it was beside the point.

Also, we sympathized with Pa and Camilla as a couple. They’d taken star-crossed to new levels. After years of thwarted longing, they were now just a few steps from happiness…and new obstacles kept appearing. First there was the controversy over the nature of the ceremony. Courtiers insisted it would have to be a civil ceremony, because Pa, as future supreme governor of the Church of England, couldn’t marry a divorcée in the church. That set off a furious debate about locations. If the civil ceremony were to be held at Windsor Castle, the couple’s first choice, then Windsor would first need to be licensed for civil weddings, and if that were to happen then everyone in Britain would be allowed to have their civil weddings there. No one wanted that.

The decision was therefore made that the wedding would take place at Windsor Guildhall.

But then the Pope died.

Bewildered, I asked Willy:
What’s the Pope got to do with Pa?

Loads, it turned out. Pa and Camilla didn’t want to get married on the same day the Pope was being laid to rest. Bad karma. Less press. More to the point, Granny wanted Pa to represent her at the funeral.

The wedding plans were changed yet again.

Delay after delay—if you listened carefully you could hear, wafting across the Palace grounds, the shrieks and groans of despair. You just couldn’t tell whose they were: the wedding planner’s or Camilla’s (or Pa’s).

Other than feeling sorry for them, I couldn’t help but think that some force in the universe (Mummy?) was blocking rather than blessing their union. Maybe the universe delays what it disapproves of?

When the wedding did finally take place—without Granny, who chose not to attend—it was almost cathartic for everyone, even me. Standing near the altar I mostly kept my head bowed, eyes on the floor, just as I had during Mummy’s funeral, but I did sneak several long peeks at the groom and the bride and each time I thought: Good for you.

Though, also: Goodbye.

I knew without question that this marriage would take Pa away from us.
Not in any real sense, not in any deliberate or malicious way, but nevertheless—away. He was entering a new space, a closed space, a tightly insular space. Willy and I would see less of Pa, I predicted, and that left me with mixed feelings. I didn’t relish losing a second parent, and I had complex feelings about gaining a step-parent who, I believed, had recently sacrificed me on her personal PR altar. But I saw Pa’s smile and it was hard to argue with that, and harder still to deny the cause: Camilla. I wanted so many things, but I was surprised to discover at their wedding that one of the things I wanted most, still, was for my father to be happy.

In a funny way I even wanted Camilla to be happy.

Maybe she’d be less dangerous if she was happy?

There are published reports that Willy and I snuck out of the church and hung
Just Married
signs on their car. I don’t think so. I might’ve hung a sign:
Be Happy
. If I’d thought of it at the time.

I do remember watching them drive off and thinking: They’re happy. They’re really happy.

Damn, I’d like all of us to be happy.

Around this time,
just before the wedding, or perhaps just after, I went off with Willy to train with the British Special Boat Service. It wasn’t official training. Just a bit of boys and toys, as we called it. Mostly a lark, though it did grow out of long-standing and solemn tradition.

Our family had always maintained close ties with the British military. Sometimes that meant an official visit, sometimes a casual lunch. Sometimes it meant a private chat with men and women home from the wars. But sometimes it meant taking part in rigorous exercises. Nothing showed respect for the military like doing, or trying to do, what they did.

Such exercises were always kept secret from the press. The military preferred it that way, and God knows the royals did too.

It was Mummy who took Willy and me on our first military exercise—a “killing house” in Herefordshire. The three of us were put into a room, told not to move. Then the room went dark. A squad kicked down the door. They threw flash bangs, scared the devil out of us, which was their aim. They wanted to teach us how to respond “if ever” our lives were in danger.

If ever?
That made us laugh.
Have you seen our mail?

But this day with Willy was different. Much more physical, more participatory. Less about teaching, more about adrenaline. We raced across Poole Harbour on speedboats, “attacked” a frigate, clambered up its cable ladders while shooting 9-mm MP5s loaded with paintball rounds. In one exercise we scurried down a flight of metal stairs into the frigate’s hold. Someone cut the lights, to make it more interesting, I suppose. In the pitch-dark, four steps from the bottom, I fell, landed on my left knee, which was immediately impaled on a fixed bolt sticking out of the floor.

Blinding pain washed over me.

I managed to get up, keep going, finish the drill. But at the end of the exercise we jumped off the boat’s helipad, into the water, and I found my knee wasn’t working. My whole leg wasn’t working. When I got out of the water and stripped off the dry suit, Willy looked down and turned pale.

My knee was gushing blood.

Paramedics were there within minutes.

The Palace announced some weeks later that my entry into the Army would be postponed. Indefinitely.

Reporters demanded to know why.

The Palace comms team told them:
Prince Harry has injured his knee playing rugby.

