Spare

I made some mates. It wasn’t easy. I had special requirements. I needed someone who wouldn’t tease me about being royal, someone who wouldn’t so much as mention my being the Spare. I needed someone who’d treat me normal, which meant ignoring the armed bodyguard sleeping down the hall, whose job was to keep me from being kidnapped or assassinated. (To say nothing of the electronic tracker and panic alarm I carried with me at all times.) My mates all met these criteria.

Sometimes my new mates and I would escape, head for Windsor Bridge, which connected Eton to Windsor over the River Thames. Specifically we’d head to the underside of the bridge, where we could smoke tabbage in privacy. My mates seemed to enjoy the naughtiness of it, whereas I just did it because I was on autopilot. Sure, I fancied a cig after a McDonald’s, who didn’t? But if we were going to bunk off, I’d much prefer heading over to Windsor Castle golf course, knocking a ball around, while drinking a wee beer.

Still, like a robot, I took every cig offered me, and in the same automatic, unthinking way, I soon graduated to weed.

18.

The game required a bat, a tennis ball, and a total disregard for one’s physical safety. There were four players: a bowler, a batsman, and two fielders stationed mid-corridor, each with one foot in the corridor and one in a room. Not always our rooms. We often intruded on other boys trying to work. They’d beg us to go away.

Sorry, we said. This is our work.

The radiator represented the wicket. There was an endless debate about what constituted a catch. Off the wall? Yes, catch. Off a window? No catch. One hand, one bounce? Half out.

One day the sportiest member of our group hurled himself at a ball, trying to make a tricky catch, and landed face-first on a fire extinguisher hooked to the wall. His tongue split wide open. You’d think after that, after the carpet had been permanently soiled with his blood, we’d have called an end to Corridor Cricket.

We didn’t.

When not playing Corridor Cricket we’d loll in our rooms. We got very good at affecting postures of supreme indolence. The point was to look as if you had no purpose, as if you’d bestir yourself only to do something bad or, better yet, stupid. Near the end of my first half we hit on something supremely stupid.

Someone suggested that my hair was a complete disaster. Like grass on the moors.

Well…what can be done?

Let me have a go at it.

You?

Yeah. Let me shave it off.

Hm. That didn’t sound right.

But I wanted to go along. I wanted to be a top bloke. A funny bloke.

All right.

Someone fetched the clippers. Someone pushed me into a chair. How quickly, how blithely, after a lifetime of healthy growth, it all went cascading off my head. When the cutter was done I looked down, saw a dozen pyramids of ginger on the floor, like red volcanoes seen from a plane, and knew I’d made a legendary mistake.

I ran to the mirror. Suspicion confirmed. I screamed in horror.

My mates screamed too. With laughter.

I ran in circles. I wanted to reverse time. I wanted to scoop up the hair from the floor and glue it back on. I wanted to wake from this nightmare. Not knowing where else to turn, I violated the sacred rule, the one shining commandment never to be broken, and ran upstairs to Willy’s room.

Of course, there was nothing Willy could do. I was just hoping he’d tell me it would be OK, don’t freak out, keep calm, Harold. Instead, he laughed like the others. I recall him sitting at his desk, bent over a book, chuckling, while I stood before him fingering the nubs on my newly bare scalp.

Harold, what have you done?

What a question. He sounded like Stewie from Family Guy. Wasn’t it obvious?

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.

Worse ridicule was yet to come. A few days later, on the front page of the Daily Mirror, one of the tabloids, there I was with my new haircut.

Headline: Harry the Skinhead.

I couldn’t imagine how they’d got wind of the story. A schoolmate must have told someone who told someone who told the papers. They had no photo, thank goodness. But they’d improvised. The image on the front page was a “computer-generated” rendering of the Spare, bald as an egg. A lie. More than a lie, really.

I looked bad, but not that bad.

19.

I didn’t think it could get worse. What a grievous mistake it is for a member of the Royal Family, when considering the media, to imagine that things can’t get worse. Weeks later the same newspaper put me on the front page again.

HARRY’S HAD AN ACCIDENT.