Spare (13 page)

Instead I was taken with notions of becoming a ski instructor…

Pa tensed again.
Out of the question.

OK.

Long pause.

How about…safari guide?

No, darling boy.

This wasn’t going to be easy.

Part of me really did want to do something totally outside the box, something that would make everyone in the family, in the country, sit up and say:
What the—?
Part of me wanted to drop out, disappear—as Mummy did. And other princes. Wasn’t there one in India, a long time ago, a bloke who just walked out of the palace and sat under a lovely banyan tree? We’d read about him at school. Or, we were supposed to.

But another part of me felt hugely ambitious. People assumed that the Spare wouldn’t or shouldn’t have any ambition. People assumed that royals generally had no career desires or anxieties. You’re royal, everything’s done for you, why worry? But in fact I worried quite a lot about making my own way, finding my purpose in this world. I didn’t want to be one of those cocktail-slurping, eyeroll-causing sloths everyone avoided at family gatherings. There had been plenty of those in my family, going back centuries.

Pa, in fact, might’ve become one. He’d always been discouraged from hard work, he told me. He’d been advised that the Heir shouldn’t “do too much,” shouldn’t try too hard, for fear of outshining the monarch. But he’d rebelled, listened to his inner voice, discovered work that excited him.

He wanted that for me.

That was why he didn’t press me to go to university. He knew it wasn’t in my DNA. Not that I was anti-university,
per se
. In fact, the University of Bristol looked interesting. I’d pored over its literature, even considered a course in art history. (Lots of pretty girls took that subject.) But I just couldn’t picture
myself spending years bent over a book. My Eton housemaster couldn’t either. He’d told me straight-out:
You’re not the university type, Harry.
Now Pa added his assent. It was no secret, he said gently, that I wasn’t the “family scholar.”

He didn’t mean it as a dig. Still, I winced.

He and I went round and round, and in my head I went back and forth, and by a process of elimination we landed on the Army. It made sense. It aligned with my desire to be outside the box, to disappear. The military would take me away from the prying eyes of the public and the press. But it also fitted with my hope of making a difference.

And it accorded with my personality. My prized toys as a boy had always been miniature soldiers. I’d spent thousands of hours planning and waging epic battles with them at Kensington Palace and in Highgrove’s Rosemary Verey–designed gardens. I’d also treated every game of paintball as though the future of the Commonwealth depended on the outcome.

Pa smiled.
Yes, darling boy. The Army sounds like just the thing.

But first,
he added…

Many people took a gap year as a matter of course. Pa, however, considered a gap year to be one of the most formative periods in a person’s life.

See the world, darling boy! Have adventures.

So I sat down with Marko and tried to decide what those adventures might look like. We settled first on Australia. Spend half the year working on a farm.

Excellent.

As for the second half of the year, Africa. I told Marko I’d like to join the fight against AIDS. That this would be an homage to Mummy, an explicit continuation of her work, didn’t need to be spelled out.

Marko went away, did some research, came back to me and said: Lesotho.

Never heard of it, I confessed.

He educated me. Landlocked country. Lovely country. Bordering South Africa. Lots of need, loads of work to be done.

I was overjoyed. A plan—at last.

Soon after, I visited Henners. A weekend in Edinburgh. Autumn 2002. We went to a restaurant and I told him all about it.
Good for you, Haz!
He was taking a gap year as well, in East Africa. Uganda, as I recall. Working in a rural school. At the moment, however, he was working a part-time job—at Ludgrove. Working as a stooge. (The Ludgrovian word for “handyman.”) It was a very cool job, he said. He got to be with kids, got to fix things all over the grounds.

Plus, I teased him:
All the free strawberries and carrots you can eat!

But he was quite serious about it.
I like teaching, Haz.

Oh.

We talked excitedly about Africa, made plans to meet up there. After Uganda, after college, Henners too would probably go into the Army. He was going to be a Green Jacket. It wasn’t really a decision; his family had been in uniform for generations. We talked about meeting up there too. Maybe, we said, we’ll find ourselves side by side one day, marching into battle or helping people on the other side of the world.

