by Penny Junor
Another visitor who unexpectedly encountered William was Bob Geldof, the habitually dishevelled musician and human rights activist. He was at Kensington Palace for a meeting with the Prince, when William appeared and, cross that his father was busy, said, ‘Why do you have to talk to that man?’
‘Because we have work to do,’ said his father.
‘He’s all dirty,’ said William.
‘Shut up, you horrible boy,’ said Geldof.
‘He’s got scruffy hair and wet shoes,’ said William, undeterred.
‘Don’t be rude,’ said Charles, mortified as only parents of tactless small children can be. ‘Run along and play.’
‘Your hair’s scruffy too,’ said Geldof as a parting shot.
‘No, it’s not,’ said William. ‘My mummy brushed it.’
Geldof doesn’t relate whether Diana heard the exchange but if she did, the chances are she would have found it funny. She was good at providing the love and the hugs for her boys and she enjoyed playing games, but she was sometimes more like a big sister than a mother to them. William’s antics made her giggle and she let him see that they did, which undermined any discipline he was getting from anyone else. Yet on other occasions, instead of giggling, she would smack him, which must have sent a confusing message to the child. Barbara Barnes meanwhile was told she must never smack the children and never even raise her voice to them if they misbehaved. If things reached an impasse between the nanny and her charges and they ran to mummy to complain, as often as not, Diana would side with the boys, thus entirely undermining Barbara’s authority.
In the absence of any real discipline from Diana – or the Prince of Wales, who was a similarly soft touch – William tended to get his way in most things and inevitably pushed the boundaries further and further. He became so noisy, cheeky and unruly that the Queen, who was a very loving grandmother and normally reticent about interfering in such matters, let it be known that William’s behaviour was not acceptable. The final straw came when William was a pageboy at Prince Andrew’s wedding to Sarah Ferguson in 1986. After dragging his cousin Laura Fellowes up the aisle, he fidgeted throughout the ceremony, rolled his order of service into a trumpet, scratched his head, covered his face with his fingers, poked his tongue out at Laura, and left the Abbey with his sailor hat wildly askew. He may have been doing what any four-year-old might, but not many other four-year-olds were of such public interest.
By contrast, Prince Harry was a timid, shy little boy, overshadowed and bossed about by his big brother. But all that soon changed. Harry became the extrovert, the risk taker, the naughty boy, and William became more circumspect and pensive, his early confidence perhaps less certain.
HIGHGROVE
The Prince of Wales’s plan that the family should base themselves in Gloucestershire never worked. Diana wasn’t an outdoor person at heart and the country, filled as it was with dogs, horses and mud – and her husband’s unbridled enthusiasm for it all – bored her. For him, it was an oasis of peace after the endless merry-go-round and exhaustion of royal duties. He spent as much time as he could there, often on his own – in as much as the Prince of Wales, with a team of courtiers, round-the-clock PPOs (Personal Protection Officers) and domestic staff, is ever on his own. Diana and the boys, meanwhile, based themselves in London, and once William started school in Notting Hill, they stayed at Highgrove only at weekends and during the school holidays.
But the boys adored it, and after a week cooped up at Kensington Palace the weekends couldn’t come fast enough. They sometimes drove with their mother but more often travelled with Barbara Barnes, their PPOs and the rest of the nursery team. There was so much more freedom for them there. It was the perfect environment for noisy, energetic and inquisitive small boys – plenty of space to roar around and lots of places to explore.
They had their father’s Jack Russells, Tigga and Roo, to play with, there were ponies to ride, ducks on the pond, cows and sheep in the fields and chickens running about in the yard. There were woods and hay lofts and, when it was warm enough, a heated outdoor swimming pool. They had a climbing frame on the lawn and a swing, and they could grow their own vegetables from the little patch of garden their father had set aside for them.
Charles has often said that if he hadn’t been a Prince he would be a farmer. His passion for the countryside and its conservation is legendary. He also firmly believes that it is only possible to lead by example – one of the many beliefs he has passed on to his sons, so when he first became interested in organic agriculture in 1982, he realised he had to do it himself. He would never be able to persuade farmers to give up chemicals unless he himself had tried it and proved it was viable. So when a farm with 710 acres near Tetbury came up for sale two years later, the Duchy bought it and employed David Wilson as manager. Gradually they converted the land to Soil Association standards and started not only experimenting in organic production, but using it as a showcase for all the Prince’s ideas about the countryside, conservation and the environment. Over the years it has become an impressive example of best-practice farming and a thriving business.
But for William and Harry, as they were growing up, it was simply a good fun place with every sort of farm animal; and tractors, combine harvesters and exciting machinery. Whenever the Prince drove over there in a Land Rover, which he did at least once every weekend, the boys would want to go with him. David and his wife, Caroline, had sons of much the same age as William and Harry and the boys would muck about while their fathers talked shop, or they would go with Charles and inspect the animals and wander about the fields and hedgerows. There was great excitement if they spotted a buzzard circling, or a hare running across a field, or a fox. Charles was thrilled to watch their interest in the countryside developing. It was important to him that the boys should see nature at work and that they should understand and respect the natural order. He wanted them to see how food is produced, how animals are reared and to learn the value of good husbandry of both land and livestock.
