Later, Kate – known as Catherine in those days – and Pippa went on with the other local children to St Peter’s Preschool, which was chaired by Audrey Needham, wife of the churchwarden, on the other weekday mornings. ‘Her mother used to come along with the other mums and the children would play together,’ she says. ‘They would walk down along the footpath to the church hall. Every year, we would have a nativity play and the children would dress up and sing Christmas songs and rhymes. Afterwards, we would have a fair to raise money for the school.’
In those days, Carole had yet to launch her party-planning empire Party Pieces, but she was already showing the business acumen that would make it a roaring success: she’d begun making up party bags to sell to other mothers. Lesley Scutter, who lived opposite the family, remembers encountering her in the village. Her daughters Lindsey and Helene went to the same toddlers group and preschool. ‘Carole would take her turn, like everybody else at the toddlers group, as mothers’ helper, making teas, coffees and squash, washing children’s hands and mopping up puddles on the floor. I remember her bringing her party bags in for us to see and make orders. It was something she felt she could do at the same time as having children.
‘She would bring the kids to school herself and pick them up afterwards. I don’t think she had any help at the time. She was always very pleasant when I spoke to her. If you passed her in the street she would stop and chat. I remember going to parties with the Twomeys, who lived next door, and Carole and Mike would be there. They were just a normal family – a really nice couple with well-behaved kids.’
In those days, on his British Airways salary, Michael and Carole could only dream of sending their children to private school. When Kate was four, at the start of the autumn term in 1986, she started at the local village school, Bradfield Church of England Primary School, which was next door to the Middletons’ home. Pippa followed two years later. The school was a hub of the community and both girls thrived, visiting friends for tea and playing in each other’s gardens. Carole would take them swimming in the school’s outdoor pool during the summer holidays. Lindsey Reeves, a fellow pupil, remembers how keen the school was on sport, a subject at which Kate excelled. ‘We had a school field where we played rounders and athletics,’ she says. ‘The outdoor pool was really cold. We also did our cycling proficiency test.’
Shortly after Kate’s fifth birthday, there was a new addition to the family. James was born on 15 April 1987 at the Royal Berkshire Hospital. He remembers an idyllic childhood, playing with his elder sisters, baking cakes and sliding down the stairs on a tray. ‘I have great childhood memories of my mother baking cakes,’ he told Tatler recently, ‘and I was always willing to participate, especially if it meant I could lick the bowl and revarnish the kitchen floor with treacle.’
It was around the time of James’s birth that Carole established the family business, Party Pieces, aiming, according to the company’s website, to ‘inspire other mothers to create magical parties at home and to make party organising a little easier’. She rented a small unit in yattendon, four miles from home, where she stored her merchandise. Yvonne Cowdrey, who did the family’s housework at the time, recalls: ‘Carole was fed up making up bags full of little gifts for the kids to take away from parties, and she realised other mums must feel the same, so she thought it would be a good idea to start a company that sold ready-made party bags. She used to send out little catalogues with her children modelling some of the things they sold. I remember Pippa and Kate being in them, wearing T-shirts with their ages on them and holding cupcakes.’
Ultimately, it was Carole’s business brains that would change the course of their lives, earning enough money for the couple to send their children to private schools, where they mingled with the cream of society.
Chapter 12
A Little Princess
Wearing a yellow sweatshirt, khaki skirt and yellow necktie, Kate Middleton ventured nervously into St Peter’s Church Hall with her younger sister Pippa one Monday night in September 1990 to join the Brownies. After being enrolled in the 1st St Andrew’s pack of twenty-four Brownies, the eight-year-old schoolgirl vowed: ‘I promise that I will do my best to do my duty to God, to serve the Queen, help other people and keep the Brownie Guide Law.’ She and Pippa, who had just turned seven, were then allocated to their respective sixes, with whom they would work on earning badges.
