William and Harry (5 page)

Aware that the Waleses increasingly fraught domestic situation was making the front pages of the daily newspapers, the Barbers sensibly banned them from the school library, and television was restricted and supervised. By now nearly every row appeared to be catalogued in the daily press and on the princess’s thirtieth birthday the
Daily Mail
’s gossip columnist Nigel Dempster broke a story about the couple rowing over a birthday party.
C
HARLES
AND
D
IANA:
C
AUSE
FOR
C
ONCERN
ran the headline. Charles had apparently wanted to throw a party for his wife, but Diana, knowing it was a facade, was having none of it and insisted that she would not be celebrating.

By now both sides were leaking stories to the press and this particular piece of propaganda appeared to have emanated from Charles’s court. The staff at Highgrove and Kensington Palace were also split, with Diana’s household, which included her private chef Darren McGrady and butler Paul Burrell, based at Kensington, and Charles’s team of aides in Gloucestershire. As a member of staff you were either with the prince or the princess, and there was a great deal of mistrust between the two camps. Diana claimed she was always careful of what she said at Highgrove as information in unsympathetic hands could be used against her. According to the prince and princess’s spokes -man Dickie Arbiter, who was vainly trying to stem the torrent of stories pouring out of the royal household at the time, Ludgrove helped to shelter the boys from their troubled home life.

‘The Barbers were more than equipped to deal with the princes. William and Harry weren’t the only members of a royal family to attend the school and they certainly weren’t the only children to come from dysfunctional homes,’ recalled a former pupil. ‘The Barbers made it their sole mission to shield William and Harry from what was going on at home.’ At weekends William would return home but the constant rowing was a reminder of just how unhappy his parents were. Diana tried her hardest to make William feel settled and comfortable and had the larder stocked with his favourite treats. She encouraged him to bring his new schoolfriends home, and their next-door neighbours Lord Freddie and Lady Ella Windsor, the children of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, would often come over to ride their BMX bikes through the palace gardens.

Both Diana and Charles were delighted with how well William settled in at Ludgrove. He was in the top stream for most of his subjects and one of the best swimmers at the school. He also captained the rugby and hockey teams. Despite their feuding, Diana and Charles made an effort to visit William. ‘Diana would often drive to Ludgrove to watch football and rugby matches,’ said a former pupil. ‘She would sit on the bench and watch William play. I remember one time I was sitting out because I was injured and Diana was very concerned about how I’d hurt myself. There was never a big deal when she showed up at the school and she seemed to like that. For us boys she was just William and Harry’s pretty mummy, not a princess.’

On sports days William and his father would compete in the clay pigeon shooting competition, which they won in 1995. William was just four when he accompanied his father to Sandringham
to watch his first shoot, and like Charles he was an impressive shot from a young age. At Christmas Charles and Diana would attend the school’s annual carol service and watch William when he was in school plays. He loved dressing up and appear ing on the stage and became the head of Ludgrove’s dramatic society, much to his parents’ delight. Kitty Dimbleby, daughter of Prince Charles’s official biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, recalled that Charles would arrange theatre trips for his sons during the school holidays:

Publicly the prince and princess put their troubles behind them and when William was injured in a freak playground accident in June 1991 they both rushed to be with him. William had been playing with a friend on the school’s putting green when he was accidentally struck on the head with a golf club. Diana, who
had been lunching at San Lorenzo, her favourite Knightsbridge restaurant, went white according to her bodyguard Ken Wharfe, who received the news on his pager, and it was an agonising journey from London to the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading. When she arrived it was decided that William should be transferred from Reading to Great Ormond Street so that he could be checked over by a brain specialist. While Charles, who had driven from Highgrove to Reading, followed in convoy, Diana sat in the ambulance with her son holding his hand. At Great Ormond Street he was diagnosed with a depressed fracture and underwent a seventy-minute corrective operation which left him with twenty-four stitches. Charles and Diana waited anxiously at the hospital, but when they were informed that the operation had been successful and William was fine, Charles sped off to the Royal Opera House for an official engagement. Diana was used to her husband’s habit of putting duty before family, but the press turned on the prince. W
HAT
K
IND
OF
A
D
AD
A
RE
Y
OU?
asked the
Sun
on its front page. Fortunately William made a speedy recovery, and although he was advised not to ride his pony, he was back at school within days showing off his war wound. Today he still bears a reminder of the accident, which he calls his Harry Potter scar.

