MEG AND I DISCUSSED getting away, but this time we weren’t talking about a day at Wimbledon or a weekend with Elton.
We were talking about escape.
A friend knew someone who had a house we could borrow on Vancouver Island. Quiet, green—seemingly remote. Only reachable by ferry or plane, the friend said.
November 2019.
We arrived with Archie, Guy, Pula, and our nanny, under cover of darkness, on a stormy night, and spent the next few days trying to unwind. It wasn’t hard. From morning to night we didn’t have to give a thought to being ambushed. The house was right on the edge of a sparkling green forest, with big gardens where Archie and the dogs could play, and it was nearly surrounded by the clean, cold sea. I could take a bracing swim in the morning. Best of all, no one knew we were there. We hiked, we kayaked, we played—in peace.
After a few days we needed supplies. We ventured out timidly, drove down the road into the nearest village, walked along the pavement like people in a horror movie. Where will the attack come from? Which direction?
But it didn’t happen. People didn’t freak. They didn’t stare. They didn’t reach for their iPhones. Everyone knew, or sensed, that we were going through something. They gave us space, while also managing to make us feel welcome, with a kind smile, a wave. They made us feel like part of a community. They made us feel normal.
For six weeks.
Then the Daily Mail printed our address.
Within hours the boats arrived. An invasion by sea. Each boat bristled with telephoto lenses, arrayed like guns along the decks, and every lens was aimed at our windows. At our boy.
So much for playing in the gardens.
We grabbed Archie, pulled him into the house.
They shot through the kitchen windows during his feeds. We pulled down the blinds.
The next time we drove into town, there were forty paps along the route. Forty. We counted. Some gave chase. At our favorite little general store, a plaintive sign now hung in the window: No Media.
We hurried back to the house, pulled the blinds even tighter, returned to a kind of permanent twilight.
Meg said she’d officially come full circle. Back in Canada, afraid to raise the blinds.
But blinds weren’t enough. Security cameras along the back fence of the property soon picked up a skeletal man pacing, peering, looking for a way in. And taking photos over the fence. He wore a filthy puffer vest, dirty trousers bunched around his raggedy shoes, and he looked as if nothing was beneath him. Nothing. His name was Steve Dennett. He was a freelance pap who’d spied on us before, in the employ of Splash!
He was a pest. But maybe the next guy would be more than a pest. Can’t stay here, we said.
And, yet…?
Brief as it was, that taste of freedom had got us thinking. What if life could be like that…all the time? What if we could spend at least part of each year somewhere far away, still doing work for the Queen, but beyond the reach of the press?
Free. Free from the British press, free from the drama, free from the lies. But also free from the supposed “public interest” that was used to justify the frenzied coverage of us.
The question was…where?
We talked about New Zealand. We talked about South Africa. Half the year in Cape Town maybe? That could work. Away from the drama, but closer to my conservation work—and to eighteen other Commonwealth countries.
I’d run the idea by Granny once before. She’d even signed off on it. And I’d run it by Pa, at Clarence House, the Wasp present. He told me to put it in writing, which I’d done immediately. Within a few days it was in all the papers and caused a huge stink. So now, at the end of December 2019, when I was chatting with Pa on the phone, saying we were more serious than ever about spending part of the year away from Britain, I wasn’t having it when he said that I must write it down.
Yeah, um, did that once before, Pa. And our plan immediately got leaked and scuppered.
I can’t help you if you don’t put it in writing, darling boy. These things have to go through government.
For the love of…
So. In the first days of January 2020, I sent him a watermarked letter broadly outlining the idea, with bullet points, and many details. Throughout the exchanges that followed, all marked PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL, I hammered the essential theme: we were prepared to make any sacrifice necessary to find some peace and safety, including relinquishing our Sussex titles.
I rang to get his thoughts.
He wouldn’t come to the phone.
I soon received a long email from him saying we’d have to sit down and discuss the whole thing in person. He’d like us to come back as soon as possible.
You’re in luck, Pa! We’re coming back to Britain in the next few days—to see Granny. So…when can we meet?
Not before the end of January.
What? That’s more than a month away.
I’m in Scotland. I can’t get there before then.
I really hope and trust that we will be able to have further conversations without this getting into the public domain and it becoming a circus, I wrote.
He responded with what felt like an ominous threat: You’ll be disobeying orders from the monarch and myself if you persist in this course of action before
we have a chance to sit down.
