Harry (7 page)

Harry and William acquired future playmates with the births of their cousins, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie. Their Aunt Sarah gave birth to both at the Portland Hospital in London, Beatrice on 8 August 1988 and then Eugenie on 23 March 1990, a time when Fergie’s marriage to Prince Andrew seemed to be sound. The same could not be said for the Waleses’ union. Only days after the Queen had expressed her delight at the arrival of another grandchild, a member of staff walked into a room at Highgrove to discover Charles on his knees picking up broken glass from the floor – he and Diana had had another fight and this time their sons were close enough to have heard the screaming row. A maid, Michelle Riles, had once described the carnage she discovered in Charles and Diana’s bedroom (he’d eventually gone to sleep in his dressing
room) at Balmoral after what had obviously been a bitter confrontation. The maid (who had a fling with Prince Edward the same summer) said it looked as though the Second World War had just taken place but, fortunately, at that stage there were no children to overhear the fracas. Nor was either boy present in Japan when Diana came down the stairs to attend a reception in a red tartan Catherine Walker dress. She ran back to their suite when Charles told her, ‘You look like a British Caledonian air stewardess.’

Harry later made it known to an army colleague that although he was barely five years old, he noticed a distinct change in his mother’s mood when Hewitt was posted to Germany and subsequently to the Gulf, but that mood soon changed when she met a new man. It was in the summer of 1989 that Harry reluctantly acquired a new father figure in the form of James Gilbey, who used to refer to him and William (to their horror) as ‘the lovebugs’. Harry did not like Gilbey and said he was ‘no fun and a bit wet’. With Hewitt out of the country a lonely Diana had accepted an invitation to party with a couple of pedigree chums from the Gilbey and Guinness dynasties. The party was hosted by the former Julia Guinness, daughter of the brewing family. Julia was the sister of one of Diana’s
bêtes noires,
Sabrina Guinness, who had had a passionate fling with Charles in 1979 that still rankled with Diana when they bumped into each other at the
hairdressers
soon after her marriage. ‘Somewhat indignantly she asked me, “Is that who I think it is?”’ says the hairdresser Kevin Shanley. ‘I wish you had told me one of his exes would be here.’

Julia, on the other hand, was extremely popular with the Princess and she was happy to go to her party having been assured that Sabrina would not be there. One of the guests was Gilbey, a member of the Gilbey’s Gin family, whose motto was ‘Honour and Virtue’. Over a few drinks, Diana shared her troubles with the young motor trade executive. She was helpless and angry, desperately in need of a soulmate and Gilbey was the right man to listen: ‘He makes a woman feel special – like she is the only person in the world who matters to him,’ she told one confidante.

Gilbey, a darkly handsome Libran who had known Diana in her bachelor days, was shocked by the goings-on Diana revealed about her husband and the wife of Brigadier Parker Bowles, and how anxious she was to protect Harry and William from the looming scandal. Before she returned to the Palace, where her sons were sleeping soundly in the attic, Diana gave him her telephone number and urged him to call. He did and they met several times in the ensuing weeks. It wasn’t long before the well-informed photographer, Jason Fraser, was on hand to snap her leaving Gilbey’s one-bedroom flat in the early hours of the morning.

Harry, meanwhile was preoccupied with two big events – a party arranged for his fifth birthday on 15 September and his duties as a pageboy at the wedding of Diana’s brother Charles to model Victoria Lockwood at St Mary’s Church, Great Brington, close to the Spencer stately home Althorp House. The other pageboy was Alexander Fellowes, son of Viscount Althorp’s sister, Lady Jane. Determined not to be
outdone, Harry sat patiently for a fitting of his outfit, even though at one point he described it as a ‘bit girlish’. He
especially
resented having to wear a dark green hat trimmed with burgundy taffeta and was amused by his mother’s annoyance when his nanny had to tell Diana that someone had got his head measurements wrong and was hopeful he wouldn’t have to wear it. To his great disappointment, the milliner Marina Killery was able to make some hasty adjustments to the dreaded headgear.

