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No matter what Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, ever becomes in life, to millions of people all over the world he will always be Diana’s baby boy.
Harry seems fairly cognizant of this fact in his tea-spilling memoir “Spare,” in which he shares and sometimes overshares details about his life and the British Royal Family. Having read the book recently I can honestly say that I could have done without knowing that his father, now King Charles III, once upon a time stood on his head alone in his chambers while wearing only his boxer shorts. Or that Harry sustained frostbite while on a trek to the North Pole on a particularly sensitive area of the male anatomy.
Clearly Harry is still nursing the wound that opened when his mother died in a car crash in Paris on a late August night at the age of 36. Harry was only 12. His father broke the news to him. Harry didn’t cry until the day of her funeral when her body was lowered into the ground. His mother had been terribly afraid of the dark and she would be spending all eternity inside a lead-lined coffin sealed off from the light of the world. The princess was buried with a picture of her sons, “possibly the only two men who ever truly loved her,” Harry writes. “Certainly the two who loved her most. For all eternity we’d be smiling at her in the darkness, and maybe it was this image, as the flag came off and the coffin descended to the bottom of the hole, that finally broke me.”
Harry himself had a childhood fear of the dark. His father would soothe him by gently tickling his cheeks so that Harry could go to sleep. Charles was a hands-on father when the boys were young, chasing them until they squealed and rolling them up in blankets like they were human hot dogs. But his interest in being an active parent waned as he gave in to early dotage.
Harry dispels the myth that he and his brother William have been close all their lives. While they were both students at Eton, William insisted that they pretend not to even know each other. He only recalls hugging William only once and that was after Harry returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
Public displays of affection and emotion are two things verboten in the house of Mountbatten-Windsor. Harry was very fond of his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, whom he called Granny. During Her Majesty’s Golden Jubilee, marking her 50th year on the throne, Harry felt an overwhelming need to give his Granny a hug, but he knew in his heart she wasn’t the cuddly type. This was a woman who greeted Charles, a toddler at the time, with a handshake after touring commonwealth countries for nearly six months.
Like his mother, Harry has been on a quest for true love much of his adult life. Though he had several serious relationships, the women bailed on him when they realized they would be stalked by paparazzi and made fodder for the infamously tawdry British tabloids for the rest of their lives.
Harry still holds the paparazzi accountable for the death of his mother. The “paps” as he calls them chased the car in which she was a passenger into the tunnels under Paris.
Harry met Meghan Markle, an American actress with a white father and a Black mother, through social media. Apparently she was not made aware of just how vicious the “paps” and the British press could be. Soon after their marriage, the intrusiveness of the press and the “paps” was too much for her and Harry. The general snobbishness of the Royal Family toward Meghan was also a strain. When Meghan became pregnant with her first child, Charles wanted to know just how Black the child would be.
There are so many passages in which Meghan is described as sobbing uncontrollably, one might think that Harry is caring for an infant and not for a spouse.
The book is an explanation for Harry and Meghan’s departure from life as working Royals. They wanted to be free of the scrutiny of the prying press and being part of an institution that’s more factory than family. They retain their titles, but they are no longer royal highnesses. Diana left her sons an inheritance and Harry and his young family, which includes son Archie and daughter Lilibet Diana, have been living off that while Harry and Meghan pursue private conventional lives while courting the spotlight they both say they’re trying to escape.
One hopes that eventually Harry and Meghan will learn that they can’t expect to have their privacy respected when they have an obvious need to have their lives examined in detail through interviews, docuseries and publications.
Diana’s baby boy has a lot of growing to do.
