William and Harry (11 page)

A few weeks later it was Harry’s turn to meet Camilla, this time at Highgrove, with his father and brother on hand to break the ice. Camilla would later say that she thought Harry had looked at her ‘suspiciously’, which was probably true. Tiggy Legge-Bourke could not bear Camilla, and picked up where Diana had left off in the war with Charles’s mistress. Camilla, who reportedly infuriated Tiggy by referring to her as ‘hired help’, resented the time she spent with Charles and the boys. It was Tiggy who took the boys rock climbing; Tiggy who accompanied them to Klosters, where she was famously photographed kissing Charles after a demanding ski run; and Tiggy who was the only other person the Prince of Wales allowed to smoke in his company. Eventually it would be Camilla who emerged victorious, when the boys’ former nanny was snubbed from Charles’s fiftieth birthday party, which William and Harry helped organise. The following summer Camilla and her children were
invited on their first ‘family holiday’ with the Waleses to Greece, where they spent a week aboard the
Alexander
. It had been William’s idea and was a major breakthrough. Finally the path had been paved for Charles to be with the woman he loved, but it would be many years before he would make her his wife.

Back at Eton, Harry was working hard to live up to his big brother’s reputation: he was still in William’s shadow even though he had left the school. Unlike William he had not made it into Pop, the school’s prestigious society for sixth formers. William had been one of the society’s most popular members, and while he had had the authority to hand out punishments to fellow pupils he rarely did. One of his jobs involved keeping watch on Windsor Bridge for any boys leaving pubs. Drinking was forbidden unless you were in the top year, when you were allowed to drink at Eton’s ‘tap bar’, but more often than not William turned a blind eye and told the boarders to hurry on home and avoid the housemaster. Although he didn’t smoke he rarely punished boys he caught illicitly smoking on the sports pitches. ‘William was pretty cool and he wouldn’t hand out detentions and punishments even though he could,’ a friend recalled. ‘He was very easy-going and very humble; he didn’t go around using his title to get him anywhere, if anything he downplayed it. If people made a deal about who he was he would colour up and move the conversation away from him. He just wanted to be William and like everyone else.’

Harry was the same, and the one place he could be himself was in the Combined Cadet Force, the CCF. Both he and William signed up for the army section. The Duke of Wellington once
said, ‘The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’, and the school has produced generations of first-class cadets. Unlike William, Harry missed out on the prestigious sword of honour, but he was promoted to lance corporal in October 2002 and led a detachment of forty-eight cadets in Eton’s respected Tattoo. Instead of spending weekends alone at Club H getting up to no good, Harry now preferred to be leading his platoon on training exercises. According to one of the cadets under Harry Wales’s charge, the prince took the training more seriously than most:

Harry also let off steam playing the Eton wall game, a sport exclusive to Eton that is both lawless and dangerous and involves two scrums of ten and a leather ball. A goal has not been recorded since before the First World War, but Harry gave it his best shot. ‘You had to be prepared for a beating especially when you were playing against Harry,’ one of his teammates told me. ‘He was
totally fearless and very aggressive when he played. It earned him a lot of respect at Eton because he was able to show he could look after himself. He turned up at Eton a slightly scrawny boy of about five feet and he left having shot up to about six feet with a lot more muscle.’ Harry did not escape unscathed: he broke his nose playing rugby when he was sixteen and spent several weeks on crutches a year later after damaging his ankle.

While his concerned teachers had warned that Harry was on his way to failing academically, he managed to pass his GCSEs with respectable grades but struggled with his A levels. After failing his mocks, he eventually dropped a subject, but Harry didn’t care. He had ruled out going to university and set his heart on attending Sandhurst, the prestigious Royal Military Academy, but he still needed two A-level passes to get in.

