I FORGET WHO USED THE WORD FIRST. Someone in the press, probably. Or one of my teachers. Whoever—it took hold and circulated. I’d been cast in my role in the
Rolling Royal Melodrama. Long before I was old enough to drink a beer (legally) it became dogma.
Harry? Yeah, he’s the naughty one.
Naughty became the tide I swam against, the headwind I flew against, the daily expectation I could never hope to shake.
I didn’t want to be naughty. I wanted to be noble. I wanted to be good, work hard, grow up and do something meaningful with my days. But every sin, every misstep, every setback triggered the same tired label, and the same public condemnations, and thereby reinforced the conventional wisdom that I was innately naughty.
Things might have been different if I’d achieved good grades. But I didn’t and everyone knew it. My reports were in the public domain. The whole Commonwealth was aware of my academic struggles, which were largely due to being overmatched at Eton.
But no one ever discussed the other probable cause. Mummy.
Study, concentration, requires an alliance with the mind, and in my teen years I was waging all-out war with mine. I was forever fending off its darkest thoughts, its basest fears—its fondest memories. (The fonder the memory, the deeper the ache.) I’d found strategies for doing this, some healthy, some not, but all quite effective, and whenever they were unavailable—for instance, when I was forced to sit quietly with a book—I freaked out. Naturally, I avoided such situations.
At all costs, I avoided sitting quietly with a book.
It struck me at some point that the whole basis of education was memory. A list of names, a column of numbers, a mathematical formula, a beautiful poem—to learn it you had to upload it to the part of the brain that stored stuff, but that was the same part of my brain I was resisting. My memory had been spotty since Mummy disappeared, by design, and I didn’t want to fix it, because memory equaled grief.
Not remembering was balm.
It’s also possible that I’m misremembering my own struggles with memory from back then, because I do recall being very good at memorizing some things, like long passages from Ace Ventura and The Lion King. I’d recite them often, to mates, to myself. Also, there’s a photo of me, sitting in my room, at my pull-out desk, and there amid the cubbyholes and chaotic papers sits a silver-framed photo of Mummy. So. Despite my clear memory of not wanting to remember her, I was also trying gamely not to forget her.
Difficult as it was for me to be the naughty one, and the stupid one, it was anguish for Pa, because it meant I was his opposite.
What troubled him most was how I went out of my way to avoid books. Pa didn’t merely enjoy books, he exalted them. Especially Shakespeare. He adored Henry V. He compared himself to Prince Hal. There were multiple Falstaffs in his life, like Lord Mountbatten, his beloved great-uncle, and Laurens van der Post, the irascible intellectual acolyte of Carl Jung.
When I was about six or seven, Pa went to Stratford and delivered a fiery public defense of Shakespeare. Standing in the place where Britain’s greatest writer was born and died, Pa decried the neglect of Shakespeare’s plays in schools, the fading of Shakespeare from British classrooms, and from the nation’s collective consciousness. Pa peppered this fiery oration with quotations from Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice—he plucked the lines from thin air, like petals from one of his homegrown roses, and tossed them into the audience. It was showmanship, but not in an empty way. He was making the point: You should all be able to do this. You should all know these lines. They’re our shared heritage, we should be cherishing them, safeguarding them, and instead we’re letting them die.
I never doubted how much it upset Pa that I was part of the Shakespeare-less hordes. And I tried to change. I opened Hamlet. Hmm: Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper…?
I slammed it shut. No, thank you.
Pa never stopped fighting the good fight. He was spending more time at Highgrove, his 350-acre estate in Gloucestershire, and it was just down the road from Stratford, so he made a point of taking me now and then. We’d turn up unannounced, watch whatever play they were putting on, it didn’t matter to Pa. Didn’t matter to me either, though for different reasons.
It was all torture.
On many nights I didn’t understand most of what was taking place or being said onstage. But when I did understand, worse for me. The words burned. They troubled. Why would I want to hear about a grief-stricken kingdom “contracted in one brow of woe”? That just put me in mind of August 1997. Why would I want to meditate upon the inalterable fact that “all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity…”? I had no time to think about eternity.
The one piece of literature I remember enjoying, even savoring, was a slender American novel. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. We were assigned it in our English divs.
Unlike Shakespeare, Steinbeck didn’t need a translator. He wrote in plain, simple vernacular. Better yet, he kept it tight. Of Mice and Men: a brisk 150 pages.
Best of all, its plot was diverting. Two blokes, George and Lennie, gadding about California, looking for a place to call their own, trying to overcome their limitations. Neither’s a genius, but Lennie’s trouble seems to be more than low IQ. He keeps a dead mouse in his pocket, strokes it with his thumb—for comfort. He also loves a puppy so much that he kills it.
A story about friendship, about brotherhood, about loyalty, it was filled with themes I found relatable. George and Lennie put me in mind of Willy and me. Two pals, two nomads, going through the same things, watching each other’s back. As Steinbeck has one character say: “A guy needs somebody—to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody.”
So true. I wanted to share it with Willy.
Too bad he was still pretending not to know me.
