Spare

by Prince Harry

Then again, maybe our mother would be here. If she hadn’t married Pa…

Oh how she loved my brother and me. Obsessively, she once confessed to an interviewer. Well, Mummy…vice versa.

Apart from fear, I was feeling a kind of hyper-awareness, and a hugely intense vulnerability, which I’d experienced at other key moments of my life. Walking behind my mother’s coffin. Going into battle for the first time. Giving a speech in the middle of a panic attack.

Harold.

Should the worst happen, Your Royal Highness…war being an uncertain thing…

A lifelong student of history, he had loads of information to share, and part of me thought we might be there for hours, and that there might be a test at the end.

Born September 15, 1984, I was christened Henry Charles Albert David of Wales. But from Day One everyone called me Harry.

My half of the room was far smaller, less luxurious. I never asked why. I didn’t care. But I also didn’t need to ask. Two years older than me, Willy was the Heir, whereas I was the Spare.

Everything distinctly, certainly, irrevocably, came to a stop.

I reached for my father’s hand, for comfort, then cursed myself, because that gesture set off an explosion of clicks. I’d given them exactly what they wanted. Emotion. Drama. Pain. They fired and fired and fired.

Her life’s been miserable, she’s been hounded, harassed, lied about, lied to. So she’s staged an accident as a diversion and run away.

I do remember people around us saying “the boys” look “shell-shocked.” Nobody bothered to whisper, as if we were so shell-shocked that we’d gone deaf.

An alternative plan was put forward. Willy would walk alone. He was fifteen, after all. Leave the younger one out of it. Spare the Spare. This alternative plan was sent up the chain. Back came the answer. It must be both princes. To garner sympathy, presumably.

It felt so good to make others laugh, especially when I hadn’t laughed for months.

I wished I’d dug deep, told my mother all the things weighing on my heart, especially my regret over the last time we’d spoken on the phone. She’d called early in the evening, the night of the crash, but I was running around with Willy and my cousins and didn’t want to stop playing. So I’d been short with her. Impatient to get back to my games, I’d rushed Mummy off the phone. I wished I’d apologized for it. I wished I’d searched for the words to describe how much I loved her.

Mr. Hughes-Games believed me to be the odd one. What could be odder, he said to me one day, than a British prince not knowing British history? I cannot fathom it, Wales. We’re talking about your blood relatives—does that mean nothing to you? Less than nothing, sir.

did Mr. Hughes-Games need to shout it from the rooftops? Did he need to use that loaded word—family? My family had declared me a nullity. The Spare.

the cardinal rule for royal travel: Pa and William could never be on the same flight together, because there must be no chance of the first and second in line to the throne being wiped out. But no one gave a damn whom I traveled with; the Spare could always be spared.

Who knows if I’m really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I’m even your real father? Maybe your real father is in Broadmoor, darling boy!

given the rumor circulating just then that my actual father was one of Mummy’s former lovers: Major James Hewitt.

I was too young, I think, to have suspicions. But I couldn’t help but feel the lack of stability, the lack of warmth and love, in our home.

Granny and Grandpa, to toughen him up, had shipped him off to Gordonstoun, a boarding school, where he was horrendously bullied.

It looked, I imagined, like Pa might have after the bullies had finished with him. Teddy expressed eloquently, better than Pa ever could, the essential loneliness of his childhood.

Apologies to Teddy, Pa deserved a proper companion.

It would make the whole country, the whole world, talk about Mummy, compare Mummy and Camilla, and nobody wanted that. Least of all Camilla.

But I wasn’t the one forgetting. Willy told me to pretend I didn’t know him. What? You don’t know me, Harold. And I don’t know you.

Willy always hated it when anyone made the mistake of thinking us a package deal. He loathed it when Mummy dressed us in the same outfits.

You shouldn’t have done it, Harold! So we’re just stating the obvious now? He said a few more things that were immensely unhelpful and I walked out.

My existence was just fun and games to these people. I wasn’t a human being to them. I wasn’t a fourteen-year-old boy hanging on by his fingernails. I was a cartoon character, a glove puppet to be manipulated and mocked for fun.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

Tiggy—one of our nannies. Our favorite nanny, to be accurate, though Tiggy couldn’t stand being called that.

Mummy, sadly, didn’t see it that way. Mummy saw Tiggy not as a nanny but as a rival. It’s common knowledge that Mummy suspected Tiggy was being groomed as her future replacement. (Did Mummy see Tiggy as her Spare?)

Now this same woman whom Mummy feared as her possible replacement was her actual replacement—how dreadful for Mummy.

I’d think: More of this, please. More fire, more talk, more loud laughter. I’d been scared of darkness all my life, and it turned out Africa had a cure. The campfire.

the Eton rule carried over to Botswana: Willy didn’t want to know me in the bush any more than he did back at school.

One night, before I fell asleep, I made myself a promise: I’m going to find a way to make that guy laugh.

It wasn’t just Willy’s edict about giving him space; the older generation maintained a nearly zero-tolerance prohibition on all physical

contact. No hugs, no kisses, no pats. Now and then, maybe a light touching of cheeks…on special occasions.

Black eye, violet welt, puffed lip, I didn’t mind. On the contrary. Maybe I wanted to look tough. Maybe I just wanted to feel something. Whatever my motivation, my simple philosophy when it came to scrapping was: More, please.

Being so obtuse, so emotionally unavailable, wasn’t a choice I made. I simply wasn’t capable. I wasn’t close to ready.

I gazed at the photos and read the story in shock. I felt sickened, horrified. I imagined everyone, all my countrymen and countrywomen, reading these things, believing them. I could hear people all across the Commonwealth gossiping about me. Crikey, the boy’s a disgrace. His poor dad—after all he’s been through? More, I felt heartbroken at the idea that this had been partly the work of my own family, my own father and future stepmother.

In a nation known for its reticence, this was a startling expression of unbridled joy.

To see her tapping her foot, and swaying in time, I wanted to hug her, though of course I didn’t. Out of the question. I never had done and couldn’t imagine any circumstance under which such an act might be sanctioned.

When he was five or six, Granny left him, went off on a royal tour lasting several months, and when she returned, she offered him a firm handshake. Which may have been more than he ever got from Grandpa. Indeed, Grandpa was so aloof, so busy traveling and working, he barely saw Pa for the first several years of his life.

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.

The Palace wouldn’t let me. In this, as in most things, the Palace stuck fast to the family motto: Never complain, never explain.