I PONDERED QUITTING the Army. What was the point of staying if I couldn’t actually be a soldier?
I talked it over with Chels. She was torn. On the one hand she couldn’t hide her relief. On the other she knew how much I wanted to be there for my team. She knew that I’d long felt persecuted by the press, and that the Army had been the one healthy outlet I’d found.
She also knew that I believed in the Mission.
I talked it over with Willy. He had complicated feelings as well. He sympathized, as a soldier. But as a sibling? A highly competitive older brother? He couldn’t bring himself to totally regret this turn of events.
Most of the time Willy and I didn’t have any truck with all that Heir-Spare nonsense. But now and then I’d be brought up short and realize that on some level it really did matter to him. Professionally, personally, he cared where I stood, what I was doing.
Not getting comfort from any quarter, I looked for it in vodka and Red Bull. And gin and tonic. I was photographed around this time going into or coming out of multiple pubs, clubs, house parties, at wee hours.
I didn’t love waking to find a photo of myself on the front page of a tabloid. But what I really couldn’t bear was the sound of the photo being taken in the first place. That click, that terrible noise, from over my shoulder or behind my back or within my peripheral vision, had always triggered me, had always made my heart race, but after Sandhurst it sounded like a gun cocking or a blade being notched open. And then, even a little worse, a little more traumatizing, came that blinding flash.
Great, I thought. The Army has made me more able to recognize threats, to feel threats, to become adrenalized in the face of those threats, and now it’s casting me aside.
I was in a bad, bad place.
Paps, somehow, knew. Around this time they began hitting me with their cameras, deliberately, trying to incite me. They’d brush, smack, jostle, or just straight wallop me, hoping to get a rise, hoping I’d retaliate, because that would create a better photo, and thus more money in their pockets. A snap of me in 2007 fetched about thirty thousand pounds. Down payment
on a flat. But a snap of me doing something aggressive? That might be a down payment on a house in the countryside.
I got into one scrap that became big news. I came away with a swollen nose, and my bodyguard was livid. You made those paps rich, Harry! You happy?
Happy? No, I said. No, I’m not happy.
The paps had always been grotesque people, but as I reached maturity they were worse. You could see it in their eyes, their body language. They were more emboldened, more radicalized, just as young men in Iraq had been radicalized. Their mullahs were editors, the same ones who’d vowed to do better after Mummy died. The editors promised publicly to never again send photographers chasing after people, and now, ten years later, they were back to their old ways. They justified it by no longer sending their own photographers, directly; instead they contracted with pap agencies, who sent the photographers, a distinction without a shred of difference. The editors were still inciting and handsomely rewarding thugs and losers to stalk the Royal Family, or anyone else unlucky enough to be deemed famous or newsworthy.
And no one seemed to give a shit. I remember leaving a club in London and being swarmed by twenty paps. They surrounded me, then surrounded the police car in which I was sitting, threw themselves across the bonnet, all wearing football scarves around their faces and hoods over their heads, the uniform of terrorists everywhere. It was one of the scariest moments of my life, and I knew no one cared. Price you pay, people would say, though I never understood what they meant.
Price for what?
I was particularly close to one of my bodyguards. Billy. I called him Billy the Rock, because he was so solid, so dependable. He once pounced on a grenade someone tossed at me from a crowd. Luckily, it turned out not to be a real one. I promised Billy I wouldn’t push any more paps. But neither could I just stroll into their ambushes. So, when we left a club, I said, You’re going to have to stuff me into the boot of the car, Billy.
He looked at me, wide-eyed. Really?
That’s the only way I won’t be tempted to have a go at them, and they won’t be able to make any money out of me.
Win-win.
I didn’t tell Billy that this was something my mother used to do.
Thus began a very strange routine between us. When leaving a pub or club in 2007, I’d have the car pull into a back alley or underground parking lot, climb into the boot and let Billy shut the lid, and I’d lie there in the dark, hands across my chest, while he and another bodyguard ferried me home. It felt like being in a coffin. I didn’t care.
