BOOK OF THE WEEK
HARRY: CONVERSATIONS WITH THE PRINCE
by Angela Levin (John Blake £18.99)
Looking at the photographs of Prince Harry as a boy in Angela Levin’s engaging and compassionate new book, I found myself imagining I was Meghan Markle flicking through them and falling even more madly in love with my handsome, freckly redhead.
Little Harry, aged nearly two, on a slide in the garden, wearing the miniature Parachute Regiment uniform to which he was addicted; aged six, riding a real tank on a visit to Germany with camouflage marks on his face; aged ten, his mother clutching his hand at the VE Day anniversary; as a casual sixth-former in his room at Eton, foot resting on his knee with Lynx deodorant on his desk.
Perhaps most swoon-inducing of all is an image of him at his Sandhurst passing-out parade, in a row of straight-faced officer cadets, unable to rein in his cheeky grin as the Queen, beaming with grandmotherly pride, catches his eye while inspecting the troops.
Angela Levin recalls conversations with Prince Harry from engagements and meetings at Kensington Palace. Pictured: Harry and Meghan on their first royal engagement last year
Levin has accompanied Harry on engagements and has had exclusive access to him at Kensington Palace. In this book she reveals in words what those photographs exude: the exuberant boyishness and the mischievous charm and seriousness of the harum-scarum Prince.— a man who has always longed to be ‘just Harry’, and who dreamed of having a full career on the Army’s front line — cruelly, the one role he wasn’t allowed to sustain for long as his presence was inevitably a magnet for the enemy.
She makes us feel Harry’s frustration physically when she describes how he was quietly airlifted out of Afghanistan in 2013 after only four months there, flown back to RAF Brize Norton and driven home to Highgrove, where he had a long bath.
You can hear the silence and feel the unwanted luxury and anti-climax of that Gloucestershire bathroom. With his whole mind, body and soul he longed to be back in Helmand Province with ‘the guys’, serving his country.
It was from that moment that he started to fall apart.
The most important thing his mother did for him, Harry told Levin, was ‘keep me safe’. But growing up in the toxically unhappy atmosphere of their parents’ failing marriage was not really ‘safe’ for the young princes.
Diana, increasingly insecure and lonely, clung to her sons for reassurance, rather than the other way round.
‘Turning her children into surrogate parents was profoundly damaging, and using them both to protect her was nothing less than exploitative,’ Levin writes forcefully. When Diana went to the boys’ prep school to tell them she and his father were going to separate, William burst into tears, but Harry’s instant comment was: ‘I hope you will both be happier now.’
Prince Harry (pictured as a child with his mother Diana) believes children shouldn’t walk behind their parent’s coffin under any circumstances
It was a heartbreakingly unselfish and empathetic comment for an eight-year-old to make.
Then came the tragedy of her sudden death. Harry tells Levin how appalled he is in retrospect that he and William had to walk behind their mother’s coffin, and that he didn’t think any child should have to do that ‘under any circumstances’.
Losing his mother, he tells her, left him in ‘total chaos’.
Surrounded though he was by bodyguards, housemasters, matrons, friends, nanny-figures and relations during his teens, no one seemed to realise that this was a boy in need of proper bereavement counselling.
In the Royal Family, the upper lip was still expected to be stiff, and it took Harry himself to change that culture, years later, by admitting the truth in public.
Thanks to him removing the stigma of talking about mental health, calls to mental health charities rose overnight by 38 per cent. Levin also reveals how, as Harry grew up, his early taste for Army camouflage morphed into a need for emotional camouflage.
Prince Harry (pictured) longed to remain in Afghanistan serving his country when he was airlifted back to the UK. Angela Levin believes Meghan knows what Harry needs
In order to survive his teens and 20s in the glare of the public eye, he became so practised at bottling up unexpressed grief for his mother that no one realised he was close to a nervous breakdown in 2013.
He became adept at smothering his misery with bravado — getting drunk in nightclubs, jumping off balconies, wearing unsuitable fancy-dress.
My favourite silly madcap moment in the book was when he swallowed a goldfish, whole, from one of the table decorations at Tiggy Legge-Bourke’s wedding when he was 15.
And now, the ‘Meghan Effect’, as Levin calls it. Living in the media spotlight became too much for Harry’s first two serious girlfriends, Chelsy Davy and Cressida Bonas. But the strong, American feminist activist, she feels, can handle it.
The world holds its breath, enchanted by the love these two people clearly feel for each other, excited by their heartfelt desire to make the world a better place, but (deep down) slightly alarmed by Meghan’s mothering instinct.
HARRY: CONVERSATIONS WITH THE PRINCE by Angela Levin (John Blake £18.99)
Levin uses the word ‘motherly’ or ‘mothering’ of Meghan, a divorcee, at least five times in the book.
It’s Harry’s ‘air of vulnerability and sadness’, Levin suggests, that has endeared him to so many of us and has brought out the mothering instinct in his fiancee.
‘She knows what he needs, which among other things is a bit of mothering.’
You could see this very motherly protective instinct in action during the couple’s first BBC interview, and during their first walkabout together in Nottingham, when Meghan clung on to Harry’s arm and stroked his back.
Levin quotes historian Dr David Starkey’s frank comment: ‘She mothers him a bit, but he needs it, and some women like to do it.’
She sounds a final disconcerting note by revealing that Meghan’s father, mother, half-sister and half-brother have all filed for bankruptcy at various moments in their lives.
The Queen is reported to have suggested that Meghan sign a pre-nuptial agreement to protect the Prince’s wealth: an idea that (according to a source) hurt Meghan and was rejected by Harry.
Let the wedding bells ring tomorrow, and let such concerns be forgotten.
