ONE OF WILLY’S friends was having a birthday party. In the countryside near Gloucestershire. More than a birthday party, it was a fancy-dress party, with
a cringy theme. Natives and colonials. Guests were required to dress accordingly.
January 2005.
I didn’t love fancy-dress parties. And I couldn’t stand themes. For Willy’s last birthday, or the one before, he’d had a fancy-dress party with a theme: Out of Africa. I found it irritating and baffling. Every time I’d gone to Africa I’d worn shorts and a T-shirt, maybe a kikoi. Would that do, Willy? But this was magnitudes worse.
Not one item of native or colonial garb hung in my wardrobe. I was crashing with Pa and Camilla, some days at St. James’s, some days at Highgrove, largely living out of a suitcase, so I didn’t give a damn about clothes. I looked most days as if I’d got dressed in a very dark and disordered room. A fancy-dress party, therefore, with a theme, was my nightmare.
Pass. Hard pass.
Willy, however, insisted. We’ll find you something to wear, Harold.
His new girlfriend promised to help.
I liked his new girlfriend. She was carefree, sweet, kind. She’d done a gap year in Florence, knew about photography, art. And clothes. She loved clothes.
Her name was Kate. I forget what native or colonial thing she was wearing to the party, but with her help Willy had chosen for himself some kind of…feline outfit. Skintight leotard with (am I remembering this correctly?) a springy, bouncy tail. He tried it on for us and he looked like a cross between Tigger and Baryshnikov. Kate and I had a great time pointing our fingers at him and rolling around on the floor. It was ridiculous, especially in a three-way mirror. But ridiculous, they both said, was the point of the upcoming party.
I liked seeing Kate laugh. Better yet, I liked making her laugh. And I was quite good at it. My transparently silly side connected with her heavily disguised silly side. Whenever I worried that Kate was going to be the one to take Willy from me, I consoled myself with thoughts of all our future laughing fits together, and I told myself how great everything would be when I had a serious girlfriend who could laugh along with us. Maybe it would be Chelsy.
Maybe, I thought, I can make Kate laugh with my costume.
But what would it be? What’s Harold going to be? This became our constant topic.
On the day of the party it was decided that I’d go to a nearby village, Nailsworth, where there was a well-known costume shop. Surely I could find something there.
It’s a bit blurry, though some things come back with total certainty. The shop had an unforgettable smell. I remember its musty, moldy funk, with an
undercurrent of something else, something indefinable, some airborne by-product of a tightly sealed room, containing hundreds of pairs of trousers, shared over several decades, by thousands of humans.
I went up and down the rows, sifting through the racks, seeing nothing I liked.
With time running out I narrowed my options to two.
A British pilot’s uniform.
And a sand-colored Nazi uniform. With a swastika armband.
And a flat cap.
I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said.
I rented it, plus a silly mustache, and went back to the house. I tried it all on.
They both howled. Worse than Willy’s leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous!
Which, again, was the point.
But the mustache needed trimming, so I snipped the long bits on the ends, made it a proper Hitler mouser. Then added in some cargo trousers.
Off we went to the party, where no one looked twice at my costume. All the natives and colonials were more focused on getting drunk and groping each other. No one took any notice of me, which I put down as a small win.
Someone, however, snapped photos. Days later this someone saw a chance to make some cash, or some trouble, and sought out a reporter. How much for snaps from a recent party attended by young royals? The crown jewel of the photos was thought to be Willy in his leotard.
But the reporter spotted something else. Hello, what’s this? The Spare? As a Nazi?
There was some haggling over price, according to reports I’ve heard. A sum of five thousand pounds was agreed upon and weeks later the photo appeared in every paper in the known world, beneath titanic headlines.
Heil Harry!
Heir Aberrant. Royal Heil to Pay.
What followed was a firestorm, which I thought at times would engulf me. And I felt that I deserved to be engulfed. There were moments over the course of the next several weeks and months when I thought I might die of shame.
The typical response to the photos was: What could he have been thinking? The simplest answer was: I wasn’t. When I saw those photos, I recognized immediately
that my brain had been shut off, that perhaps it had been shut off for some time. I wanted to go around Britain knocking on doors, explaining to people: I wasn’t thinking. I meant no harm. But it wouldn’t have made any difference. Judgment was swift, harsh. I was either a crypto Nazi or else a mental defective.
I turned to Willy. He was sympathetic, but there wasn’t much to say. Then I phoned Pa. To my surprise he was serene. At first I was suspicious. I thought maybe he was seeing my crisis as another opportunity to bolster his PR. But he spoke to me with such tenderness, such genuine compassion, that I was disarmed. And grateful.
He didn’t gloss over the facts. Darling boy, how could you be so foolish? My cheeks burned. I know, I know. But he quickly went on to say that it was the foolishness of youth, that he remembered being publicly vilified for youthful sins, and it wasn’t fair, because youth is the time when you’re, by definition, unfinished. You’re still growing, still becoming, still learning, he said. He didn’t specifically cite any of his youthful humiliations, but I knew. His most intimate conversations had been leaked, his most ill-conceived remarks had been trumpeted. Past girlfriends had been interrogated, their rating of his lovemaking spread across tabloids, even books. He knew all about humiliation.
He promised that the fury about this would blow over, the shame would fade. I loved him for that promise, even though—or maybe because—I knew it to be false. The shame would never fade. Nor should it.
Day after day the scandal grew. I was excoriated in newspapers, on radio, on TV. Members of Parliament called for my head on a spike. One said I should be barred from entering Sandhurst.
The blowing-over, therefore, according to Pa’s staff, would need some help. I’d need to make some sort of public atonement.
Fine by me, I said. Sooner the better. So Pa sent me to a holy man.
