Spare

(The fonder the memory, the deeper the ache.)

Study, concentration, requires an alliance with the mind, and in my teen years I was waging all-out war with mine.

With bagpipes it’s not the tune, it’s the tone.

The Heir and the Spare—there was no judgment about it, but also no ambiguity. I was the shadow, the support, the Plan B. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy. I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow. This was all made explicitly clear to me from the start of life’s journey and regularly reinforced thereafter.

I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will. I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they'd been there for me too.And I believe they'll look back one day and wish they had too.

What hell, being an adult!

I heard the story of what Pa allegedly said to Mummy the day ofmy birth: Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an Heir and a Spare—my work isdone. A joke. Presumably. On the other hand, minutes after delivering this bit ofhigh comedy, Pa was said to have gone off to meet with his girlfriend. So. Manya true word spoken in jest.

Is each generation doomed to unwittingly repeat the sins of the last?

I told them that I failed to see how speaking to Oprah was any different from what my family and their staff had done for decades – briefing the press on the sly, planting stories. And what about the endless books on which they’d co-operated, starting with Pa’s 1994 crypto-autobiography with Jonathan Dimbleby? Or Camilla’s collaborations with the editor Geordie Greig? The only difference was that Meg and I were upfront about it. We chose an interviewer who was above reproach, and we didn’t once hide behind phrases like “Palace sources”, we let people see the words coming out of our mouths.

It wasn’t that she felt no emotions. On the contrary, I always thought that Granny experienced all the normal human emotions. She just knew better than the rest of us mortals how to control them.

It occurred to me then that identity is a hierarchy. We are primarily one thing, and then we're primarily another, and then another, and so on, until death- in succession. Each new identity assumes the throne of Self, but takes us further from our original self, perhaps our core self- the child. Yes, evolution, maturation, the path towards wisdom, it's all natural and healthy, but there's a purity to childhood, which is diluted with each iteration.

He assured me that people do stupid things, say stupid things, but it doesn’t need to be their intrinsic nature. I was showing my true nature, he said, by seeking to atone. Seeking absolution.

She said: That was everything. She said: That is a man. My love. She said: That is not a Spare.

Maybe money sits at the heart of every controversy about monarchy. Britain has long had trouble making up its mind. Many support the Crown, but many also feel anxious about the cost. That anxiety is increased by the fact that the cost is unknowable. Depends on who’s crunching the numbers. Does the Crown cost taxpayers? Yes. Does it also pay a fortune into government coffers? Also yes. Does the Crown generate tourism income that benefits all? Of course. Does it also rest upon lands obtained and secured when the system was unjust and wealth was generated by exploited workers and thuggery, annexation and enslaved people? Can anyone deny it? According to the last study I saw, the monarchy costs the average taxpayer the price of a pint each year. In light of its many good works that seems a pretty sound investment. But no one wants to hear a prince argue for the existence of a monarchy, any more than they want to hear a prince argue against it. I leave cost-benefit analyses to others. My emotions are complicated on this subject, naturally, but my bottom-line position isn’t. I’ll forever support my Queen, my Commander in Chief, my Granny. Even after she’s gone. My problem has never been with the monarchy, nor the concept of monarchy. It’s been with the press and the sick relationship that’s evolved between it and the Palace. I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will. I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they’d both been there for me. And I believe they’ll look back one day and wish they had too.

Grief is a thing best shared.

In this mixed-up world, this pain-filled life, we’d done it. we’d managed to find each other.

In some ways he was my mirror, in some ways he was my opposite. My beloved brother, my arch-nemesis, how had that happened?

Weddings were joyous occasions, sure, but they were also low-key funerals, because after saying their vows people tended to disappear.

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.Not remembering was balm.

I recall one headline, addressed pointedly at Granny: Show Us You Care. How rich, coming from the same fiends who “cared” so much about Mummy that they chased her into a tunnel from which she never emerged.

No one had an answer for a boy actually seeking external pain to match his internal.

My family had declared me a nullity. The Spare. I didn’t complain about it, but I didn’t need to dwell on it either. Far better, in my mind, not to think about certain facts, such as the cardinal rule for royal travel: Pa and William could never be on the same flight together, because there must be no chance of the first and second in line to the throne being wiped out. But no one gave a damn whom I traveled with; the Spare could always be spared.

He was, I realize now, one of the most truthful people I’ve ever known, and he knew a secret about truth that many people are unwilling to accept: it’s usually painful.

Maybe she was omnipresent for the very same reason that she was indescribable—because she was light, pure and radiant light, and how can you really describe light? Even Einstein struggled with that one.

not to be devastated by my mistake, but instead to be motivated. He spoke to me with the quality one often encounters in truly wise people—forgiveness.

Being royal, it turned out, wasn’t all that far from being onstage. Acting was acting, no matter the context.

I remember the mounds of flowers all around us. I remember feeling unspeakable sorrow and yet being unfailingly polite. I remember old ladies saying: Oh, my, how polite, the poor boy! I remember muttering thanks, over and over, thank you for coming, thank you for saying that, thank you for camping out here for several days. I remember consoling several folks who were prostrate, overcome, as if they knew Mummy, but also thinking: You didn’t, though. You act as if you did…but you didn’t know her.

Never complain, never explain.

He spoke to me with the quality one often encounters in truly wise people—forgiveness. He assured me that people do stupid things, say stupid things, but it doesn’t need to be their intrinsic nature.

I'd traveled the world from top to bottom, literally. I'd hopscotched the continents. I'd met hundreds of thousands of people, I'd crossed paths with a ludicrously large cross-section of the planet's seven billion residents. For thirty-two years I'd watched a conveyor-belt of faces pass by and only a handful ever made me look twice. This woman stopped the conveyer belt.