Teaching them manners was a struggle – as it is with most lively little boys – but William’s godfather, King Constantine, says that Charles always treated them like young adults. He didn’t force them to do anything but would explain and reason with them; and William, who was bright, exhausting and extremely wilful, would have stretched the patience of a saint at times.
One bitterly cold winter’s day when he and his father went to the farm together, William, aged four, arrived without any gloves. He had refused point blank to wear them. He hadn’t been out of the car long before he began to grumble that his hands were cold. Eventually he started to cry. ‘I told you to bring some gloves,’ said Charles, ‘and you wouldn’t listen, so shut up.’
Diana never joined them on those visits to the farm. Unless the weather was glorious and she could swim in the pool, she preferred to be in London and, as the years went by, she saw less and less of Highgrove. And the less she enjoyed it, the less she hid her antipathy. She cut a lonely figure walking around the grounds listening to music through earphones, or curled up on a sofa watching a film, reading magazines or telephoning her friends. Her friends were her lifeline, although they sometimes, inexplicably, went out of favour. And many were the times she would suddenly cut short the weekend, sweep up the children and take them back to London early on a Sunday afternoon, much to the Prince’s dismay.
Charles revelled in the time he spent with the children, particularly at Highgrove, and was never happier than on the rare weekends when the nanny was off and he was needed for nappychanging and bathing. He had been a doting elder brother to Princes Andrew and Edward, and was a popular godfather to many of his friends’ children. He never tired of reading stories to the boys and was good at making them laugh. He would pull silly faces and put on strange Goonish voices, never remotely embarrassed about making a fool of himself. They loved spending time with him but it was always in short supply since he was frequently called away to work.
There was no clear
dividing line for Charles between work and play, office and home. Every day was a work day. Even those when he was ostensibly on holiday, or went hunting or played polo, some part of the day would be taken up furiously writing memos or with paperwork, speechwriting or letters. Even on Christmas Day, when the whole extended family would be together at Sandringham, the Prince would find time to fire off memos to his staff or to the people who ran his charities to tell them about some great idea he had had or someone he’d met who might be useful; his mind was never still. Private secretaries and press secretaries yo-yoed up and down the motorway from London, papers arrived daily, and he held meetings with advisers and experts in every field as he expanded his knowledge on the myriad subjects that fascinated, excited and troubled him.
Thus Highgrove was as much an office as a home, and while the children had the run of the gardens, most of the house for most of the time was out of bounds. They lived in the nursery on the top floor, as they did in London, and generally ate all their meals with the nanny rather than with their parents. Their other constant companions and playmates were their PPOs, who had guns discreetly tucked under their clothes. Knowing of no other life, it seemed perfectly normal.
The nursery at Highgrove was like another self-contained flat, with bedrooms, bathrooms, sitting rooms, play rooms and a kitchen, although their meals tended to be delivered on a tray from the main kitchen downstairs, cooked by the homely figure of Mrs Whiteland, whom Charles had inherited from the previous owners. He had bought the house from Maurice Macmillan, MP, son of the former Conservative Prime Minister, the late Lord Stockton, and Paddy and Nesta (better known as Mrs Paddy) Whiteland had worked for the family for nearly forty years. Mrs Paddy was cook and housekeeper and her husband, Paddy, who was something of a legend locally, was groom and general factotum. They instantly took to the Prince, and he to them, and the boys gravitated to Mrs Paddy’s side in the kitchen, bringing in eggs that they’d found in the barn and chattering away about all they’d been up to in London.
In his book about Highgrove, the Prince said one of the most crucial and persuasive factors in buying the property was the presence of Paddy, ‘one of the most inimitable Irishmen I have ever come across … A former prisoner of war of the Japanese, he can only be described as one of “Nature’s Gentlemen”. Meeting him for the first time, you invariably came away (a considerable time later!) feeling infinitely better. Once met he is never forgotten. His rugged features and twinkling eyes are one of the most welcoming features of Highgrove and his Irish stories are famous …’
Mrs Paddy sadly died in 1986, when the children were still small, but Paddy worked on until cancer took him in 1997 at the age of eighty-five, and he was as much a part of Highgrove for William and Harry as the furniture. He was a grandfatherly figure, who had a way with horses, and who captivated the boys with his tales of country lore. Charles described him as ‘one of the most loyal people I have ever met … also one of the best and truest of individuals’, and he looked after him and paid for his care to the end.
Banishment to the nursery was no hardship for the boys; it was customary in aristocratic families and, besides, William adored Barbara Barnes. Every morning when he woke up he would go and climb into bed with her before they both got up for breakfast. He might then go and sneak into bed with his mother for a second cuddle of the day. His mother would always be his mother, but he had an undeniably strong and loving bond with his nanny too. It was hardly surprising. She was the one who was always there: she comforted him when he fell and hurt himself, reassured him when he woke in the night, distracted him when he was upset, battled with him and managed his tantrums, read to him, deciphered his childish chatter and answered his endless questions. She did everything a mother would and loved him as a mother would.
