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She had been so high: the future Queen. Now she was still high, at least with the people we were meeting on the street, and the papers said she was a phenomenon – the looks of a supermodel and the heart of a saint. But I knew the truth.
I had seen many saintly things done in her name, and even if she was not exactly saint material herself – as she would be quick, even too quick, to agree – she had certainly done a lot of suffering. Not all of it had been done in public either, as some would have you believe. Now, however, she was floundering. Where once she had been the ideal young wife and mother, now she was a self-proclaimed adulteress. Where once she had been worshipped by charities, now she was worshipped for her photo-spreads. Where once she had summoned Air Force jets, now she cadged lifts in planes smelling of rich men’s cologne.
True, there were always going to be causes begging for this kind of celebrity patronage; and she had built up deep reserves of public sympathy. She still had that magical forgivability. But I knew these were the gifts more of others’ mistakes than of her shining virtues. I knew she had begun to believe her own publicity, just as I was believing it less and less. I feared that others, like me, were every day seeing more of the steady fraying of her fragile mental stability, and I felt there was now no way back to the happy certainties of my early days at the Palace.
How had it all changed? Eight years earlier it had all been so different – another world, almost another universe.
Autumn 1987. Somewhere on the long journey from Scotland I had lost my cuff links. Summoned from the frigate Arethusa while she was pausing in her patrol to refuel in a stormy west-coast sea loch, I had taken a boat, two buses, an aeroplane and a taxi to reach the Kensington hotel that was my base for the coming ordeal. Along the way the cuff links, with their family crest and a wealth of sentimental value, had disappeared, never to return.
Some frantic improvisation was called for. Dejectedly I substituted collar studs, one of the archaic pieces of kit which gave the Navy its charm for me. It seemed a bad omen, not least because in those days any meeting with royalty was a signal for sartorial precision of the highest order. This was no ordinary meeting either: it was a job interview. By some quirk of fate, I had been chosen – along with five others – as a candidate to be the next equerry to the Princess of Wales.
I knew little about what an equerry actually did, but I did not greatly care. I already knew I wanted to do the job. Two years on loan to the royal household would surely be good for promotion, and even if it was not, it had to be better than slaving in the Ministry of Defence, which was the most likely alternative.
I wondered what it would be like to work in a palace. Through friends and relatives I had an idea it was not all red carpets and footmen. Running the royal family must involve a lot of hard work for somebody, I realized, but not, surely, for the type of tiny cog that was all I expected to be.
In the wardroom of the frigate, alongside in Loch Ewe, news of the signal summoning me to London for interview had been greeted with predictable ribaldry and a swift expectation that I therefore owed everybody several free drinks.
Doug, our quiet American on loan from the US Navy, spoke for many. He observed me in sceptical silence for several minutes. Then he took a long pull at his beer, blew out his moustache and said, ‘Let me get this straight. You are going to work for Princess Di?’
I had to admit it sounded improbable. Anyway, I had not even been selected yet. I did not honestly think I would be. ‘Might work for her, Doug. Only might. There’s probably several smooth Army buggers ahead of me in the queue. I’m just there to make it look democratic.’
The First Lieutenant, thinking of duty rosters, was more practical. ‘Whatever about that, you’ve wangled a week ashore. Jammy bastard!’ Everyone agreed with him, so I bought more drinks.
While these were being poured, my eye fell on the portraits hanging on the bulkhead. There were the regulation official photographs of the Queen and Prince Philip, and there, surprisingly, was a distinctly nonregulation picture of the Princess of Wales, cut from an old magazine and lovingly framed by an officer long since appointed elsewhere. The picture had been hung so that it lay between the formality of the official portraits and the misty eroticism of some art prints we had never quite got round to throwing away. The symbolic link did not require the services of one of the notoriously sex-obsessed naval psychologists for interpretation.
