William and Harry (8 page)
Authors: Katie Nicholl
Diana had an established coterie of spiritualists and astrologers whom she depended on for guidance and instruction including a psychic called Rita Rogers. William was also fascinated by the notion that people could see into the future, and when he was younger would often make secret calls to his mother’s psychic, begging her for a reading. Rita told him he was too young, but this did not dispel the young prince’s curiosity. Harry was also intrigued by the idea that some people were ‘gifted’. At this particular afternoon session this ‘special lady’, as Diana called Simone, had a premonition of an event that would change Harry’s life for ever. Less than a year on he would walk by his brother’s side, their heads bowed in grief, behind their mother’s
coffin. It was the greyest day of their lives after the most wonderful summer.
The bedroom door slammed shut. ‘It’s my room and no, you can’t stay in it,’ Omar Al Fayed shouted from inside the locked cabin. Harry banged his fist on the door. ‘Don’t you say that. Your mummy said we can stay wherever we want and I want this room.’ Aboard the five-star yacht there was no shortage of space. The boat had a crew of sixteen, a master bedroom with a king-size bed and its own jet skis, and everything was in place for the royal party. But according to Mohamed Al Fayed’s daughter Camilla, her younger brother Omar wanted his own bed that night and there was no way he was going to give it up for Harry. Upstairs Diana stretched out on her towel and turned the music up on her Walkman. The boys had been bickering for the best part of an hour, and still no solution had been reached to the problem of where Harry would be sleeping. William was on the upper deck quietly reading with Camilla and her sister Jasmine. They giggled about the fight going on downstairs, although it would be a whole day before their younger brother spoke to Harry again after being made to give up his room. The row aside, it had been a wonderful holiday so far, and Diana, William and Harry had wanted for nothing as the guests of Mohamed Al Fayed, the Egyptian-born billionaire owner of Harrods in London.
While the royal family’s relationship with the Fayed family has always been frosty, Diana enjoyed the company of the flamboyant store owner. With money no object, Mohamed Al Fayed had purchased the
Jonikal
, a luxury £15 million yacht, as soon
as Diana had accepted his invitation to join his family in St-Tropez. It was Mohamed’s way of safeguarding his royal guests and ensuring they had maximum privacy, his ulterior motive was to play Cupid between the princess and his eldest son Dodi, a divorced forty-one-year-old film producer. Diana was single, having recently broken off her romance with Hasnat Khan, the heart surgeon who she had fallen in love with in the summer of 1996, and Mohamed, who they all referred to as ‘Mo’, was convinced Dodi was the man to make Diana happy.
Keen to put her troubles behind her and desperate for some Mediterranean sun, Diana and her sons flew to the south of France on Al Fayed’s private Gulfstream jet on 11 July 1997. William and Harry always looked forward to holidays with their mother, and as they touched down on the sun-baked tarmac in Nice, Diana had promised them the holiday of their lives. Stripped of her HRH title, Diana had decided to part with her long-serving bodyguard Ken Wharfe, but the boys were accompanied by their two protection officers. Al Fayed also had his own team of security at the Villa Castel Ste-Therese, the family’s pink-painted villa set high above the mountains of St-Tropez, where they enjoyed the first days of the holiday.
William and Harry had known Jasmine, Camilla and Omar for several years, and they had already spent some of that summer together in London. According to Camilla, she and her siblings had been invited to the newly refurbished games room at Kensington Palace to play computer games with the princes. Harry was the self-proclaimed king of Sonic the Hedgehog, and his mother could barely keep him away from the screen. Before the divorce Diana had spent a fortune redecorating the palace, stripping the walls of
their traditional patterned wallpaper and painting them vibrant yellow. William’s bedroom was painted blue while Harry’s room was papered in fresh lemon and white, a contrast to the green military paraphernalia that littered the newly installed cream carpet. Camilla, the youngest of Mohamed and his wife Heini Wathen’s four children, recalled how they would spend hours playing games that her father had sent to the palace from the toy department of Harrods: ‘That summer we all became a team. I was eleven at the time and my sister was fifteen. We used to hang out with William and Harry all the time at the palace. We were all so excited about spending the summer together and it was wonderful. We adored each other and we did everything together.’