It was an exciting time for the sisters, who loved Brownies so much that they begged their parents to let them go on the pack holiday the following Easter, to a summer camp based in three old RAF buildings in seventeen acres of woodland at Macaroni Wood in the Cotswolds. There they fed chickens, collected eggs, watched chicks hatch, bottle-fed lambs and kid goats, rode horses and went for horse-and-cart rides. There was also a playground with rope swings, a slide, a sandpit, a playhouse and a barbecue.
Brown owl June Scutter ran the pack for twenty-five years and remembers the two sisters joining together. She took them by coach to Macaroni Wood, where the Brownies slept in sleeping bags on camp bunk beds in two dormitories. ‘When we went there it was more like a shed,’ she recalls. ‘It was very basic in those days. Now, apparently, they have showers, but in our day there were just washbasins, placed on a board across a bath. We had a big room where everyone congregated, which was pretty comfortable, and a crafts room behind it, which was easy to sweep up. There was a cook but the girls had to help around the place with the housework and make their own beds. They had to follow an itinerary and spend a couple of days washing up or wiping up or sweeping in order to get their house orderly badge. They would peel potatoes and onions, which would make them cry. Some of them had never even done the washing up before. On other days, they made puppets and Easter chicks for their toymakers’ badge, and they would do sports. They had a special uniform for pack holidays – brown trousers and cardigans and yellow shirts – so that they didn’t ruin their normal uniform, and they had overalls for craftwork.’
During the holiday, Kate and Pippa visited Cogges Manor Farm Museum, a traditional Victorian farmstead set in rural oxfordshire. There they talked to the farm hands and dairymaids as they milked the cows, fed the pigs and made butter, visited the old milking parlour for an ice cream and watched maids cooking on the kitchen range. They also played with replica toys and games and dressed up in Victorian costumes. ‘We would go on a couple of outings to villages in the Cotswolds,’ says Mrs Scutter. ‘I took Kate and Pippa to Cogges Farm, where they played with the animals. All the girls were allowed so much pocket money for shopping and souvenirs when they were out and about.’
By the time Kate joined Brownies, her parents’ business had begun to thrive and they were able to afford the fees to send their children to a private prep school, St Andrew’s School in Pangbourne, four miles away from Bradfield Southend. Today, the annual fees are upwards of £10,000. Wearing her green blazer, kilt, white shirt and crested tie, Kate walked up the stone steps for the first time and into the coeducational school, housed in a Victorian mansion and set in 54-acre grounds, at 8.25 a.m. at the start of the autumn term in 1989.
The school motto, ‘Altiora Petimus’, which translates as ‘We Seek Higher Things’, is echoed by the current headmaster Jeremy Snow, who writes on the school’s website:
We hope that the children in our care will leave us with a well-established set of values which will stay with them for life. We want them to gain confidence from their achievements in this school and move on to great future success and fulfilment.
It was at St Andrew’s that Kate, a gangly seven-year-old, first showed the promise that would attract a prince. Above average height, she excelled at sport, winning swimming races and playing goal defence in netball. She was a natural athlete, gaining the school record in her age group for high jump and spending many Saturdays playing sport: netball and hockey during the winter, tennis and rounders in the summer, and basketball, volleyball and badminton whenever the opportunity arose. There were also skiing trips during
the holidays. Sport is an interest that she has in common with William, who is a keen rugby player and footballer and enjoys water polo. ‘Kate was very sporty,’ remembers former pupil Samantha Garland, who was in her year. ‘I don’t think there was a sport she couldn’t turn her hand to. She was very good at the high jump.’
As well as being a natural at sport, Kate loved drama and took part in the school’s public-speaking competitions, debates and poetry recitals. She was involved in many of the school pantomimes and plays – they staged three productions each year – and did drama workshops during the summer holidays. She also learned ballet and tap and had recorder lessons after school.
One parent whose daughter was at the school says: ‘Kate was very well brought up. She never put a foot wrong when she came for tea and had beautiful manners. She was a credit to her mother. Her parents were lovely people. Carole was very hardworking; I just applaud her. I was of the same opinion as her: we wanted our daughters to learn everything.’