One of the few Diana told about Gilbey was her
sister-in-
law, the Duchess of York. By now, however, Fergie was having marital troubles herself: her sailor husband wasn’t coming home on his shore leave but going to his old quarters at Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle or spending time with Elizabeth Nocon, the wife of his photographic guru, Gene Nocon. Nevertheless, the Duchess had unexpectedly fallen pregnant with her second child and, working hard to promote her first two
Budgie
books, had little time to listen to Diana’s woes. She was also about to embark on an affair of her own with Steve Wyatt, the stepson of American oil tycoon, Oscar Wyatt.

One week before Christmas, Prince Charles made one of the biggest mistakes of his life. Lying on his bed in the early hours of the morning at Eaton Hall in Cheshire, home of his close friend Anne, the Duchess of Westminster, he picked up his mobile phone and called Camilla. It was an X-rated conversation, picked up and recorded by a radio scanner and subsequently broadcast to the world. Charles and Camilla
could no longer conceal their secret from the world at large and especially not from Harry and William.

Little more than a week later, Diana was caught in the same trap. It was New Year’s Eve and she was at Sandringham with the Queen. Harry and William had been put to bed and her husband was downstairs with the other royals preparing to welcome in 1990. Quite alone, Diana dialled Gilbey’s number. Gilbey was travelling to spend the night with friends near Abingdon when the call came through. He pulled into a lay-by on the downs near Newbury to listen as Diana began to pour forth her anguish, never knowing that Harry and William would hear what she had to say: ‘I was very bad at lunch and I nearly started blubbing. I just felt really sad and empty and I thought, “Bloody hell, after all I’ve done for this f***ing family”.’

Referring to her affectionately as ‘Squidgy’ (although he also called her ‘darling’ fifty-three times), Gilbey indulged in what can best be described as an intimate conversation with his princess, although it did not match the Charles and Camilla tawdry love chat. However, it made interesting listening for radio enthusiast Jane Norgrove, a 25-year-old typist who tuned in using a £95 second-hand scanner in her bedroom, recorded it and made it public, as did a second member of the public who picked it up on a further
occasion
– perhaps indicating a broadcast by an official source. Some suggest GCHQ might have had a hand, having already leaked the news that Fergie and her daughters had taken a ‘secret’ holiday to Morocco with Steve Wyatt.

Diana was staying at Balmoral with William and Harry when she was told that the following morning’s papers would contain extracts – albeit censored ones – of what became known as the Squidgy tapes. In an effort to escape the inevitable storm breaking around her, Diana took her sons swimming at the Craigendarroch Hotel near the village of Ballater. As she tucked Harry into bed that night she told him that she would be all over the papers and on the television the next morning because someone had leaked the details of a ‘silly’ conversation she had had with the man she encouraged them to call ‘Uncle James’ – the name by which they also referred to Hewitt – at a time when she was cross with his father (Buckingham Palace initially tried to claim the tape was a hoax). No one will say how he and William took the news when they eventually were shown an article in
The Sun
headlined
MY LIFE IS TORTURE
and read her miserable disclosure to Gilbey about their father: ‘He makes my life real, real torture.’

Despite the Gilbey affair, Diana continued to exchange intimate correspondence with the distant Hewitt and,
overlooking
Harry’s protests, took her sons on trips to the Devon home of Hewitt’s mother Shirley – where they would have their most intimate letters sent. William remained
tight-lipped
but Harry said the visits were boring and he couldn’t understand why they had to go all that way with their policeman in tow just to pick up some letters. After all, Auntie Shirley was no fun at all.

Harry’s first experience of the death of a close relative elicited a strange response in the seven-year-old. Harry was on holiday with his parents and brother in the Austrian ski resort of Lech when news reached Ken Wharfe that Diana’s father, the 8th Earl Spencer, had died. Charles had reluctantly agreed to switch their skiing holiday to Lech because she was still traumatised over the death in an avalanche of their friend Hugh Lindsay while skiing near Klosters – Charles’s
favourite
. It had caused another row but Charles eventually gave in because, no matter where Diana would go, he wanted to be with his sons when they learned to ski. He would take them out on to the slopes early, leaving his wife to breakfast and gossip with her friends Kate Menzies and Catherine Soames in the restaurant of the five-star Hotel Arlberg.