Reading the papers, my leg iced and elevated, I threw back my head and laughed. I couldn’t help savoring one small particle of self-indulgent glee as the papers, for once,
unwittingly
printed a lie about me.

They soon got their revenge, however. They began pushing a story that I was
afraid
to go into the Army, that I was bunking off, using a fake knee injury as a way of stalling.

I was, they said, a coward.

One of Willy’s
friends was having a birthday party. In the countryside near Gloucestershire. More than a birthday party, it was a fancy-dress party, with a cringy theme. Natives and colonials. Guests were
required
to dress accordingly.

January 2005.

I didn’t love fancy-dress parties. And I couldn’t stand themes. For Willy’s last birthday, or the one before, he’d had a fancy-dress party with a theme:
Out of Africa
. I found it irritating and baffling. Every time I’d gone to Africa I’d worn shorts and a T-shirt, maybe a
kikoi
.
Would that do, Willy?
But this was magnitudes worse.

Not one item of native or colonial garb hung in my wardrobe. I was crashing with Pa and Camilla, some days at St. James’s, some days at Highgrove, largely living out of a suitcase, so I didn’t give a damn about clothes. I looked most days as if I’d got dressed in a very dark and disordered room. A fancy-dress party, therefore,
with a theme,
was my nightmare.

Pass. Hard pass.

Willy, however, insisted.
We’ll find you something to wear, Harold.

His new girlfriend promised to help.

I liked his new girlfriend. She was carefree, sweet, kind. She’d done a gap year in Florence, knew about photography, art. And clothes. She loved clothes.

Her name was Kate. I forget what native or colonial thing she was wearing to the party, but with her help Willy had chosen for himself some kind of…feline outfit. Skintight leotard with (am I remembering this correctly?) a springy, bouncy tail. He tried it on for us and he looked like a cross between Tigger and Baryshnikov. Kate and I had a great time pointing our fingers at him and rolling around on the floor. It was ridiculous, especially in a three-way mirror. But ridiculous, they both said, was the point of the upcoming party.

I liked seeing Kate laugh. Better yet, I liked making her laugh. And I was quite good at it. My transparently silly side connected with her heavily disguised silly side. Whenever I worried that Kate was going to be the one to take Willy from me, I consoled myself with thoughts of all our future laughing fits together, and I told myself how great everything would be when I had a serious girlfriend who could laugh along with us. Maybe it would be Chelsy.

Maybe, I thought, I can make Kate laugh with my costume.

But what would it be? What’s Harold going to be? This became our constant topic.

On the day of the party it was decided that I’d go to a nearby village, Nailsworth, where there was a well-known costume shop. Surely I could find something there.

It’s a bit blurry, though some things come back with total certainty. The shop had an unforgettable smell. I remember its musty, moldy funk, with an undercurrent of something else, something indefinable, some airborne
by-product of a tightly sealed room, containing hundreds of pairs of trousers, shared over several decades, by thousands of humans.

I went up and down the rows, sifting through the racks, seeing nothing I liked. With time running out I narrowed my options to two.

A British pilot’s uniform.

And a sand-colored Nazi uniform.

With a swastika armband.

And a flat cap.

I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought.

Nazi uniform, they said.

I rented it, plus a silly mustache, and went back to the house. I tried it all on. They both howled. Worse than Willy’s leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous!

Which, again, was the point.

But the mustache needed trimming, so I snipped the long bits on the ends, made it a proper Hitler mouser. Then added in some cargo trousers.

Off we went to the party, where no one looked twice at my costume. All the natives and colonials were more focused on getting drunk and groping each other. No one took any notice of me, which I put down as a small win.

Someone, however, snapped photos. Days later this someone saw a chance to make some cash, or some trouble, and sought out a reporter
. How much for snaps from a recent party attended by young royals?
The crown jewel of the photos was thought to be Willy in his leotard.

But the reporter spotted something else. Hello, what’s this? The Spare? As a Nazi?

There was some haggling over price, according to reports I’ve heard. A sum of five thousand pounds was agreed upon and weeks later the photo appeared in every paper in the known world, beneath titanic headlines.

Heil Harry!

Heir Aberrant.

Royal Heil to Pay.

What followed was a firestorm, which I thought at times would engulf me. And I felt that I deserved to be engulfed. There were moments over the course of the next several weeks and months when I thought I might die of shame.

The typical response to the photos was: What could he have been
thinking
? The simplest answer was: I wasn’t. When I saw those photos, I recognized immediately that my brain had been shut off, that perhaps it had been shut off for some time. I wanted to go around Britain knocking on doors, explaining to people:
I wasn’t thinking.
I meant no harm.
But it wouldn’t have made any
difference. Judgment was swift, harsh. I was either a crypto Nazi or else a mental defective.