As she looked down at us in our off-duty moments the Princess represented youth, femininity and a glamour beyond our grey steel world. She embodied the innocent vulnerability we were in extremis employed to defend. Also, being royal, she commanded the tribal loyalty our profession had valued above all else since the days of King Alfred. In addition, as a matter of simple fact, this tasty-looking bird was our future Queen.
Later, when that day in Loch Ewe felt like a relic from another lifetime, I often marvelled at the Princess’s effect on military people. That unabashed loyalty symbolized by Arethusa’s portrait was typical of reactions in messes and barracks worldwide. Sometimes the men gave the impression that they would have died for her not because it was their duty, but because they wanted to. She really seemed worth it.
So this is where she lives, I thought. I stood by the gates to Kensington Palace (or ‘KP’ as I came to call it) and looked up the long drive to where another set of gates – the security barrier – guarded the entrance to what is in fact a kind of royal compound.
The usual picture the public sees of KP is only one short face of a rectangular complex of buildings. Behind this facade – the favoured backdrop of TV reporters doing a Princess Di story – lies a warren of courtyards and gardens. Around these are an assortment of grand state apartments and smaller private apartments where the Waleses, Princess Margaret and other royal people have their London homes.
I suppose, if you have to live in a palace, this is the one to choose, in London at least. It sits at one end of Hyde Park, and if you look out of a window facing north, east or south the view is mostly of trees and grass. If you look west you can see the smart houses in ‘Millionaires’ Row’. Insulated from the noise of London’s traffic, I discovered that it was a tranquil spot, especially in summer. On a fine day the only noise was of birds and crackling police radios – sometimes punctuated by the shouts of William and Harry riding their bikes, or by the penetrating laughter of the Princess of Wales, as she stood at the front door telling a new joke to her personal protection officer before revving up her convertible and racing off.
I had imagined that the heir to the throne and his family would live somewhere elegant and spacious, in an atmosphere of restrained grandeur. I pictured French windows leading onto a lawn and perhaps a smaller version of the terrace I knew they had at Buckingham Palace. In fact, their apartment did not have much of a view at all. Tucked into the heart of the Palace complex, it was surprisingly dark. The Princess had a love–hate relationship with it. It was convenient for her public work and for shopping, and it was secure. But by 1987 it was the backdrop to a dying marriage and its walls had heard too many angry words.
Not only was the apartment dark and viewless, it was also surprisingly small. Everybody could hear everybody else. If you needed to get away from someone, there was just not enough space. The reception rooms were no bigger than you would expect in any smart town house and the private quarters were very unpalatial. Although I did not yet know it, the Prince had already moved out of the matrimonial bed and into his dressing room.
Most of the time the house was still. The Prince and Princess were usually out and the staff retreated to their places behind the scenes. Bursts of sudden activity broke the stillness, however. Every royal arrival or departure was marked by the slamming of doors, the bustle of domestic staff and, as often as not, the anxious pacing of the private secretary. Meanwhile, in the sewing room, the pantry, the kitchen and the nursery (not to mention the brushing room, the police room and the cellar) a large staff unobtrusively maintained a style of life that had changed little in a hundred years. Yet if you sent the staff home, closed the curtains and forgot to turn on all the lights, no amount of TV channels, loud music or ringing telephones could keep the darkness at bay.
Of course the house had been made comfortable – especially if you like lime-green carpet – but unless you had all the lights on, even in daytime it was gloomy. The Princess’s sitting room was the sunniest in the house. Its tall windows looked down on a pretty walled garden where she sometimes relaxed on summer evenings (though her favourite place for sunbathing was on the roof terrace). It also looked down on the front door so she could see or hear everybody approaching. She had very acute hearing. Inside, it was a grown-up version of a teenager’s room. There were two pink sofas by the fire and a smart writing desk by the window, but there were also soft toys, cushions that said ‘Good girls go to heaven – bad girls go everywhere’, and children’s school paintings on the walls. Every flat surface had photos, Halcyon Days enamel boxes or Herrend figurines crammed on to it. It was cheerful, girlish and very cluttered. It smelt good too. There were always flowers – lilies were a favourite – as well as potpourri and scented candles.