Although he had been unwell for some time, Earl Spencer’s death from a heart attack at the Brompton Hospital in South Kensington on 28 March 1992 was unexpected. Rumours the previous day that he had died were dismissed as nonsense by the family but proved to be startlingly prophetic. Who was going to tell Diana? Charles had received the news but was adamant that he was not the man to break it to her so the task was delegated to Wharfe. ‘She was calm at first,’ records Wharfe in his memoirs
Closely Guarded Secret.
‘She had not expected it, nobody ever does, however much they may have readied themselves for bad news. But before long her eyes filled and tears began to stream down her face.’

Charles did break the news to his sons, who had both been extremely fond of their maternal grandfather, but after
some minutes of silent contemplation, always relaxed Harry was to ask, ‘Does this mean we can’t go skiing today?’ The seven-year-old was focused – as he remains to this day – on what was to happen in the hours ahead. Grandpa Spencer had passed away yesterday.

In some ways it was a relief that Earl Spencer was no longer around to witness the painful scandals involving his daughter and son-in-law which were about to explode via the
worldwide
media. His grandchildren, however, were and it was never going to be easy for them. In September 1992, Harry was sent away to Ludgrove, an independent preparatory boarding school for 200 boys aged from seven to thirteen
situated
in the quaintly named parish of Wokingham Without, near the Berkshire town of Wokingham and close enough for Diana to collect him should he become the subject of too much ridicule as a result of the headlines she was now making daily. The headmasters Gerald Barber and Nichol Marston, as well as Barber’s wife Janet found it necessary to assure Diana they would do all in their power to maintain his happiness ‘in these difficult times’; but it was going to be no easy task.

It was on his first day at Ludgrove that Harry met the boy who would become his very best friend, Henry van Straubenzee. The two (along with William and Henry’s elder brother Thomas) forged a close bond, often spending
weekends
at each other’s houses and holidays together at a cliff-top house near Polzeath in north Cornwall. Thomas taught Harry and Henry to surfboard and they played French cricket on the nearby sandy beach. The Vans, as they were known, also
stayed at Highgrove and Kensington Palace with their royal pals and even joined them on Mediterranean cruises when Prince Charles had the use of John Latsis’s super-yacht, the
Alexander.
Apart from William, Harry had never had a friend as close as Henry van Straubenzee and, although he missed his mother’s bedtime tales and his father reading him stories, the friendship made life a lot easier.

By this time, Harry had become a keen lover of fiction, in particular horror stories. One of his favourite books was C. S. Lewis’s
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
, and he later starred in a student stage production of the tale. It soon became apparent that Harry’s enjoyment of an audience was the start of an attention-seeking lifestyle. Unlike his brother he showed a liking for public adulation and a desire for fame. No wonder Harry was destined to become the life and soul of every party he went to.

Although he struggled in many of his academic classes at Ludgrove, he excelled at sport, not surprisingly because the school had an excellent sporting reputation having been founded exactly 100 years earlier by Arthur Dunn, the noted footballer of his day, who was then succeeded by two England international football captains: G. O. Smith and William Oakley. The well-known cricketer Alan Barber had been headmaster in the years preceding Harry’s arrival.

Although by now he was enjoying his schooldays, Harry looked forward to short breaks with his father and was particularly pleased when he and William were invited to join a shooting party with Charles and the children of sixteen of
his friends at Sandringham for a few days in November 1992. Diana, however, had other ideas: she made it clear that she didn’t want to go and had her own plans: she was going to take her sons to spend those days with the Queen at Windsor. The argument went backwards and forwards through private secretaries until Diana took her lawyer’s advice and wrote a letter saying that she did not feel the atmosphere at Sandringham would be conducive to a happy weekend for her sons. What she meant was that she did not wish them to spend time in the company of Camilla who would almost certainly be there.