Prince Harry
Page 4
But their activities weren’t all rustic. Aston Martin had presented the Prince of Wales with a miniature replica of his own car for the young Princes, and this became their pride and joy. They would squabble over who drove. William, being the eldest, invariably won, but the pair of them were a familiar sight on the drives between the various cottages and other buildings on the estate. Later they moved on to go-karts and then trail bikes.
In the early days, when Charles was starting work on the garden, Diana had taken photographs of his progress and produced a wonderful record of the transformation, season by season, which she painstakingly pasted into leather-bound albums. By the time Charles was working on a book about the estate ten years later, and wanted to reproduce the photos, he asked her if he might have them, but the relationship between them was so hostile by then that she never gave them to him and, sadly, that record is lost.
COUNTRY PURSUITS
The Prince of Wales is a country person through and through—he felt suffocated in London—and his master plan had been to use Highgrove in Gloucestershire as the family’s home and Kensington Palace as a city base. He had given Diana a free rein with the interior, and once again she used Dudley Poplak, whose design was contemporary, colorful and comfortable. Highgrove is a neoclassical Georgian house, built at the end of the eighteenth century, and is everything that Kensington Palace is not. There are big rooms with high ceilings, large windows and polished wooden floors with rugs; but, as in London, there were fresh flowers in every room and also large potted plants. All over the surfaces stood silver photo-frames and Herend porcelain, as well as the Wemyss Ware pottery that the Prince liked.
There was a large open fireplace in the sitting room, and a television set, in front of which the Prince and Princess used to eat their supper off a card table in the evenings. The children loved Highgrove as much as their father did, and would no doubt have been very happy living there and going to local nursery schools, as did the Princess Royal’s children, Peter and Zara Phillips, who lived six miles away at Gatcombe Park. But Diana didn’t wholeheartedly enjoy the countryside. She loved swimming, which she could do in the garden, but she didn’t ride horses, having been put off them as a child by a fall; she didn’t like dogs, had no interest in any other country pursuits, and gardening left her cold. London was where she wanted to be, where she could shop, see her friends, go to the gym, go to the cinema, go to smart restaurants and concerts and generally have fun. Despite having lived in the country as a child, it held limited appeal as an adult, and as the years went by she made fewer and fewer visits to Highgrove. Later she professed to “hate the place.”
So the master plan never worked as the Prince had hoped. And once the decision had been made to send William to Mrs. Jane Mynors,’ a nursery school in Notting Hill, the die was cast. They were committed to spending the week in London. Harry followed William to Mrs. Mynors’ two years later, and from there to Wetherby, a private day prep school also in Notting Hill, and then to Ludgrove, a boarding prep school in Berkshire, at the age of eight. As time passed, Charles based himself more and more at Highgrove, arriving—as often as not—in a big noisy, red Wessex helicopter. The Wessex landed in the field at the front of the house, where sheep grazed, and when the boys were little, as soon as they heard it approaching they would rush out excitedly to see their father. Once the blades had stopped turning, they would hurtle across the field and jump into his arms, as often as not covering his smart suits with sheep droppings.
William and Harry’s two lives—urban and rural—could not have been more contrasting. With their mother they went to the cinema, shopping, or to the zoo or the London Dungeon; they ate McDonald’s hamburgers, listened to music and watched videos. With their father, they romped around with the dogs, they rode ponies, they went for country walks, they looked after their pets—William had a guinea pig and Harry a gray, lop-eared rabbit, which lived in a hutch in a corner of the stable yard that they cleaned out themselves. At Highgrove they learned about the natural world and traditional country pursuits. They loved both parents and, therefore, both lives, but they always felt that Highgrove was home. Among the pleasures for Harry were the horses. William at first shared some of his mother’s nervousness, although that didn’t last, but Harry immediately took to riding and was competent enough to be off the leading rein by the age of four. They each had a Shetland pony—Smokey and Trigger—and most mornings Marion Cox, a local woman, would take them out for a riding lesson over the fields. Come the summer, the ponies traveled up to Balmoral with them for the holidays. As they grew more confident, they went to the occasional gymkhana and other events organized by the Beaufort Pony Club, where they met and mixed with local children from horsey families. Harry became so impressive on horseback that his aunt, Princess Anne, a former Three-Day Event champion, remarked that he had a “good seat” and that he had the talent to compete and reach an international standard.
In time, he moved on to polo. The Beaufort Polo Club was about half a mile from Highgrove—it is where Charles regularly used to play and the Prince of Wales became good friends with its founders, Simon and Claire Tomlinson. It is a small, friendly club, now run by Claire alone following the couple’s divorce. Claire once captained the England Women’s team; she was one of the highest-rated women players in the world. She also coached the England team, and although Harry didn’t start until his mid-teens, his polo skills, like his brother’s, are down to Claire’s expert tuition.