The future. We wondered aloud what it held. I worried about it, but not Henners. He didn’t take the future seriously, didn’t take anything seriously. Life as it comes, Haz. That was Henners, always and forever. I envied his tranquility.

For now, however, he was heading to one of Edinburgh’s casinos. He asked if I wanted to come along. Ah, can’t, I said. I couldn’t possibly be seen in a casino. It would cause a huge scandal.

Too bad, he said.

Cheers, we both said, promising to talk again soon.

Two months later, a Sunday morning—just before Christmas 2002. The news must have come in the form of a phone call, though I only dimly recall holding the phone, hearing the words. Henners and another boy, leaving a party near Ludgrove, drove into a tree. Though the call’s a blur, I vividly remember my reaction. Same as when Pa told me about Mummy.
Right…so Henners was in an accident. But he’s in hospital, right? He’s going to be OK?

No, he wasn’t.

And the other boy, the driver, had been critically injured.

Willy and I went to the funeral. A little parish church down the road from where Henners grew up. I remember hundreds of people squeezing into creaky wooden pews. I remember, after the service, queueing up to hug Henners’s parents, Alex and Claire, and his brothers, Thomas and Charlie.

I think, while we waited, I overheard whispered discussions of the crash.

It was foggy, you know…

They weren’t going far…

But where
were
they going?

And at that time of night?

They were at a party and the sound system was knackered!

So they ran off to get another.

No!

They went to borrow a CD player from a friend. Short distance, you know…

So they didn’t bother with seatbelts…

Just like Mummy.

And yet, unlike Mummy, there was no way to spin this as a disappearance. This was death, no two ways about it.

Also, unlike Mummy, Henners wasn’t going that fast.

Because he wasn’t being chased.

Twenty miles an hour, tops, everyone said.

And yet the car went straight into an old tree.

Old ones, someone explained, are much harder than young ones.

They wouldn’t let me
out of Eton until I acted. That was what they said: I needed to take part in one of their formal dramas before they’d punch my ticket and release me into the wild.

It sounded ridiculous, but theater was deadly serious at Eton. The drama department staged several productions each year, and the year-end production was always the most major of them all.

In the late spring of 2003 it was Shakespeare’s
Much Ado About Nothing
.

I was cast as Conrade. Minor character. He was, perhaps, a drinker, perhaps a drunkard, which gave the press all sorts of clever openings for calling me a drunkard too.

What’s this? Bit of typecasting, is it?

Stories wrote themselves.

Eton’s drama teacher said nothing about typecasting when he gave me the role. He just told me I was Conrade—
Have fun with it, Harry
—and I didn’t question his motives. I wouldn’t have questioned them even if I’d suspected he was taking the piss, because I wanted to get out of Eton, and to get out of Eton you had to act.

Among other things, I learned from studying the play that it was wrongheaded, and reductive, to focus on Conrade’s alcohol consumption. He was a fascinating guy, really. Loyal, but also immoral. Full of advice, but essentially a follower. Above all, he was a henchman, a sidekick, whose main function, seemingly, was to give the audience a laugh or two. I found it easy to throw myself into such a role, and discovered during dress rehearsals that I had a hidden talent. Being royal, it turned out,
wasn’t all that far from being onstage. Acting was acting, no matter the context.

Opening night, my father sat dead center in a packed Farrer Theatre and no one had a better time. Here it was, his dream come true, a son performing Shakespeare, and he was getting his money’s worth. He roared, he howled, he applauded. But, inexplicably, at all the wrong moments. His timing was bizarrely off. He sat mute when everyone else was laughing. He laughed when everyone else was silent. More than noticeable, it was bloody distracting. The audience thought Pa was a plant, part of the performance.
Who’s that over there, laughing at nothing? Oh—is that the Prince of Wales?

Later, backstage, Pa was all compliments.
You were wonderful, darling boy.

But I couldn’t help looking cross.

What’s the matter, darling boy?

Pa, you laughed at all the wrong times!