In 1992, at the age of ten, Kate starred as Eliza Doolittle in a production of My Fair Lady. Her leading man was Andrew Alexander, now a singer in the vocal group Teatro. ‘Kate was enchanting,’ he gushed in an interview. ‘She played the role with passion and a steely conviction. I always like to think that, although I’ll never be King, I was at least her first prince.’ He mentioned that his most recent encounter with Kate had been at a party where he was serving hors d’oeuvres. After the play, Kate asked Andrew to go out with her, but he regretted that he was too shy to say yes. ‘I was only ten years old and Kate was so mature at the time,’ he told the Daily Mail later. When she asked him out, he recounted: ‘I remember being flushed all of a sudden and getting tongue-tied. I think I caused myself more embarrassment than I caused her. If she asked me now, I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes.’
Kate was also one of the students in the school’s production of the Tchaikovsky ballet The Nutcracker and performed in a musical called Rats!, an adaptation of the Robert Browning poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin. In her final year at St Andrew’s School, she appeared in an end-of-term play, a Victorian melodrama with an interesting twist – her leading man was called William. In one scene, William drops onto one knee and asks Kate’s character to marry him. She replies, ‘yes, it’s all I’ve ever longed for. Yes, oh yes, dear William . . . Ah, to think I am loved by such a splendid gentleman.’ Later in the play, she proclaims, ‘I feel there is someone waiting to take me away into a life that’s full, bright and alive.’ When a fortune teller reveals that she will meet a good-looking and wealthy man, she asks, ‘Will he fall in love with me and marry me? oh, how my heart flutters!’ At the end of the play, Kate’s character is abandoned with her child, as William turns out not to be such a splendid gentleman after all.
Kingsley Glover, another former classmate, interviewed for the Daily Mirror about a video of the play obtained by the paper, recalled: ‘Back then, she was completely different. Shy, skinny and lanky. But just look how confident and beautiful she is now.’ During her later years at the school, Kate would spend the occasional night at St Andrew’s, which was a flexi-boarding school. Kingsley, who was a boarder, described being embarrassed after Kate and her friends witnessed his dressing gown being blown open by a gust of wind in the corridor. ‘It made me cringe,’ he told the Mirror, ‘but now I laugh when I think that the girl who might be the future Queen of England has seen my crown jewels.’
While Kate and Pippa were at school, Carole juggled her mail-order company with looking after her youngest child, James. Sadly, on 1 December 1991, when Carole was 36 years old and her brother Gary 26, their grandmother Elizabeth Harrison died of bronchopneumonia in a nursing home in Southall. Aged 88, she was their only surviving grandparent and the one they both knew the best. Their grandfather Charlie Goldsmith had died before they were born and both of their other grandparents, Thomas Harrison and Edith Goldsmith, had died by the time Carole was 21. It was a difficult time for the siblings, whose mother was understandably devastated.
Around this time, Party Pieces began to blossom after Carole and Michael decided to create a website on the fledgling Internet. In an astute move, they registered the name with Companies House in order to prevent it being stolen by another firm. As Party Pieces flourished, the business outgrew its premises – today, it claims to be ‘the UK’s leading online and catalogue party company’ – and in April 1995 it moved into larger premises, a collection of farm buildings a mile down the road in Ashampstead Common, Berkshire. Eight customer service staff now work in the 200-year-old barn, answering calls and taking orders, while packers work in the picking room, based in a converted cowshed, and the warehouse, a converted hayloft stacked to the roof with themed tableware, decorations, party bags and games.