Claire is unmoved by titles, and prepared to push the Princes as hard as anyone else to get them to play well; she admires the way they have both combined their position with their sporting talent. Polo is all about being a good horseman, good hand–eye coordination and being a team player. Robert ffrench Blake, who was his father’s polo manager, said of Harry when he was still in his teens, “He is naturally very talented, well co-ordinated and he’s a natural sportsman. How good he becomes depends entirely on how much effort and time he gives to the game. But he has the ability to become a four-or five-goal player.” The higher the handicap, the better the player. Sadly, Harry didn’t have the time to practice and is now, like his brother, a one-goal player, but he is potentially the better of the two. Claire also admires their attitude to their horses. So many men tend to treat their horses like machines, riding them to the point of exhaustion, but both William and Harry are sympathetic riders. They respect their animals, understand them and care about them and therefore get the best out of them.
Charles had often said that if he hadn’t been a Prince he would have liked to be a farmer, and his passion for conservation is well known, so when Broadfield, a farm with a further 710 acres, came up for sale on the other side of Tetbury in 1984, the Duchy bought it and appointed David Wilson, a young farmer with a wife and two young sons to manage it. The Prince had become involved in the organic movement a couple of years earlier and, being a firm believer in the importance of leading by example, had felt that if he was ever to persuade farmers to abandon chemicals, then he must first do so himself and prove to others that it was viable. Most weekends, he would visit the farm and take William and Harry and his Jack Russells, Tigger and Roo, with him. They would all jump into the Land Rover for the short drive to the other side of Tetbury, eager to romp around the fields and hedgerows alongside their father, to go and see the animals or clamber on the tractors and other huge bits of machinery.
The sheep grazed at Highgrove; at lambing time, usually in the Easter holidays, the boys would go into the lambing pen near the house with Fred Hartles, the shepherd. Harry loved it. He would spend hours filling water buckets, bringing in hay and picking up the lambs. Charles was delighted to see how much both boys loved the countryside. It was important to him that his children should see nature at work and understand and respect the natural order; and important for them to see how food is produced, how animals are reared and to learn the value of good husbandry of both land and livestock. It is something he feels very strongly about and it g
oes to the heart of the man.
In David Wilson, Charles had found a kindred spirit, in total agreement with him about the environment and future sustainability of the planet. Convincing the men in suits who ran the Duchy of Cornwall at that time, whose statutory obligation was to safeguard its capital assets, was another matter, but the Prince was adamant. “If the Duchy of Cornwall can’t afford to try organic farming,” he stormed, “then who the hell can?” So gradually they converted the land and started experimenting in organic production. They planted copses and mixed hedges to enhance the landscape and to encourage birds; slowly skylarks began to sing again above, and wild poppies to grow through the wheat. They planted barley and oats too, and clover to regenerate the soil, and they bought livestock: a dairy herd of 110 Ayrshires and 400 Mule sheep, which lambed for the first time in the spring of 1987, when Harry was two. To those they added Aberdeen Angus beef cattle, Gloucester heifers, Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs and a few other rare breeds to provide a gene base for the future. And because they don’t use chemical sprays, the hedgerows are bristling with wildlife, including partridge.
Shooting has long been a royal enthusiasm, which Harry took to with gusto. Diana was falsely accused of turning Charles against it when he gave it up in the mid-1980s. It had nothing to do with Diana; he had given up because he was bored by it and the ease with which thousands of birds were bagged in a day. She was no opponent of the sport—far from it. She didn’t care to do it herself, but her father and brother always had and there had been regular pheasant shoots at Althorp. It was what happened on big country estates from October to February. So she was just as keen as Charles for William and Harry to start learning how to handle a gun when they were not yet in their teens.
They were taught to shoot by Willie Potts, the gillie at Balmoral, and they practiced their newfound skills anywhere and everywhere, sometimes at Highgrove or—for a change of scene—over at the farm, always telephoning beforehand. Their PPOs would drive them over and they would spend a happy few hours shooting rabbits and pigeons, always taking what they shot home to the Highgrove kitchen. They had been taught that this was an important part of it all. Willie Potts also taught them to cast for salmon, and to track, kill, gralloch (disembowel) and skin a deer. “Contrary to a lot of people’s beliefs,” says David, “shooting and dealing with wildlife and eating it helps build respect and the balanced view for all conservation matters. All the Royal Family totally get the whole nature, conservation, food, farming balance.”
