Jesteśmy społecznością, która kocha książki

My existence was just fun and games to these people. I wasn’t a human being to them. I wasn’t a fourteen-year-old boy hanging on by his fingernails. I was a cartoon character, a glove puppet to be manipulated and mocked for fun. So what if their fun made my already difficult days more difficult, made me a laughingstock before my schoolmates, not to mention the wider world? So what if they were torturing a child? All was justified because I was royal, and in their minds royal was synonymous with non-person. Centuries ago royal men and women were considered divine; now they were insects. What fun, to pluck their wings.

I’d think: More of this, please. More fire, more talk, more loud laughter. I’d been scared of darkness all my life, and it turned out Africa had a cure.
The campfire.

Two years older than me, Willy was the Heir, whereas I was the Spare.
This wasn’t merely how the press referred to us—though it was definitely that. This was shorthand often used by Pa and Mummy and Grandpa. And even Granny. 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 was twenty the first time I heard the story of what Pa allegedly said to Mummy the day of my birth: Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an Heir and a Spare—my work is done. A joke. Presumably. On the other hand, minutes after delivering
this bit of high comedy, Pa was said to have gone off to meet with his girlfriend. So. Many a true word spoken in jest.

When my wife and I fled this place, in fear for our sanity and physical safety, I wasn’t sure when I’d ever come back.

Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past. The past is never dead. It’s not even past. When I discovered that quotation not long ago on BrainyQuote.com, I was thunderstruck.

Succession was like the weather, or the positions of the planets, or the turn of the seasons.

Being a Windsor meant working out which truths were timeless, and then banishing them from your mind. It meant absorbing the basic parameters of one’s identity, knowing by instinct who you were, which was forever a byproduct of who you weren’t.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.

Most of my teachers were kind souls who just let me be, who understood all that I was dealing with and didn’t want to give me more.

The only thing we asked in return was that he not marry her. You don’t need to remarry, we pleaded. A wedding would cause controversy. It would incite the press. It would make the whole country, the whole world, talk about Mummy, compare Mummy and Camilla, and nobody wanted that.

Being royal, it turned out, wasn’t all that far from being onstage. Acting was acting, no matter the context.
Opening night, my father sat dead center in a packed Farrer Theatre and no one had a better time. Here it was, his dream come true, a son performing Shakespeare, and he was getting his money’s worth. He roared, he howled, he applauded. But, inexplicably, at all the wrong moments. His timing was bizarrely off. He sat mute when everyone else was laughing. He laughed when everyone else was silent. More than noticeable, it was bloody distracting. The audience thought Pa was a plant, part of the performance.

(…)the Palace stuck fast to the family motto: Never complain, never explain.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

The thing I found endlessly mesmerizing about the stars was how far away they all were. The light you saw was born hundreds of centuries ago. In other words, looking at a star, you were looking at the past, at a time long before anyone you knew or loved had lived.
Or died.
Or disappeared.

Once upon a time, this was going to be my forever home. Instead it had proved to be just another brief stop.

Long before she was Princess Diana, back when she was simply Diana Spencer, kindergarten teacher, secret girlfriend of Prince Charles, my grandfather was her loudest advocate. Some said he actually brokered my parents’ marriage. (…)
Then again, maybe our mother would be here. If she hadn’t married Pa...

I recalled one recent chat, just me and Grandpa, not long after he’d turned ninety-seven. He was thinking about the end. He was no longer capable of pursuing his passions, he said. And yet the thing he missed most was work. Without work, he said, everything crumbles. He didn’t seem sad, just ready. You have to know when it’s time to go, Harry.