The brand later changed its name to Starburst - a move Harry deems “pure heresy." Two years older than me, Willy was the heir, whereas I was the spare.”Ĭhewy fruit-flavored candies Harry liked to eat in vast quantities during the Ludgrove ritual known as “Grub Day,” when students would line up after lunch and gorge themselves on candy piled high on a table. “My half of the room was smaller, far less luxurious," Harry writes. The name for the single bedroom shared by William and Harry at Balmoral, where the royal pecking order was obvious. After shampooing a boy the matron would ease back his head, give him a slow and luxurious rinse. Every boy had his own towel, embossed with his school number. “The matrons came down the row of tubs with stiff brushes, bars of floral soap. “I can still see the long row of white baths, each with a boy reclining like a pharaoh, awaiting his personalized hair-washing,” he writes. In one of the book’s most charged Freudian moments, Harry recalls the women who worked as “matrons” at the school and, like surrogate mothers, bathed prepubescent students in an elaborate and rather creepy ritual. Harry was enrolled at Ludgrove when his mother, Princess Diana, died. Ludgrove is a boarding school for boys between the ages of 8 and 13, located in Berkshire. What Prince William calls Harry, whose name is actually Henry. Who knew the Spice Girls could be so poignant? (Harry also quotes a surprisingly profound verse from their hit single "Wannabe": "If you want my future, forget my past.") Ginger was "the only Spice with whom I felt any connection," he writes, because of her red hair, obviously, but also her fondness for the Union Jack, the flag draped over Diana's coffin. As recounted in "Spare," Harry met the Spice Girls at a concert in South Africa shortly after his mother's death. Nom de guerre of Geri Halliwell, a member of the 1990s pop group the Spice Girls. As in, “Harry claims that William and Kate encouraged him to wear a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party in 2005.” It should not be confused with fancy dresses, like those Harry says Kate liked to wear, in contrast with Meghan, a barefoot-in-ripped-jeans kinda girl. What British people call costumes, for some reason. “Don’t read it, darling boy,” referring to erroneous tabloid coverage of the family). “Darling boy, mummy’s been in a car crash”) but also to dismiss his younger son’s concerns patronizingly (e.g. But his opinion of the queen’s long-suffering younger sister - the spare to an earlier heir - seems to have softened over the years: “Now and then, as I grew older, it struck me that Aunt Margo and I should be friends.”Ĭharles’ preferred term of endearment for Harry, used to relay difficult news in a sensitive manner (e.g. Aunt Margo, a woman he didn’t know well but who, he writes, “could kill a houseplant with one scowl.”Īt the time, the gift struck Harry as “cold-blooded,” and he doesn’t offer much insight into what she may have intended with the bizarre present. Harry recalls receiving a Biro - wrapped, for some reason, in a tiny rubber fish - as a present one Christmas from Princess Margaret, a.k.a. (Associated Press)Ī term for a common ballpoint pen, similar to a Bic. Prince Harry arrives in the gardens of Buckingham Palace in London, January 2020. Students dress in funereal black tailcoats and pinstriped trousers because “we were supposed to be in perpetual mourning for old Henry VI,” writes Harry, who felt out of place at such an elite place of learning despite his royal lineage: “Heaven for brilliant boys, it could thus only be purgatory for one very unbrilliant boy.” The uber-posh boarding school Harry and William attended was founded by King Henry VI in 1440 and has a complicated lexicon of its own (teachers are known as “beaks,” classes as “divs”). Club H was located deep in the bowels of the estate, beyond a wine cellar “wherein Camilla kept her fanciest bottles,” and a storage room containing “absurd gifts from foreign governments” that couldn’t be regifted or donated. Harry describes the castle in vivid detail, including the brownish tap water - “filtered and sweetened by the Scottish peat” - and the identical doors, which made it all too easy to barge in accidentally on his father doing headstands in his boxers.Ī bomb shelter turned windowless party lair at Highgrove, Charles’ country estate, where teenage Harry and Will consumed vodka and Red Bull with friends named Badger, Casper, Chimp and Skippy. It's also where Harry and his brother, Prince William, learned their mother, Princess Diana, had been killed in a car accident in 1997. The royal family’s estate in Scotland and the site of some of the most dramatic moments in "Spare." It is where Queen Elizabeth II died last year (shortly before Harry arrived - he wasn't invited on the family plane).
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