Spare

I’d broken a bone in my thumb playing rugby, no big deal, but the paper decided to make out that I was on life support. Bad taste, under any circumstances, but a little more than a year after Mummy’s alleged accident?

C’mon, fellas.

I’d dealt with the British press all my life, but they’d never before singled me out. In fact, since Mummy’s death an unspoken agreement had governed press treatment of both her sons, and the agreement went like this: Lay off.

Let them have their education in peace.

Apparently that agreement had now expired, because there I was, splattered across the front page, made out to seem a delicate flower. Or an ass. Or both.

And knocking on death’s door.

I read the article several times. Despite the somber subtext—something’s very wrong with Prince Harry—I marveled at its tone: larky. 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. So what if their fun made my already difficult days more difficult, made me a laughingstock before my schoolmates, not to mention the wider world? So what if they were torturing a child? All was justified because I was royal, and in their minds royal was synonymous with non-person. Centuries ago royal men and women were considered divine; now they were insects. What fun, to pluck their wings.

Pa’s office lodged a formal complaint, publicly demanded an apology, accused the paper of bullying his younger son.

The newspaper told Pa’s office to sod off.

Before trying to move on with my life I took one last look at the article. Of all the things that surprised me about it, the truly flabbergasting thing was the absolutely shitty writing. I was a poor student, a dreadful writer, and yet I had enough education to recognize that this right here was a master class in illiteracy.

To take one example: After explaining that I’d been grievously injured, that I was nearly at death’s door, the article went on to caution breathlessly that the exact nature of my injury couldn’t be revealed because the Royal Family had forbidden the editors to do so. (As if my family had any control over these ghouls.) “To reassure you, we can say that Harry’s injuries are NOT serious. But the accident was considered grave enough for him to be taken to hospital. But we believe you are entitled to know if an heir to the throne is involved in any accident, however small, if it results in injury.”

The two “buts” in a row, the smug self-regard, the lack of coherence and absence of any real point, the hysterical nothingness of it all. This dog’s dinner of a paragraph was said to be edited—or, more likely, written—by a young journalist whose name I scanned and then quickly forgot.

I didn’t think I’d ever run across it, or him, again. The way he wrote? I couldn’t imagine he’d be a working journalist much longer.

20.

I forget who used the word first. Someone in the press, probably. Or one of my teachers. Whoever—it took hold and circulated. I’d been cast in my role in the Rolling Royal Melodrama. Long before I was old enough to drink a beer (legally) it became dogma.

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. I wanted to be good, work hard, grow up and do something meaningful with my days. But every sin, every misstep, every setback triggered the same tired label, and the same public condemnations, and thereby reinforced the conventional wisdom that I was innately naughty.

Things might have been different if I’d achieved good grades. But I didn’t and everyone knew it. My reports were in the public domain. The whole Commonwealth was aware of my academic struggles, which were largely due to being overmatched at Eton.

But no one ever discussed the other probable cause.

Mummy.

Study, concentration, requires an alliance with the mind, and in my teen years I was waging all-out war with mine. I was forever fending off its darkest thoughts, its basest fears—its fondest memories. (The fonder the memory, the deeper the ache.) I’d found strategies for doing this, some healthy, some not, but all quite effective, and whenever they were unavailable—for instance, when I was forced to sit quietly with a book—I freaked out. Naturally, I avoided such situations.

At all costs, I avoided sitting quietly with a book.

It struck me at some point that the whole basis of education was memory. A list of names, a column of numbers, a mathematical formula, a beautiful poem—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.