Charles sighed in exasperation and noted how determined and extremely stubborn his elder son could be. Not for the first time the two were at loggerheads, and the topic dividing father and son as they stood in the drawing room of St James’s Palace was that of William’s gap year. It was the summer of the Millennium, and William could not contain his excitement about the twelve months of freedom ahead of him. He and Harry had just had the best summer of their lives, part of which they had spent in Rock, a pretty seaside town in Cornwall. The princes and a group of friends had spent an idyllic fortnight swimming and surfing off the Cornish coast, meeting girls and sampling the beer on tap at the Oystercatcher pub. Now the issue of what William planned to do for the next year could be postponed no longer.

The eighteen-year-old prince had spoken to his friends Luke and Mark Tomlinson about travelling to Argentina to play polo for a season. By now he was an accomplished player like his father, and he wanted to improve his game. From there he intended to join a group of schoolfriends who were backpacking in South America. He had gone to his father to talk about his master plan, and to his anger Charles had vetoed the suggestion. ‘It’s not fair,’
William complained. ‘Everyone else is allowed to go backpacking, why can’t I?’ He knew full well that he was not like everyone else but the disappointment still weighed heavily on him. He had told his father he had no plans to do work experience in London. ‘I didn’t want to sit around and get a job back in London,’ William later admitted. ‘I wanted to get out and see a bit of the world.’ On that issue Charles was in full agreement, but the trip had to be vocational, educational and safe. The very idea of the second-in-line to the throne backpacking around a foreign continent was unthinkable. As was often the case in such situations Charles, who has always hated any sort of confrontation with either of his sons, decided to seek advice, and he assured William that a solution would be found.

Charles empathised with his son’s frustration. He was desperate for William to have more fun than he had had at that age. When Charles left Gordonstoun, he went straight to Cambridge and then into the armed forces. For him a gap year had been totally out of the question, and Charles had hated the limitations of a life dictated solely by duty. ‘You can’t understand what it is like to have your whole life mapped out for you,’ he had said. ‘It’s so awful to be programmed.’ He was far more relaxed with William than his own parents were with him. He had surprised William when he presented him with a motorbike on his eight eenth birthday that June. ‘My father is concerned about the fact that I’m into motorbikes but he doesn’t want to keep me all wrapped up in cotton wool,’ said William. ‘You might as well live if you’re going to live. It’s just something I’m passionate about.’ The fact that William can ride around London without being recognised is still one of his greatest thrills. But although
Charles was lenient in some areas, he was adamant that his son’s gap year had to be carefully organised. He enlisted a group of dignitaries to help him plan a suitable year for his son. The group comprised the Bishop of London the Right Reverend Richard Chartres, who has been a part of Charles’s advisory panel since their days at Cambridge, former cabinet minister and governor of Hong Kong Chris Patten, William’s housemaster at Eton Dr Andrew Gailey and Dr Eric Anderson, who had been Charles’s tutor at Gordonstoun and was provost at Eton.

It was agreed that William should get his wish of going to South America, but the trip would have to entail voluntary work, not polo. He would also visit Rodrigues, a paradise island in the Indian Ocean, and revisit Kenya, where he had been three years earlier for a three-and-a-half-month safari. In addition he would do some work experience in the UK, including on a farm near Highgrove. But before all that, it was decided that William would travel to the Belize jungle to join the Welsh Guards on exercise. As the future head of the armed services, he would be expected to have had a career in the military, and a week of training in the jungles of Central America would be an excellent, albeit harsh, introduction.

William took part in an operation code-named Native Trail, which was the toughest expedition of his life to date and made the CCF look easy. Sandwiched between Guatemala and the Caribbean Sea, Belize is hot, humid and dangerous. Temperatures in the jungle rarely dip below thirty degrees Celsius and it is almost permanently wet. William had little time to acclimatise before he was driven deep into the jungle by Winston Harris, a Belizean who had been made an MBE for his work training
the SAS in jungle tactics. It was like nothing William had ever experienced before. The jungle was lush, wet and full of snakes, crocodiles and infection-transmitting insects.

