I SAT DOWN WITH PA that summer, possibly at Balmoral, though it might’ve been Clarence House, where he was now living more or less full-time. He’d moved
in shortly after Gan-Gan’s death, and wherever he lived, I lived.
When I wasn’t living at Manor House.
My final year at Eton drawing near, Pa wanted to chat about how I envisaged my life post-Eton. Most of my mates would be headed off to university. Willy was already at St. Andrews and thriving. Henners had just finished his A levels at Harrow School and was planning to go to Newcastle.
And you, darling boy? Have you given any thought to…the future?
Why, yes. Yes, I had. For several years I’d talked in all seriousness about working at the ski resort in Lech am Arlberg, where Mummy used to take us. Such wonderful memories. Specifically, I wanted to work at the fondue hut in the center of town, which Mummy loved. That fondue could change your life. (I really was that mad.) But now I told Pa I’d given up the fondue fantasy, and he sighed with relief.
Instead I was taken with notions of becoming a ski instructor… Pa tensed again. Out of the question.
OK.
Long pause.
How about…safari guide? No, darling boy.
This wasn’t going to be easy.
Part of me really did want to do something totally outside the box, something that would make everyone in the family, in the country, sit up and say: What the
—? Part of me wanted to drop out, disappear—as Mummy did. And other princes. Wasn’t there one in India, a long time ago, a bloke who just walked out of the palace and sat under a lovely banyan tree? We’d read about him at school. Or, we were supposed to.
But another part of me felt hugely ambitious. People assumed that the Spare wouldn’t or shouldn’t have any ambition. People assumed that royals generally had no career desires or anxieties. You’re royal, everything’s done for you, why worry? But in fact I worried quite a lot about making my own way, finding my purpose in this world. I didn’t want to be one of those cocktail-slurping, eyeroll-causing sloths everyone avoided at family gatherings. There had been plenty of those in my family, going back centuries.
Pa, in fact, might’ve become one. He’d always been discouraged from hard work, he told me. He’d been advised that the Heir shouldn’t “do too much,” shouldn’t try too hard, for fear of outshining the monarch. But he’d rebelled, listened to his inner voice, discovered work that excited him.
He wanted that for me.
That was why he didn’t press me to go to university. He knew it wasn’t in my DNA. Not that I was anti-university, per se. In fact, the University of Bristol looked interesting. I’d pored over its literature, even considered a course in art history. (Lots of pretty girls took that subject.) But I just couldn’t picture myself spending years bent over a book. My Eton housemaster couldn’t either. He’d told me straight-out: You’re not the university type, Harry. Now Pa added his assent. It was no secret, he said gently, that I wasn’t the “family scholar.”
He didn’t mean it as a dig. Still, I winced.
He and I went round and round, and in my head I went back and forth, and by a process of elimination we landed on the Army. It made sense. It aligned with my desire to be outside the box, to disappear. The military would take me away from the prying eyes of the public and the press. But it also fitted with my hope of making a difference.
And it accorded with my personality. My prized toys as a boy had always been miniature soldiers. I’d spent thousands of hours planning and waging epic battles with them at Kensington Palace and in Highgrove’s Rosemary Verey–designed gardens. I’d also treated every game of paintball as though the future of the Commonwealth depended on the outcome.
Pa smiled. Yes, darling boy. The Army sounds like just the thing. But first, he added…
Many people took a gap year as a matter of course. Pa, however, considered a gap year to be one of the most formative periods in a person’s life.
See the world, darling boy! Have adventures.
So I sat down with Marko and tried to decide what those adventures might look like. We settled first on Australia. Spend half the year working on a farm.
Excellent.
As for the second half of the year, Africa. I told Marko I’d like to join the fight against AIDS. That this would be an homage to Mummy, an explicit continuation of her work, didn’t need to be spelled out.
Marko went away, did some research, came back to me and said: Lesotho. Never heard of it, I confessed.
He educated me. Landlocked country. Lovely country. Bordering South Africa.
Lots of need, loads of work to be done.
I was overjoyed. A plan—at last.
Soon after, I visited Henners. A weekend in Edinburgh. Autumn 2002. We went to a restaurant and I told him all about it. Good for you, Haz! He was taking a gap year as well, in East Africa. Uganda, as I recall. Working in a rural school. At the moment, however, he was working a part-time job—at Ludgrove. Working as a stooge. (The Ludgrovian word for “handyman.”) It was a very cool job, he said. He got to be with kids, got to fix things all over the grounds.
Plus, I teased him: All the free strawberries and carrots you can eat!
But he was quite serious about it. I like teaching, Haz. Oh.
We talked excitedly about Africa, made plans to meet up there. After Uganda, after college, Henners too would probably go into the Army. He was going to be a Green Jacket. It wasn’t really a decision; his family had been in uniform for generations. We talked about meeting up there too. Maybe, we said, we’ll find ourselves side by side one day, marching into battle or helping people on the other side of the world.
The future. We wondered aloud what it held. I worried about it, but not Henners. He didn’t take the future seriously, didn’t take anything seriously. Life as it comes, Haz. That was Henners, always and forever. I envied his tranquility.
For now, however, he was heading to one of Edinburgh’s casinos. He asked if I wanted to come along. Ah, can’t, I said. I couldn’t possibly be seen in a casino. It
would cause a huge scandal.
Too bad, he said.
Cheers, we both said, promising to talk again soon.
Two months later, a Sunday morning—just before Christmas 2002. The news must have come in the form of a phone call, though I only dimly recall holding the phone, hearing the words. Henners and another boy, leaving a party near Ludgrove, drove into a tree. Though the call’s a blur, I vividly remember my reaction. Same as when Pa told me about Mummy. Right…so Henners was in an accident. But he’s in hospital, right? He’s going to be OK?
No, he wasn’t.
And the other boy, the driver, had been critically injured.
Willy and I went to the funeral. A little parish church down the road from where Henners grew up. I remember hundreds of people squeezing into creaky wooden pews. I remember, after the service, queueing up to hug Henners’s parents, Alex and Claire, and his brothers, Thomas and Charlie.
I think, while we waited, I overheard whispered discussions of the crash.
It was foggy, you know… They weren’t going far… But where were they going? And at that time of night?
They were at a party and the sound system was knackered! So they ran off to get another.
No!
They went to borrow a CD player from a friend. Short distance, you know… So they didn’t bother with seatbelts…
Just like Mummy.
And yet, unlike Mummy, there was no way to spin this as a disappearance. This was death, no two ways about it.
Also, unlike Mummy, Henners wasn’t going that fast. Because he wasn’t being chased.
Twenty miles an hour, tops, everyone said.
And yet the car went straight into an old tree.
Old ones, someone explained, are much harder than young ones.