She must have been in her sitting room that day as I made my cautious approach to the anonymous black door that was to be my entrance to the world of the Waleses. I tried to look calm on the outside, as if I turned up at palaces every day, but inside I was quaking … and curious.
Before going back to the reality of my very different life in the Navy, I decided to enjoy this unexpected opportunity for as long as it lasted. I would use the chance to find out as much as I could about this woman who fascinated millions of people who had never met her and never would do so. I was not fascinated myself; not really. I already knew that would not be an advantage for anyone trying to work for her. But if I was going to have to meet this beauty, about whom I had unavoidably read and heard so much, I might as well make the most of the experience.
Nervously, I tried to check my reflection in the opaque window of the front door. I had an idea that equerries to Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales were several inches taller than me in their Gucci loafers and carried a reassuring air of labradors and sports cars. They certainly did not lose their cuff links.
Summoning up all my stiffening thoughts, I pressed the bell. I could not hear if it had rung, so after several minutes I pressed it again, just as the door opened to reveal the Prince of Wales’s butler. He was about my height and wore a dark blue jacket with the Prince of Wales’s cypher on the lapels. He looked politely unimpressed. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Come in.’
Later, I came to know Harold Brown well and grew to admire his professionalism. At home and abroad, he quietly bore the hundreds of little stresses that came with dealing with his royal employers at their less attractive moments. His gift as a mimic had me crying tears of laughter into my whisky on many foreign tours. That afternoon, however, he was every inch the guardian of his master’s privacy and impassively allowed me to follow him to the Equerries’ Room where I was to await the royal summons.
Like so much of the apartment, although undeniably comfortable and well appointed, the Equerries’ Room was dark. Clever effects had been achieved with concealed lighting, pastel colourings and flowers, but the over-riding impression was one of pervasive gloom.
Two people were already there – the Princess’s lady-in-waiting, Anne Beckwith-Smith, and her current equerry, Richard Aylard. They were there to examine me as a possible recruit to their exclusive way of life. During the last few days they had been examining five others as well, of course, so they were understandably distant, if polite.
I was polite too – this was surely part of the selection process – and determined, like the butler, to look unimpressed. But I did need to go to the loo. Badly.
Groping in the semi-gloom of the cloakroom, I became the latest visitor to fumble for the trick light switch on a fiendish trompe l’oeil before finding the real switch on the wall behind me. The humour continued on the other walls, where original cartoons celebrated the Prince of Wales’s talent for self-deprecation. Other pictures showed the Prince and Princess in mostly military group shots, and the image of country-house-style domestic harmony was completed with some equestrian prints. Looking more closely, however, I could not help noticing that even the most recent photograph must have been at least five years old and all the cartoons featured a distinctly bachelor Prince.
Of course I had read the tabloid rumours about the marriage – there had recently been a furore about a visit to a badly flooded area of Wales, when the couple’s visible estrangement had been more of a story than the floods themselves. Like practically everyone else in the wardroom, I had also tittered over Sylvie Krin’s imaginatively romanticized reports in Private Eye. But nobody really knew what was happening. Everybody just assumed that, whatever their private difficulties, the Prince and Princess would stoically maintain the outward unity that was expected of them.
Although schooled by my upbringing to view the monarchy with reverence – and still very much in awe of my surroundings – I already felt an inkling of critical detachment. Later, it was this ability to put some distance between myself and the job that helped keep me sane. Having no strong English ‘county’ background made this easier, I thought. So did the years I had spent living in the Irish Republic. Nevertheless, I happily accepted that if I was to become even a temporary member of the courtiers’ charmed circle I had to accept that royal people by definition exercise a supreme authority. It was an article of faith.