His uncle Prince Edward had spent a week there with 40 Commando in 1985 and had found it a daunting experience. William was no different. He struggled with the heat and there was the constant danger of malaria. The young prince’s first survival skills were learning how to treat a snake bite and kill a chicken for food. William didn’t flinch when he was told to wring the bird’s neck – his grandmother had shown him exactly how to do it – although it was the first time he had had to cut a bird’s feet off using a machete. Corporal Claud Martinez of the Belizean Defence Force, who took part in the exercises with William, said, ‘The prince would make a good soldier. He has the physical structure and mental strength. He was surrounded by men firing machine guns and he still looked at ease. I never saw a moment of panic on his face.’ It was training that would serve William in good stead and made him realise just how much he loved army life. The only reminder of home was when Charles emailed William his A-level results. He had got an A in geography, a B in history of art and a C in biology. William breathed a deep sigh of relief. He had the grades he needed to enrol at St Andrews University in Scotland, where he had applied to study the history of art.

Now he could really enjoy his gap year, and after the discomfort of the mosquito-infested rainforest of Belize he was delighted to be heading to Rodrigues, a stunning island off the coast of Mauritius. William flew to the island on a chartered aircraft with Mark Dyer, a former member of the Welsh Guards
and former equerry to the Prince of Wales who had become a ubiquitous presence on the prince’s gap year, as he would on Harry’s. William had enjoyed geography at school, and the trip, which was partly organised by the Royal Geographical Society, had been billed as an opportunity to learn how to protect the area’s endangered coral reefs. In truth it was more of a holiday, and William travelled around the nine-mile-long island on a rusty Honda 125cc motorbike meeting the locals and teaching them how to play rugby as well as fish more safely. William, in shorts, T-shirt and flip-flops, loved the anonymity of the trip and checked in as ‘Brian Woods’ at Le Domaine de Decide, a small and basic resort where he stayed for a month. He had no need to worry about being recognised; there were no photographers on the island. William was left in peace to enjoy the simplicity of living in a spartan hut with a corrugated-iron roof and two single beds for twenty-six pounds a night. Years later he would return to the paradise island with a young lady called Kate Middleton.

On his return from Rodrigues, William came back to reality with a thud. It was the end of September, and before he left for Chile he had to give his first-ever solo press conference. As part of the deal with the media, who had promised to leave William alone during his gap year, the prince had agreed to speak to a cross section of print and broadcasting press from around the world to update them on his trip. It was not something the eighteen-year-old prince was looking forward to, but fortunately his debut press conference, on a warm afternoon on 29 September 2000 in the gardens of Highgrove, went smoothly. While Charles appeared in a suit, William chose to dress down in
jeans, his favourite Burberry sweater and North Face trainers. He was understandably nervous and uncomfortable.

William had become increasingly wary of the press following his mother’s death and rarely gave interviews. His last official photocall had been when he agreed to give royal photographer Ian Jones unprecedented access during his final months at Eton. Jones recalled William’s interest in his occupation and said, ‘William had always had photographers in his life and he was curious about our methods. He learned a lot when we worked together.’ William had indeed learned a lot and had become adept at spotting the paparazzi, who often lurked in bushes. He had picked up a few tricks from his grandfather, who was known to stalk the grounds of Sandringham at Christmas in search of prying photographers. When Philip eventually found them he would rap on the steamed-up windows of their cars with his walking stick and enquire, ‘Having a good snoop, are we?’

While William reluctantly accepted that being in the limelight would always be an integral part of his life he disliked being the centre of attention and said, ‘I feel uncomfortable with it.’ He was also, he announced, unhappy that his late mother had not been allowed to rest in peace. Since her death there had been a deluge of books, many penned by Diana’s trusted former aides, which had upset the princes. At the time their mother’s former private secretary Patrick Jephson’s memoirs were the subject of a sensational serialisation in a Sunday newspaper. Even in Rodrigues William had been kept abreast of Jephson’s revelations, and when asked about them during the press conference he said, ‘Harry and I are both quite upset about it – that our mother’s trust has been betrayed and that, even now, she is still being exploited.’