He was baffled. I was too. How could he have no idea what I was talking about?

Slowly it became clear. He’d told me once that, when he was my age, acting in his own school performance of Shakespeare, Grandpa turned up and did exactly the same thing. Laughed at all the wrong times. Made a complete spectacle. Was Pa modeling his own father? Because he knew no other way to parent? Or was it more subliminal, some recessive gene expressing itself? Is each generation doomed to unwittingly repeat the sins of the last? I wanted to know, and I might’ve asked, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you could ever raise with Pa. Or Grandpa. So I put it out of my mind and tried to focus on the good.

Pa is here, I told myself, and he’s proud, and that’s not nothing.

That was more than a lot of kids had.

I thanked him for coming, gave him a kiss on each cheek.

As Conrade says:
Can you make no use of your discontent?

I completed my education at
Eton in June 2003, thanks to hours of hard work and some extra tutoring arranged by Pa. No small feat for one so unscholarly, so limited, so distracted, and while I wasn’t proud of myself, exactly, because I didn’t know how to be proud of myself, I felt a distinct pause in my nonstop internal self-criticism.

And then I was accused of cheating.

An art teacher came forward with evidence of cheating, which turned out not to be evidence of cheating. It turned out to be nothing at all, and I was later cleared by the exam board. But the damage was done. The accusation stuck.

Brokenhearted, I wanted to release a statement, hold a press conference, tell the world: I did the work! I didn’t cheat!

The Palace wouldn’t let me. In this, as in most things, the Palace stuck fast to the family motto:
Never complain, never explain.
Especially if the complainer was an eighteen-year-old boy.

Thus I was forced to sit by and say nothing while the papers called me a cheat and a dummy every day. (Because of an art project! I mean, how do you “cheat” on an art project?) This was the official start of that dreaded title: Prince Thicko. Just as I was cast as Conrade without my consultation or consent, I was now cast in this role. The difference was, we did
Much Ado About Nothing
for three nights. This had the look of a role that would last a lifetime.

Prince Harry? Oh, yeah, not too bright.

Can’t pass a simple test without cheating, that’s what I read!

I talked to Pa about it. I was near despair.

He said what he always said.

Darling boy, just don’t read it.

He never read it. He read everything else, from Shakespeare to white papers on climate change, but never the news. (He did watch the BBC, but he’d often end up throwing the controller at the TV.) The problem was, everyone else read it. Everyone in my family claimed not to, just like Pa, but even as they were making this claim to your face, liveried footmen were bustling around them, fanning every British newspaper across silver platters, as neatly as the scones and marmalades.

The farm was called
Tooloombilla. The people who owned it were the Hills.

Noel and Annie. They’d been friends of Mummy. (Annie had been Mummy’s flatmate when she first started dating Pa.) Marko helped me find them, and somehow persuaded them to let me be their unpaid summer jackaroo.

The Hills had three children. Nikki, Eustie, and George. The eldest, George, was exactly my age, though he looked much older, perhaps due to years and years of toil under the boiling Australian sun. Upon arriving I learned that George would be my mentor, my boss—my headmaster, in a way. Though Tooloombilla was nothing like Eton.

In fact it was like no place I’d ever been.

I came from a green place. The Hills’ farm was an ode to brown. I came from a place where every move was monitored, catalogued, and subjected to judgment. The Hills’ farm was so vast and remote that no one would see me for most of each day but George. And the odd wallaby.

Above all, I came from a place that was temperate, rainy, cool. The Hills’ farm was hot.

I wasn’t sure I could endure this kind of hot. The Australian Outback had a climate I didn’t understand and which my body couldn’t seem to accept. Like Pa, I wilted at the mere
mention
of heat: how was I supposed to put up with an oven inside a blast furnace inside a nuclear reactor set on top of an active volcano?

Bad spot for me, but worse for my bodyguards. Those poor lads—of all the assignments. Plus, their lodging was extra spartan, an outbuilding on the edge of the farm. I rarely saw them and often imagined them out there, sitting in their briefs before a noisy electric fan, grumpily polishing their CVs.