Spare

by Prince Harry

Her devastating smile, her vulnerable eyes, her childlike love of movies and music and clothes and sweets—and us. Oh how she loved my brother and me. Obsessively, she once confessed to an interviewer. Well, Mummy…vice versa.

We support you, we said. We endorse Camilla, we said. Just please don’t marry her. Just be together, Pa.

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.

I think your body was born in Britain, but your soul was born here in Africa.

I knew without question that this marriage would take Pa away from us.

I hadn’t been aware, before this moment, that the last thing Mummy saw on this earth was a flashbulb.

If I die in Afghanistan, I thought, at least I’ll never have to see another fake headline, read another shameful lie about myself.

How would I be remembered by history? For the headlines? Or for who I actually was?

It was still so hard to think of Mummy in the realm of Death. Mummy, who’d danced with Travolta, who’d quarreled with Elton, who’d dazzled the Reagans—could she really be in the Great Beyond with the spirits of Newton and Chaucer?

What was the universe out to prove by taking my penis at the same moment it took my brother?

This is the first time I’ve been able to cry about my mum since the burial.

Who are you when you can no longer be the thing you’ve always been, the thing you’ve trained to be?

Pa and Camilla didn’t want Willy and Kate getting loads of publicity. Pa and Camilla didn’t like Willy and Kate drawing attention away from them or their causes. They’d openly scolded Willy about it many times.

one therapist said off-handedly that I was clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress, and that rang a bell.

Willy. Africa was his thing, he said. And he had the right to say this, or felt he did, because he was the Heir.

Happy Spike in Botswana, tightly wound Prince Harry in London.

But Meg seemed the shining exception to this rule. All rules. I knew her straightaway, and she knew me. The true me. Might seem rash, I thought, might seem illogical, but it’s true: For the first time, in fact, I felt myself to be living in truth.

I felt helpless, and this, I realized, was my Achilles heel. I could deal with most things so long as there was some action to be taken. But when I had nothing to do…I wanted to die.

At one point he actually ordered me, as the Heir speaking to the Spare, to shave.

I gathered that Pa and Camilla’s people had planted a story or stories about him and Kate, and the kids, and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. Give Pa and Camilla an inch, he said, they take a mile.

how much I wished my mother could hold her grandson, how often it happened that, while hugging Archie, I felt her—or wanted to. Every hug tinged with nostalgia; every tuck-in touched with grief.

Because my deepest fear is history repeating itself…I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces.

We wanted to say that we were taking a reduced role, stepping back but not down.

What Meg and I were dealing with was indeed a question of life and death.

But Pa wasn’t merely my father, he was my boss, my banker, my comptroller, keeper of the purse strings throughout my adult life. Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable.

But there’s a big difference between being a sponge and being prohibited from learning independence.

Your mother says: You’re living the life she couldn’t. You’re living the life she wanted for you.

I’d soon prove that the press were more than liars, I said. That they were lawbreakers. I was going to see some of them thrown into jail. That was why they were attacking me so viciously: they knew I had hard evidence.

I told them that I failed to see how speaking to Oprah was any different from what my family and their staffs, had done for decades—briefing the press on the sly, planting stories.