It was, after all, what she had been hired to do; what every good and caring nanny does. The homes of the aristocracy are filled with retired nannies who live on with the family long after the children have grown up. They are loved like family and are no threat to the mothers they help or stand in for – they are simply another anchor in the child’s support system. But Diana’s old insecurities began to surface. She didn’t consider what removing Barbara would do to William; here, she thought with the selfishness of a child. She wanted a hundred per cent of his affection, just as she wanted a hundred per cent of her husband’s. She had lost the latter battle, but she could fix the former. Giving the flimsiest of reasons, she showed Barbara Barnes the door.
The irony is that in suddenly cutting Baba, as he called her, out of the four-year-old’s life, Diana was inflicting on her son the same painful feelings of loss and bewilderment that she herself had struggled with when her mother suddenly disappeared from her life at the age of six.
William understood nothing of his mother’s insecurities and had no comprehension of why Baba had gone. Had he, perhaps, been so naughty he had driven her away? Once she was out of the house, she was out of his life and Diana entertained no contact. Barbara was invited to his confirmation ten years later because Charles recognised she had been an important part of his life. William never forgot her either. Barbara Barnes was one of the most important names on the guest list at his wedding twenty-five years after she vanished from the nursery.
Two other nannies followed, Ruth Wallace and Jessie Webb, but neither stayed for more than two or three years. Finally Olga Powell slipped seamlessly into the role. She had been deputy to all three nannies, in place since William was six months old, and remained with him until his mother’s death in 1997. Both boys stayed in touch with her after her retirement and, in her eighties, she was another prominent name on the wedding-guest list.
But something died in William the day his beloved Baba left; he became less outgoing, less trusting, less inclined to make himself vulnerable.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
In 1998, more than a year after Diana’s death, I wrote a book that attempted to discover the truth about the relationship between the Prince and Princess. I called the book Charles: Victim or Villain? because I wanted to determine, if possible, which of the two he was. Had he caused Diana’s problems, as she had suggested in her famous Panorama interview, by his obsession with Camilla Parker Bowles, or had Diana gone into that marriage already damaged and Charles had returned to Camilla Parker Bowles because he couldn’t cope with her erratic behaviour? Had he, in short, been a villain, or was he as much of a victim as Diana?
The conclusion I came to, after talking to many of the key people in their lives during this period, was that there were no villains.
While Charles sank into ever deeper depression, mystified by Diana’s mood swings and his inability to make her happy, she embarked on a series of love affairs which were each as unfulfilling as the last. Charles, meanwhile, started seeing those friends that he had ostracised at Diana’s insistence. Now back in the fold, they were deeply concerned about how their friend had changed in the intervening years, and feared he might be close to thoughts of self-destruction. He had said nothing about the difficulties of his relationship and had been loyal to Diana to the nth degree, but they guessed that if anyone could help restore his spirits it would be Camilla, whose own marriage was less than fun, and Patty Palmer-Tomkinson put them in touch. Charles and Camilla had not seen each other to speak to since his engagement, except once, on the occasion when he gave her the famous bracelet, and the only telephone call was with the news that Diana was pregnant.
At first they wrote each other long letters, then there were phone calls and after several months they met at the house of their mutual friend; and eventually the relationship became physical. Camilla became his lifeline; she made his spirits soar, although it was a long climb back from the abyss. She was a sympathetic ear, someone who understood and cared about him – and crucially believed in him – and the only person to whom he felt he could speak openly and honestly without for a second doubting she would keep his trust. Yet there was a lightness in the friendship too, and an easi
ness; she was on the same wavelength, she had the same sense of humour, loved the same things and shared the same interests. Her marriage to Andrew was a sham; although she was deeply fond of him, and remains so, he had been unfaithful to her for years.
Whatever Diana might have imagined, and whatever she accused her husband of when she spoke to Andrew Morton, Charles did not commit adultery, as he said to Jonathan Dimbleby, ‘until his marriage had broken down irretrievably’, and he did not sleep with Camilla on the night before his wedding, as Diana claimed he did. He may have weaknesses in his character, but Charles has never been dishonourable. If anything he has been too honest for his own good, unable to tell the white lie that would have harmed no one and prevented the emotional tsunami. He was racked with guilt about Camilla, little knowing about Diana’s own infidelities, which had begun years earlier.
Once Diana realised that Camilla was back in the picture, she went into meltdown, and any pretence of proper married life became impossible. They could barely tolerate being in the same room as each other, let alone under the same roof, as everyone who worked for them was painfully aware. The curse of royalty is that there is no privacy and no clear distinction between work and play, public and private. There were blistering rows, tears and hysterics, rage and fury, all heard to some degree by everyone who was hapless enough to be in the house. Kensington Palace was small and badly soundproofed but not even the Cotswold stone walls at Highgrove were enough to keep the poison from pervading the house – and as time passed it was increasingly out in the open.
Greeting one of his staff in full uniform one morning before setting off on a formal engagement, the Prince said, ‘You only have one medal. We’ll have to do something about that.’ Whereupon the Princess, following Charles down the stairs, said, ‘Yes, but at least he earned his.’