Harry hurled a pillow with all his might. It hit his target on the head, and as his latest victim toppled from his bed the prince let out a jubilant shout. It was after lights out, and the boys knew there would be trouble if Mr Barber discovered they were still up. Harry had only been at Ludgrove a matter of weeks but he was loving it. He had got off to a wobbly start and been
terribly homesick when he started in September 1992, but William soon helped him settle in, and matron, who had taken an immediate shine to the cheeky little redhead, had allowed him to sit in her room and watch
Star Trek
with a cup of cocoa. It was not long before Harry had persuaded her to allow his dorm-mates to join him. Charles had once remarked that his younger son was the one ‘with the more gentle nature’, but in his final year at Wetherby, once William had left, Harry had come out of his shell. He was more talkative and confident in class, and at home his parents noticed a change in the brothers’ characters. William, who was deeply affected by the breakdown of his parents’ marriage because he was more aware of what was going on, had become quieter and more sensitive. He preferred to curl up on the sofa and watch movies with his mother, while Harry would be in the paddock showing off his latest tricks on his pony Smokey. He had grown into an accomplished horseman, and Marion Cox, who had taught both boys to ride from the age of two, had long dispensed with her rein. Now Harry was cantering and jumping fences, and it was not just on horseback that he was beginning to emerge as a daredevil. When their mother took them skiing to Lech during a half-term vacation in March 1991, it was Harry, then only six, who was the first to race down the slopes with his instructor.

When he arrived at Ludgrove, the troublesome streak that would later see him crowned the rebel of the family began to emerge. While William had grown out of childish pranks and immersed himself in his studies, Harry earned a reputation for being the class clown. One former pupil recalled that his favourite trick involved using a ruler to remove the contents of his unsuspecting
victim’s pocket or pencil case. The prince would watch in glee as the classmate fumbled around trying to find the missing items, which were always returned with an impish grin at the end of the lesson. When Charles and Diana came to visit him at Ludgrove for his first sports day, Harry decided to get his own back on the photographers who had gathered on the public footpath ahead of his parents’ arrival. At his instigation, four school leavers mooned at the press, some of who were hiding in the undergrowth. ‘Harry didn’t actually moon at anyone. He dared the school leavers to do it and they did,’ recalled one school contemporary. ‘He didn’t want to get caught. I do remember that he wasn’t very flattering about the photographers. He was very aware of them and didn’t like them being there.’

On Sunday evenings when it was time to go back to school, Harry couldn’t wait. William was reluctant to leave his mother alone in the palace, but Harry had already packed his bags and was desperate to see his friends at Ludgrove, where he would be rewarded with a Cremola Foam, which was similar to a cream soda with ice cream in it and served to all the returning boys. Sunday nights were also typically when Harry and his friends would instigate dorm raids, but on one occasion, not realising his own strength, Harry sent a victim crashing to the floor as he jumped from bed to bed. Hearing the child’s wails, the housemaster burst into the dormitory and switched on the lights. While the boy was taken to the school nurse for a check-up, Harry was taken aside for a stern talking-to. When his friend’s concerned mother came up to the school the next day, the prince was made to apologise.

‘Harry wasn’t given any special treatment and neither was
William, which is probably why they liked it so much,’ one of their friends recalled. There were, however, occasions when the boys were granted certain privileges, and when their father announced that he had tickets for the FA Cup final in May 1995 they were allowed special leave. Everton won, and the boys returned to Ludgrove dressed in the winning team’s kit with a signed football. ‘They kept us all up way past lights out that night,’ recalled one of their friends. ‘It was so exciting and we wanted to know every detail of the day over and over again.’ Their privileges won them more friends than foes, and when the alarms at the nearby Broadmoor High Security Hospital were tested, Harry would assure his friends, ‘Don’t worry! Our policemen will protect us all from any baddies.’ It was Harry who triggered a security alert at the school when he lost his GPS satellite security tag one evening. Both he and William had been instructed to wear the tags every day so that their protection officers could track them even if they weren’t actually with them, and there was chaos when Harry lost his. After several frantic minutes, the device was located beneath the dirty clothes in Harry’s laundry bin.

The routine of Ludgrove distracted both William and Harry from the troubles at home, as did holidays. More often than not Charles and Diana took separate vacations with the children. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, daughter of Charles’s dear friends Patti and Charles, recalls holidaying with the princes one summer on the
Alexander
, a luxury yacht owned by John Latsis.

When the Waleses did go away together as a family – to Canada in October 1991 on an official visit – it seemed to be a points-scoring exercise more than anything else. Diana, elated to be reunited with her sons, made a great show of embracing William and then Harry as they ran across the deck of the royal yacht
Britannia
to greet her. The cameras clicked away, but it was only the photographs of Diana with the boys which made the papers the next day. ‘It was a great pity that they didn’t also show the pictures of Charles embracing the boys,’ recalled Dickie Arbiter, who accompanied them on the trip. ‘These were two compassionate parents who adored their sons and would do anything for them but didn’t get equal billing.’

By now the strains in the marriage had taken their toll on William. He was at a difficult age and stormed off when his
mother asked him to pose for a photograph with
Britannia
’s crew. Diana had a habit of sending mixed signals when it came to cameras, and William had had enough. Eventually Charles persuaded William to come out from his cabin to wave at the crowds as the yacht pulled out of the harbour, but he was in a mood for the rest of that day. Harry, in contrast, was in high spirits and brought some much-needed light relief to an otherwise oppressive situation. When he started an impromptu game of deck hockey with the crew his mother happily joined in. While Harry tore around the deck delivering sharp smacks to the shins of anyone that dared get in his way, William, who was still sulking, watched from the sidelines.