The boys did not know Dodi, but he now charmed them with his stories of Hollywood and won their mother over with compliments and expensive gifts. According to Camilla, the holiday was an adventure from start to finish.
There were reports that we children didn’t get along but that wasn’t true. I have nothing but happy memories of that summer. I will never forget the time we spent together in France, it was wonderful. It was great fun being with Diana, she was so beautiful and kind and she doted on us all. She would come and tuck us up in bed like we were her own children. We were all very close, it’s just no one really knew about our friendship. You have to remember we weren’t star-struck by having the princes and Diana around. We’d have Michael Jackson to tea, so for us it was very normal to have famous people around. I remember that Harry was very much a mummy’s boy and he always wanted Diana’s
attention. He and Omar did have an argument but there was no fight as was reported in the newspapers. The truth is they fell out over a bed! Our mother told Omar to give up his bed for Harry, because he was our guest but Omar didn’t want to. He wasn’t having any of it and I remember there was a lot of shouting and door slamming but no fisticuffs. We were all laughing about it, especially Diana, who thought it was so funny. Omar and Harry didn’t speak for a whole day because of it and we laughed about the whole thing until we had tears streaming down our faces. William was quieter than Harry and a real gentleman. I always remember he had impeccable manners and you could tell even then that he had been groomed for the top job. He would always open doors for his mother and make sure she was comfortable and happy. He was the perfect little prince.
While the holiday was just what Diana and the boys needed, it was hard to relax on the yacht. Pictures of the holidaymakers were being sold to newspapers for tens of thousands of pounds, with the press based on a nearby mooring day and night, their long lenses constantly trained on the
Jonikal
. Diana, tanned and stunning in an eye-catching swimsuit, had tried to reason with the paparazzi but to no avail. Without a protection officer to help, she decided to take a tender across to the press to ask them to leave her family alone. ‘William is freaked out,’ she shouted at the photographers. ‘My sons are always urging me to live abroad and be less in the public eye, and maybe that’s what I should do – go and live abroad.’ It was typical Diana, and of course her comments were front-page news the next day. Did
she plan to move to the States, as had been widely speculated, and would she take William and Harry with her? There would be another crisis for the royal family if that was her intention. By now William deeply resented the media circus that accompanied his mother, and he spent much of his time below deck, where the lenses could not reach him.
It was with some relief that they flew home on Saturday 20 July. The boys attended the Queen Mother’s ninety-seventh birthday lunch at Clarence House before joining the royal family aboard the
Britannia
for the royal yacht’s last ever cruise of the Western Isles. They left the yacht early to spend the rest of the summer with their father at Balmoral. Since Charles and Diana’s separation, the Queen had insisted on her grandchildren spending more time in the privacy of the royal estates, and Charles had agreed. There were concerns that whenever the boys holidayed with their mother, the vacation, whether it be Disney World or the south of France, was news. For the Queen, who believed in keeping her family life private, this was alarming to say the least. On the royal estate in Scotland the boys were safe from prying lenses.
Ironically, after their divorce relations between Diana and Charles were smoother than they had been for years. With their marriage now a closed chapter, Diana was determined to enjoy her summer, and Dodi provided a welcome distraction from her recent heartbreak. She decided to fly to Paris for a secret rendezvous with him just days after their vacation aboard the
Jonikal
. She had visited Milan for the funeral of her friend designer Gianni Versace, but the rest of the summer was to be one long vacation in the Mediterranean sunshine. After cruising around the Greek islands with her close friend Rosa Monckton,
Diana returned to London on 20 August to collect a suitcase before flying to Nice, where she was reunited with Dodi for another cruise aboard the
Jonikal
. The world’s paparazzi decamped to Sardinia, where the couple were photographed kissing on deck, and not a day passed without the princess and her new lover appearing on the front pages of the daily press. There was specu -lation that they had become engaged and rumours that the princess, who appeared to have a swollen belly beneath her leopard-print swimsuit, was pregnant. Speculation reached fever pitch when the couple flew to Paris on Saturday 30 August. It was to be a fatal detour. Diana had been due to fly to London to be reunited with her sons, but Dodi decided that a romantic night in Paris would be the perfect end to their holiday. Diana spoke to William that morning from the Imperial Suite of the Ritz. She was regaled with news of her sons’ wonderful holiday in Balmoral, and William told her that he and Harry could not wait to see her. As the receiver clicked, William went to inform Harry that Mummy would be coming home tomorrow. It was the last time he ever spoke to his mother.
