Spare

One boy kept to the side. His face was round, open, transparent. There was obviously a terrible burden on his heart. I felt it would be prying to ask. But I had one more gift in my bag, a torch, and I gave it to him.

I said I hoped it would light his way each day to school.

He smiled.

I wanted to tell him that his smile would light mine. I tried.

Alas, my Sesotho wasn’t very good.

40.

Soon after we returned to Britain the Palace announced that Willy was going to marry.

November 2010.

News to me. All that time together in Lesotho, he’d never mentioned it.

The papers published florid stories about the moment I realized Willy and Kate were well matched, the moment I appreciated the depth of their love and thus decided to gift Willy the ring I’d inherited from Mummy, the legendary sapphire, a tender moment between brothers, a bonding moment for all three of us, and absolute rubbish: none of it ever happened. I never gave Willy that ring because it wasn’t mine to give. He already had it. He’d asked for it after Mummy died, and I’d been more than happy to let it go.

Now, as Willy focused on wedding preparations, I wished him well and turned sharply inward. I thought long and hard about my singlehood. I’d always assumed I’d be the first to be married, because I’d wanted it so badly. I’d always assumed that I’d be a young husband, a young father, because I’d resolved not to become my father. He’d been an older dad, and I’d always felt that this created problems, placed barriers between us. In his middle years he’d become more sedentary, more habitual. He liked his routines. He wasn’t the kind of father who played endless rounds of tag, or tossed a ball until long after dark. He’d been so once. He’d chased us all over Sandringham, making up wonderful games, like the one where he wrapped us in blankets, like hot dogs, until we screamed with helpless laughter, and then yanked the blanket and shot us out of the other end. I don’t know if Willy or I have ever laughed harder. But, long before we were ready, he stopped engaging in that kind of physical fun. He just didn’t have the enthusiasm—the puff.

But I would, I always promised myself. I would.

Now I wondered: Will I?

Was that the real me who made that promise to become a young father? Or was this the real me, struggling to find the right person, the right partner, while also struggling to work out who I was?

Why is this thing, which I supposedly want so badly, not happening?

And what if it never happens? What will my life mean? What will my ultimate purpose be?

War, I reckoned. When all else failed, as it usually did, I still had soldiering. (If only I had a deployment date.)

And after the wars, I thought, there will always be charitable work. Since the Lesotho trip, I’d felt more passionate than ever about continuing Mummy’s causes. And I was determined to take up the cause Mike gave me at his kitchen table. That’s enough for a full life, I told myself.

It seemed like serendipity, therefore, like a synthesis of all my thinking, when I heard from a group of wounded soldiers planning a trek to the North Pole. They were hoping to raise millions for Walking With The Wounded, and also to become the first amputees ever to reach the Pole unsupported. They invited me to join them.

I wanted to say yes. I was dying to say yes. Just one problem. The trek was in early April, dangerously close to Willy’s announced wedding date. I’d have to get there and back with no hitches, or risk missing the ceremony.

But the North Pole wasn’t a place you could ever be sure of getting to and from without hitches. The North Pole was a place of infinite hitches. There were always variables, usually related to weather. So I was nervous at the prospect, and the Palace was doubly nervous.

I asked JLP for his advice.

He smiled. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Yes. It is.

You’ve got to go.

But first, he said, there was one other place I needed to go.

In a direct continuation of conversations he and I had begun five years earlier, after my Nazi debacle, he’d organized a trip to Berlin.

And so. December 2010. A bitterly cold day. I put my fingertips to the bullet holes in the city’s walls, the still-fresh scars from Hitler’s insane vow to fight to the last man. I stood at the former site of the Berlin Wall, which had also been the site of SS torture chambers, and swore I could hear the echoes of agonized screams on the wind. I met a woman who’d been sent to Auschwitz. She described her confinement, the horrors she saw, heard, smelt. Her stories were as difficult to hear as they were vital. But I won’t retell them. They’re not mine to retell.