Tender words, a teddy: The things Harry’s book tells us about King Charles
London: Prince Harry’s book is on the shelves and flying off them according to his publisher, which said that Spare had become the UK’s fastest-selling non-fiction book of all time.
The media coverage has focussed on the Duke of Sussex’s bitter rift with his brother, Prince William, and father, King Charles, stemming from the dysfunctional way Buckingham Palace operates by encouraging rivalry leading to the royal households to leak against each other, according to Harry.
But the book also captures many surprising, tender and warm moments relating to the King.
A throwback tender picture of then Prince Charles with sons Prince Harry, left, and Prince William.Credit:Instagram/kensingtonroyal
Here are some of the more unexpected reveals in the prince’s memoir:
1. Charles calls Harry “darling boy”
Harry criticises his father for not being good at showing emotion and sharing feelings or hugs and says that his father was not made for single parenthood.
But it’s obvious Charles loves his son dearly and uses language to express his love, referring to his second son as “my darling boy”.
According to the book, Charles uses the words during some of the frankest conversations he has with Harry, repeatedly advising and later pleading with him not to read the negative press, something Harry consistently ignores, contributing to his deep hatred for the media.
Prince Charles and Princess Diana try to get their son Harry, 2, to smile to the cameras in Spain.Credit:Reuters/File
2. Charles carries his childhood teddy around
Spare focuses on the damage that royal life and “fancy captivity” has caused Harry throughout his life since the death of his mother Diana, aged 37, in 1997.
But we see fragments of the suffering and trauma caused to Charles by the way he was raised, and in particular, being sent as a young boy to Gordonstoun boarding school where he was bullied.
Harry recounts Charles telling him that he’d been “persecuted” by the other boys, that he “nearly didn’t survive” and that his father had relied on a teddy bear to get through it all.
He says Charles still owns that teddy.
“Teddy went everywhere with Pa. It was a pitiful object, with broken arms and dangly threads, holes patched up here and there,” Harry writes.
“It looked, I imaged, like Pa might have after the bullies had finished with him. Teddy expressed eloquently, better than Pa ever could, the essential loneliness of his childhood.”
King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, receives a new teddy bear from German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Bellevue Castle in Berlin in 2019.Credit:AP
3. Charles loves music and particularly classical composer Beethoven
Charles loves music and plays it on a portable CD player which he calls his “wireless”, according to Harry.
Classic music-lover Prince Charles on the cello in 1988.Credit:Syndication International/Archives
Just how much Charles loves music wasn’t apparent to Harry until recently, when he took his then future bride Meghan around to Charles and Camilla’s for a catch-up.
Charles and Meghan bonded over their love of music and in particular classical music. Meghan loves Frédéric Chopin while Charles’ favourite classical composer is Ludwig Beethoven.
4. Charles does headstands wearing only boxers
Harry says that Charles suffers constant pain in his back and neck from old polo sporting injuries.
We learn this detail early in Harry’s memoir as he recounts holidaying at Balmoral in summer with his grandmother, the late Queen Elizabeth II.
According to Harry, the King’s physio prescribed performing headstands as a way of alleviating the pain.
“He performed them daily, in just a pair of boxers, propped against a door or hanging from a bar like a skilled acrobat,” he writes.
This led to constant fears of accidentally walking in on him performing the exercises.
4. Charles has an Aussie chef
Harry talks often about eating food prepared by “Pa’s” chef as recounts his lonely bachelorhood living first with his father and now Queen Consort Camilla, later by himself in a flat and finally at Nottingham Cottage on the grounds of Kensington Palace.
He speaks of wearing a disguise and whipping to the local supermarket for groceries to prepare his own food. He memorised the layout of the supermarket so that he could get all his groceries in 10 minutes and minimise the risk of being spotted by photographers.
But on some occasions his father’s chef would prepare him meals and send them over. We later learn that Charles’ chef is Aussie. More evidence of the monarch’s good taste?
5. Charles loves Shakespeare but laughs in the wrong places
There is a delightful passage in Spare when Harry contrasts his own interests with those of his father. They are pretty much total opposites.
Bard-fan Charles, centre, applauds a performance at the Royal Shakespeare Company, in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in 2020.Credit:AP
“Pa didn’t merely enjoy books, he exalted them. Especially Shakespeare. He adored Henry V. He compared himself to Prince Hal,” Harry recounts.
Charles loves Shakespeare so much he gives a lecture peppered with quotes from the Bard’s works and takes Harry to performances in Stratford.
He urged Harry to read Hamlet but Harry was not keen on the idea.
“Hmm: Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper…? I slammed it shut. No, thank you,” Harry writes.
But Harry is pleased when cast in Much Ado About Nothing at Eton and Charles’ turns up to watch the performance.
“Opening night, my father sat dead centre 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,” Harry recounts.
Harry writes that later Charles praises his “darling boy” as wonderful and he tells him that he laughed at the wrong times.
Charles tells Harry that his own father, Prince Philip, turned up and did the same thing at his Shakespeare performance.
7. He seems to like his cologne a little too much
Charles loves scent but according to Harry wears a little too much of his favourite Eau Sauvage by Dior.
8. He prefers letters to phone calls
When Harry was in the army and serving in Afghanistan, he used his precious calls to home on the satellite phone to phone his then-girlfriend Chelsea, who he called Chels, and his father.
Prince Harry or just plain Captain Wales as he is known in the British Army, wears his monocle gun sight as he sits in the front seat of his cockpit at the British controlled flight-line in Camp Bastion southern Afghanistan.Credit:AP
But Charles eventually tells him that he prefers letters to phone calls.
“He asked me to write rather than call. He loved my letters. He said he’d much prefer a letter,” Harry writes.
Charles also returns the favour. Elsewhere in the book, Harry discusses Charles’ struggle to communicate with him verbally but that he’d go to bed and find a note placed under his pillow written by his father telling him how proud he was of his accomplishments.
9. He is a workaholic and often falls asleep at his desk
According to Harry, Charles is continually espousing the virtues of work and would stay at his desk burning the midnight oil dealing with all his correspondence.
“His own work was also a kind of religion because he was furiously trying to save the planet,” Harry writes.
“Countless times, late at night, Willy and I would find him as his desk amid mountains of bulging blue postbags – his correspondence.
“More than once we discovered him, face on the desk, fast asleep. We’d shake his shoulders and up he’d bob, a piece of paper stuck to his forehead,” Harry recalls.
Prince Harrry writes that he lived with his father Charles and stepmother Camilla before moving out.Credit:AP
10. Charles didn’t chastise Harry over Nazi and stripper incidents
You would think getting blasted by the press for wearing a Nazi costume to a fancy dress party might earn you a parental rap across the knuckles, and again for allowing yourself to be photographed by “dodgy casino calls” playing a round of strip snooker.
London newsagent Roy Ottoway reads a copy of tabloid ‘The Sun’, whose front page shows Prince Harry wearing a Nazi soldier’s uniform to a fancy dress party in 2005.Credit:AP
But Harry says Charles was sympathetic about both incidents when they occurred and said that young people made mistakes.
“To my surprise and relief he was gentle. Even bemused. He’d felt for me, he said, he’d been there.”
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