Spare

Typically the pilot would be flying low, five hundred feet off the deck, level with the rising sun, but sometimes I’d send him lower and put him into a pop-up. As he streaked towards me at the speed of sound, he’d pull back, shoot upwards at a forty-five-degree angle. Then I’d begin a new series of descriptions, new details. As he reached the top of his climb and rolled his wings, as he leveled and started to feel negative g-force, he’d see the world just as I’d painted it, then swoop down.

Suddenly he’d cry out: Tally target! Then: In dry!

Then I’d say: Clear dry.

Meaning, his bombs were but spirits melting into air.

Then I’d wait, listening keenly for the pretend explosions.

The weeks just flew by.

6.

Once I was a trained FAC, I had to become combat ready, which meant mastering twenty-eight different combat “controls.”

A control was basically an interaction with an aircraft. Each control was a scenario, a little play. For instance, imagine two aircraft come into your airspace. Good morning, this is Dude Zero One and Dude Zero Two. We’re a pair of F-15s with two PGMs on board, plus one JDAM, we’ve got a playtime of ninety minutes and we are currently two nautical miles east of your location at Flight Level 150, waiting for talk-on…

I needed to know precisely what they were saying, and how to respond to them precisely in their own jargon.

Sadly, I wouldn’t be able to do this in a normal training area. The normal areas, like Salisbury Plain, were too out in the open. Someone would see me, and tip off the press, and my cover would be blown; I’d be back where I started. Instead, Colonel Ed and I decided that I should learn the controls somewhere remote…somewhere like…

Sandringham.

We both smiled when the thought occurred. Then laughed.

The last place anyone would think of Prince Harry getting himself combat ready. Granny’s country estate.

I got a room at a small hotel near Sandringham—Knights Hill. I’d known the place all my life, driven past it a million times. Whenever we visited Granny at Christmas, our bodyguards would sleep there. Standard room: hundred quid.

In summers, Knights Hill tended to be full of bird-watchers, wedding parties. But now, in the autumn, it was empty.

The privacy was thrilling, and would’ve been total, if not for the older lady in the pub connected to the hotel. She watched me, goggle-eyed, every time I passed.

Alone, almost anonymous, my existence narrowed to one interesting task, I was delirious. I tried not to say so to Chelsy when I phoned her in the evenings, but it was the kind of happiness that’s hard to hide.

I recall one difficult chat. What were we doing? Where were we heading?

She knew I cared about her. But she felt unseen. I am not visual.

She knew how desperate I was to go to war. How could she not forgive my being a bit detached? I was taken aback.

I explained that this was what I needed to do, the thing I’d wanted to do all my life, and I needed to do it with all my heart and soul. If that meant there was less heart and soul left over for anything or anyone else, well…I was sorry.

7.

Pa knew I was living at Knights Hill, knew what I was up to. And he was just down the road at Sandringham on an extended visit. And yet he never dropped in. Giving me space, I guess.

Also, he was still very much in his newlywed phase, even though the wedding was more than two years prior.

Then one day he looked up in the sky and saw a Typhoon aircraft doing low passes along the seawall and he figured it must be me. So he got into his Audi and hurried over.

He found me in the marshes, on a quad bike, talking to a Typhoon some miles off. While I waited for the Typhoon to appear in the sky overhead we had a quick chat. He said he could see how good I was getting at this new job. Above all, he could see how hard I was working at it, and that delighted him.

Pa had always been a worker. He believed in work. Everyone must work, he often said. But his own work was also a kind of religion, because he was furiously trying to save the planet. He’d been fighting for decades to alert people to climate change, never flagging, despite being cruelly mocked by the press as a Henny Penny. Countless times, late at night, Willy and I would find him at his desk amid mountains of bulging blue postbags—his correspondence. More than once we discovered him, face on the desk, fast asleep. We’d shake his shoulders and up he’d bob, a piece of paper stuck to his forehead.