Poor Harry Windsor

The announcement by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex that they intend to step back from senior roles in his family’s firm and become financially independent came as a surprise to the entire world if you believe what you read in the British tabloids. It didn’t shock me that Harry and Meghan would try to draw boundaries around their family, especially when you consider the nature of the trauma of his childhood, although it’s possible I have read more about the royals than is good for me. 

My latest novel The True Story of Maddie Bright (Lost Autumn in the US and Canada, both great titles!) touches on events in the lives of two other royals, Edward VIII, who abdicated to marry an American divorcee, and, later, Harry’s mother Diana, who was killed in a car accident when the drunk driver in charge of her security crashed into a concrete pylon.

I was interested in Edward and Diana because my last novel Swimming Home had been about the first women to swim the English Channel who were, oddly, the first ever celebrities, at a young age, about Diana’s age when she met Charles. Their lives were ruined by the fame attending their swimming. I wanted to explore what happens to people we make into celebrities because while it might have started with swimmers in the early twentieth century, our hunger to raise people up and knock them down is ever more voracious and fickle. We are becoming meaner, and Rupert Murdoch and the internet have helped us on that perilous journey. 

Edward and Diana were both loved by people but hated by the royal family, or at least by the staff who manage the firm’s agenda. Members of the public who met either of them talked about their charisma, charm, an aura or glow. You wanted to be with them. You couldn’t stop looking at them. They were beautiful, ethereal, angelic. It’s possible they both suffered mental illness—Diana talked about her mental health issues a number of times— and both came from traumatic childhoods. As a child, Edward was cared for by a series of nannies, sadistic or obsessed with him, and by his own account never felt he was a grownup. Diana’s mother left her husband who then sued for sole custody of Diana, six, and her brother Charles, four. In a brutal court battle, Diana’s mother lost access to her children and they lost access to their mother.

In my research, I watched every bit of footage of Diana. It was as if her entire adult life was lived in the public domain, which is hard to conceive of, even if you have a glancing experience of public life. While her nineteen-year-old’s engagement dress stays in my mind because it’s a size too large—as if she’s a girl trying to make herself bigger and more important—the footage that upsets me most was taken on a ski slope in the year before she died. She is pleading with a camera-man to allow her sons some privacy. While at nineteen she is hope personified, at thirty-six, she knows the world. He continues filming, of course, and I continue watching (yes, the irony hasn’t escaped me).

The job of a novelist in many ways is kindness. You have to be able to understand and empathise with your characters or you can’t have them jump off that cliff and really feel afraid, and you can’t have them be taken advantage of and still believe in goodness with them. I did my best to understand how Edward’s life was shaped and how he became the poor wretched soul he became. And with Diana, I tried to understand the heart of a girl, a nineteen-year-old girl, so very young, offered that pandora’s box of life as a princess. 

Harry was twelve when he was woken one Sunday morning to be told about his mother’s death. By his own account, no one mentioned it after that, not even the pastor at the Sunday church service he attended with his father and brother and grandparents. It was likely well-intentioned, but imagine being twelve and trying to figure that out. Later that day, he had to ask his father if his mother really was dead. And then, the next Saturday, he marched behind her coffin while the entire world watched. 

For many years, Harry said little about the effect of his mother’s death on his life, but what he has said recently would resonate with anyone who understands trauma and its lifelong impact. In a discussion with his brother promoting their commitment to mental health charities, he mentioned feeling angry and getting help to deal with his feelings in his twenties. Interviewed by his friend journalist Tom Bradby last year, he said that every time he hears the click of a camera, he is taken back to what happened. ‘I lost my mother and now I am watching my wife fall victim to the same powerful forces.’ Imagine what that would feel like. No wonder he is seeking a different life.  

Yes, yes, I know he was born to wealth and privilege and a system of inherited government is just so silly. But wealth and privilege don’t make you happy and fame doesn’t either and while we give lip service to people’s mental health and the need to understand, when faced with Harry’s telling someone he is at risk, the response in the media has been cry me a river and who’s paying the bill? Harry was once a boy with a boy’s sensibility, trying to navigate the entire world through terrible loss and now, by his own account, he is terrified it’s going to happen again.

Two songs in a row by the same artist from the same album came up on my playlist this week. On this occasion it was John Lennon’s Watching the Wheels, followed by Beautiful Boy about Lennon’s son Sean, both from the Double Fantasy album. Lennon famously turned his back on fame and set up in an apartment on Central Park with his wife Yoko Ono and their son. He stopped taking drugs, touring and recording. We lost his great good voice for a period. When he came back, in 1980, he released Double Fantasy which is a gift to the world. Those two songs in particular are perfect. A month after the album was released, in the year of his fortieth and his son’s fifth birthdays, Lennon was shot dead by a deranged fan.  

Meghan Markle, in the interview with Tom Bradby, said she’d tried to keep a stiff upper lip in response to the way she has been written about in British newspapers. She was more vulnerable when pregnant and then mother of a newborn. She said she wasn’t sure that keeping a stiff upper lip was healthy. She survived, but the point surely is to more than survive. You’d hope to thrive. 

In the song Beautiful Boy, Lennon is surrounding his son with himself, protecting him. He’s keeping him safe crossing the road, after a bad dream, facing a difficult world. It’s what parents do. It’s what, I suspect, poor Harry Windsor is trying to do. I hope he finds what he is looking for, and along with his grandmother, I wish him and his new family peace. 

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Lost Autumn (look at that cover below!) will be published in the US and Canada from 3 March, out now in Australia as The True Story of Maddie Bright (look at that cover below that cover!).