The money began to roll in, and Michael and Carole set their sights on moving out of the village of Bradfield Southend and into the countryside. They sold their house in July 1995 and moved two miles down the road, to the outskirts of Chapel Row, a genteel place with a village green, a butcher’s, a tea shop and a pub named the Blade Inn. Set in the well-heeled parish of Bucklebury, where neighbours include John Madejski, the multimillionaire owner of Reading Football Club, DJ Chris Tarrant, singer Kate Bush and TV personality Melinda Messenger, it is the quintessential English village, one that would not be out of place in Midsomer Murders. The Middletons have become well-known faces in the village and regulars at its traditional August Bank Holiday fair, with its displays of wolves and birds of prey, sheep and duck races, vintage cars and hog roasts. ‘They are a very jolly family and have been here a long time,’ butcher Martin Fidler told the press recently. ‘They are not high profile but are much liked.’
It was in their current home, a red-brick house with climbing vines and wisteria, that Michael and Carole brought up the girl who would one day marry the second in line to the throne.
Chapter 13
At Marlborough
It was three months after her fourteenth birthday when Kate Middleton drove with her parents past the porter’s lodge and the arched entrance of renowned public school Marlborough College to the all-girl house where she would spend the next four years of her life.
The school is set in extensive grounds in the quaint market town of Marlborough, 33 miles from Kate’s home in Bucklebury. Wearing her new uniform, a blue blazer and tartan skirt, the shy teenager arrived at the boarding school, where fees today are more than £29,000 a year, in April 1996 – midway through the academic year and at the start of the summer term.
It was a daunting experience for Kate. She had left St Andrew’s the previous summer after passing her Common Entrance examination and had spent two terms at Downe House, a boarding school a few miles from her home in Bucklebury, before her parents decided to remove her.
Now the retiring schoolgirl was once again facing with trepidation the prospect of starting a new school – her fourth in a decade. This always nerve-racking situation was no doubt made even more intimidating because her fellow pupils were drawn from the upper echelons of society.
It was a sign that everything Kate’s grandmother Dorothy had aspired to had been achieved by her daughter Carole. She had become solidly middle class, living in a traditional Home Counties manor house and educating her children at a very exclusive school.
Carole’s aspirations would prove to be the making of her daughter. Kate may have felt out of her depth when she joined Marlborough, but within a decade she had blossomed into a confident young woman, taking the world in her stride and dating the next but one in line to the throne.
Marlborough College, which has the motto ‘Deus Dat Incrementum’ – ‘God Giveth the Increase’, or ‘God Gives Growth’ – from 1 Corinthians 3:6, was founded in 1843 for the sons of Church of England clergymen and within a few decades it had become one of the country’s leading boys’ public schools. Although it now attracts the children of peers and socialites, former pupils, known as old Marlburians, are an eclectic bunch, including Poet Laureate S
ir John Betjeman, art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, round-the-world yachtsman Francis Chichester, actor James Mason, war poet Siegfried Sassoon, Conservative politician Rab Butler and singer Chris de Burgh.
Built beside the Marlborough Mound, an ancient man-made knoll thought once to have formed part of a Norman motte-and-bailey castle, the college is centred round a courtyard dominated by a Victorian Gothic chapel with stained-glass windows by William Morris. But the school campus, bordered by the River Kennet, is sprawled across the town. Today, the college has its own trout ponds and an observatory as well as extensive playing fields. There are eleven rugby pitches, seven soccer pitches, eight cricket squares, six grass hockey pitches, three lacrosse pitches, two volleyball courts, twelve tennis courts and a driving range.
It was in that sporty atmosphere that Kate would thrive. A keen sportswoman, she joined Marlborough six years after it became co-educational – although the school began admitting girls to the sixth form in 1968 – and moved into the girls’ boarding house Elmhurst, once a nineteenth-century private house. It had its own garden and purpose-built sixth-form wing and was a short walk from the central courtyard.
One of the first girls Kate met on her arrival was Jessica Hay, five months her senior, who showed her up to their dormitory, helped her to unpack her trunk and went with her to the dining hall for supper. Jessica remembers Kate as a shy and gawky teenager, and told the News of the World that her nerves would have been worsened by the older boys’ habit of publicly marking new girls out of ten, writing the figures on a napkin at dinner. Jessica recounted that Kate received only ones and twos.
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