Dickie Arbiter was about to climb into bed when the phone rang at his Kensington home. It was just after 11.30 on Saturday night, and CNN was on the line wanting to know if the press secretary had any update on the princess following the crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. As Arbiter turned on his television, images of the twisted black Mercedes that Diana, Dodi, their driver Henri Paul and bodyguard Trevor Rees Jones had been travelling in flashed across his screen. At Balmoral, the Queen, Prince Philip and Prince Charles were watching the same pictures and being kept abreast
of developments via the Queen’s private secretary Robin Janvrin, who was liaising with the French authorities.
Charles was informed his ex-wife had been involved in a crash minutes after it happened late on Saturday night and padded along the corridor to wake his parents. He was told that Dodi was dead while Diana was in a critical condition. Suffering from shock, he paused for several moments outside William and Harry’s bedrooms not knowing whether to wake them. The Queen, who was by now fully awake and in her dressing gown, advised her son to let them sleep. At this stage there was no confirmation from Paris as to how seriously the princess had been injured. Some reports claimed she had walked away from the wreckage unscathed, while others said she was in a coma.
Shortly after 3 a.m. on Sunday morning the family was informed by the British embassy in Paris that Diana was dead. It was the duty of Robin Janvrin to inform the Prince of Wales, and it was a wonder that Charles’s wails did not wake the entire household. Thankfully William and Harry continued sleeping in their beds. As Charles walked across the moors alone, dawn broke, and it would only be a matter of hours before his sons would awake to the terrible tragedy.
Back at Buckingham Palace Dickie Arbiter was at his desk, telephoning the news through to the necessary advisers, including Charles’s private secretary Sir Michael Peat. ‘I got a phone call at 3.10 that morning to say that the princess was dead,’ recalled Arbiter.
I got into the shower, dressed in a suit and I was in the palace at 3.50 a.m. I phoned Peat, who was somewhere in Wales fast
asleep, but he woke up fast enough. He was staggered and had to do some fast thinking. Buckingham Palace was open to the public, and Peat had to decide whether to keep it open or close it. I then called the superintendent at Windsor Castle and Holyrood House to get the flag at half-mast. Later in the day I was in constant touch with the Lord Chamberlain, who was in London co ordinating everything. We knew by 8.30 that morning that the Queen’s Flight was going out to fetch her. I was shocked but there was no time for emotion, there was a job to do and there was going to be a funeral. At that point we were unsure what shape the funeral would take because it had to be a Spencer family decision. Charles Spencer was in South Africa, and we couldn’t make a decision without him so we went ahead with planning the homecoming.
William was immediately aware that something was wrong when he woke up to find his father sitting at the end of his bed. It was 7.15 on Sunday morning, and as he got up and drew the curtains, he could see that his father’s eyes were red from crying. The young prince’s heart skipped a beat and then Charles delivered the news that would change his life for ever. Diana had been in an accident in Paris, Charles explained. As tears rolled down his cheeks he held his elder son tightly to his chest. She had been chased by the paparazzi and there had been a terrible collision in an underpass. The French medics had not been able to save her.
Too shocked to even cry at first, William told his papa he wanted to be with him when he told Harry. As the sun came up the princes’ cries echoed through the corridors. Downstairs the Queen and Philip were dressing for church while people around
the world woke up to the news that would trigger an outpouring of grief never before seen in Britain.
Determined that the boys would draw comfort from their faith, the family were driven to mass at Craithie church in the nearby village. Crowds had already gathered to offer their con dolences, but there were no statements and no tears. Behind the palace walls the boys were encouraged to cry, but in public they had to be strong. It is the royal way and they duly obliged. Their former nanny Tiggy had flown to Balmoral immediately, and for hours Harry, stunned into silence, would not leave her side. Princess Anne’s son Peter had also flown to Scotland to be with his cousins. While they were out Charles arranged for the television in the nursery, which was now a den for the youngsters, to be removed. He wanted them to be spared the pain of the rolling news and the awful images of the twisted wreckage from which their mother had been pulled.