Harry was a good shot. He’d sometimes bring over a clay pigeon trap, which was good for getting his eye in; and sometimes he and a friend or two would go out at night with a powerful torch. At other times, he would get someone to drive him around the fields in a Land Rover while he shot out of the window. David was only too pleased to see him with his gun. As far as he was concerned it was vermin control—rabbits and pigeons both eat young crops.
As soon as they were big enough to ride trail bikes, they each had one, long before the age at which they could legally ride on the roads. They roared across the fields on them both at Highgrove and the farm. One of the estate workers would bring the bikes over in a trailer and, again, they would always phone before turning up. “Harry was always well mannered,” recalls David (although no better mannered than his brother). “I remember a member of the Household staff pulling him up over something when he was very young. He was very, very polite. He hadn’t done anything in my opinion but they corrected him.”
In summer, Prince Charles played polo fanatically, but in winter it was fox hunting that consumed his spare time and he enthused both boys from an early age. They would go to meets on foot and follow the hunt with Paddy until they were old enough to go out on horseback themselves. Even then, what Harry particularly enjoyed was riding on the back of a quad bike with the terrier man, whose job was to send terriers below ground to flush the fox out if it went to earth. On those days, Harry always had rather superior sandwiches from the Highgrove kitchen. It is a very cohesive community, and both Princes made close friends through hunting and the social activities that go with it. It’s a dangerous sport, but it was the danger and the exhilaration that they loved, and they and their father were very sad to have to give it up when it was banned in 2004. Their friends continued to ride to hounds, ostensibly following a scent dragged across the countryside, but there was always the possibility that the dogs would pick up the scent of a fox instead. While their friends could take that risk, they were different.
PLAYING AWAY
It is impossible to overestimate just how difficult William and Harry’s home life was—and how lucky we as a nation are that they both came out of it so apparently unscathed. They will both, of course, have demons. And there is a lot of anger in Harry, and a lot of hurt, but it is a measure of what a loving start he had in life that he has not allowed that anger to destroy him. Expensive rehab clinics are filled with the children of broken homes and bitter divorces, who end up throwing their lives away, some of whose experiences pale beside Harry’s. What almost certainly saved him and his brother was the army of people employed to look after them: the nannies, the PPOs, the school teachers and others who were there for them while they were growing up and who were able to provide the continuity, support and consistency that wasn’t always there from their warring parents.
Diana’s Panorama interview in November 1995, when Harry was just eleven, was hugely damaging. Looking vulnerable but brave, sitting alone in the middle of a room, explaining to the millions glued to their television sets that her marriage had never stood a chance because, to use her words, “there were three of us in the marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” convinced the viewing public that Charles was the villain. His obsession with Camilla Parker Bowles—his infidelity—had destroyed their marriage and made Diana bitterly unhappy.
Charles has never defended himself, but Charles takes a very long view of life—in his inimitable, philosophical way. He is content for history to be the judge of what happened in that marriage, when he is long dead and all the papers and the diaries and the facts are known. He feels a crushing sense of guilt that he was unable to help Diana, but he knows in his heart that he did everything he could to make their marriage work, and Camilla played no significant part in its failure.
They were both desperately lonely within their marriage, both desperately wanting to be loved and both desperately in need of support. So it was not surprising that Diana should have sought out the comfort of other men; or that Charles should have turned back to Camilla Parker Bowles. Under other circumstances, it could have worked. Members of the aristocracy have been having extramarital affairs for generations. If their marriages didn’t work out, they discreetly (and occasionally not so discreetly) took lovers, but stayed together for the sake of their children and their estates. But they had no paparazzi to worry about. This was the most high-profile couple in the country, and the media watched their every twitch.
For five years Diana found happiness with James Hewitt who, like so many men, was instantly smitten by her. They had met at a party. He was a talented horseman; she told him she had lost her nerve as a child but would like to learn to ride again; he offered to teach her. Twice a week she would go to Knightsbridge Barracks, where the mounted division of the Household Cavalry was based, and they would ride round Hyde Park together. They fell in love. He was not the first, but this was the most enduring of her love affairs and he was the lover that William and Harry, particularly Harry, knew best. Hewitt became a frequent visitor to Kensington Palace when they were there and he also went to Highgrove on occasions when the Prince was away. She took carefully selected employees into her confidence, people like Paul Burrell, the butler at Highgrove (and, after the divorce, her butler at Kensington Palace), to help. Sometimes he would be one of several friends staying for the weekend and would always be given a room across the corridor from the Princess’s, but everyone in the house knew precisely where he was for most of the night.