This was obviously a historical anachronism, but I rather liked that. Anyway, I felt quite sure that somewhere wise heads must long ago have worked out the answer to a nagging question. How, I wondered, would I reconcile that historical anachronism with the harsh realities of a world which did not swallow articles of faith quite as readily as it had in more deferential times? Perhaps, from my seat on the sidelines, I would learn how it was done.
Without apparent warning, we were on the move. Following the impassive butler up KP’s broad staircase – a steep hill of lime green with pink fleurs-de-lis – our conversation seemed suddenly too loud. As we approached the summit our voices fell to the self-conscious level you might hear in a church or a ward for the gravely ill. We were led into the drawing room, blinking against the sudden bright sunshine. In the glare I registered the room only as an overexposed negative. Impressions of family photographs, great art and pastel fabrics swam at me against the light. Conversation dwindled to nothing as we stood and fidgeted.
Suddenly a door at the far end of the room opened and the Princess of Wales entered at speed. Squinting horribly against the sun, I prepared to make my bow while trying desperately to see if she was even looking in my direction.
She was. I had seen the blue-eyed gaze in photographs, of course, and it lost none of its unsettling power at close range. When I looked again, though, I saw the gaze was tempered by an undeniable friendliness mixed with frank appraisal. In my peripheral vision I noticed some incidental details. She was wearing a cream cotton suit that set off her tan nicely. A bit too many rays on the chest, I thought absently, noticing a rosy tint to the even golden appearance. No jewellery.
Her handshake was cool and firm, my bow instinctive. In the distance somebody was introducing me. ‘It’s good of you to come all this way, Jeph,’ said the Princess. Even as I realized she had only misheard the introduction, I thought how nice it was that she used an old family nickname. As I was to learn, she seemed to have a knack for attracting such happy coincidences.
We went through to the dining room for lunch, and the same sun that had dazzled me in the drawing room bathed our small round table in a golden light. The Princess sat on my left, while Anne and Richard arranged themselves in the other seats. I took stock of my surroundings, trying not to goggle too obviously.
The KP dining room was tall and square, furnished with antiques and softened with pink and peach pastel fabrics. A complicated flower arrangement seemed to burst out of the middle of the table. Silver and crystal sparkled against the crisp whiteness of the napkins. Portraits from the Royal Collection looked down at the scene and I was just practising meeting their regal gaze unblinkingly when a voice on my left diverted my attention to the real thing.
‘I hope you like chicken,’ said the Princess. ‘I’m afraid we seem to have it all the time.’ This was true, I discovered later. At the time I was only aware that, for all I cared, I might have been eating the royal underfelt that no doubt lay beneath the deep-pile carpet. There were tiny potatoes and salad with the chicken, and white wine. I watched the Princess covertly for signs of an eating disorder, even though I had no idea what those signs might be. She seemed to eat like anybody else, and drank the wine too.
I now realized that the energetic flurry of our introduction was an affectation. As she probably intended, her breezy bonhomie blew away our nervousness. It also seemed to dispel an air of preoccupation that had hung about her as she entered the room. In later years I came to recognize the technique, which she often used to shrug off – however temporarily – the cares that beset her.
It was time to practise my small talk. ‘Are you looking forward to going to Germany, Ma’am?’ I had done some research and knew that she and the Prince were due to go on a tour the following week.
She nodded, but without much enthusiasm. ‘It’s an outing for my husband really,’ she said. (It was strange to hear him described like that, and it was the same when I first heard her mention ‘my mother-in-law’ or ‘Granny’.) ‘He gets a chance to meet his old rellies. Half the royal family’s German!’ She giggled. Later, when she was in trouble for buying a German rather than a British sports car, she joked, ‘Well, I’ve got a German husband, why can’t I have a German car?’
For me this was daring stuff. ‘Better be careful,’ I said. ‘Don’t mention the war.’
She laughed again – not because she recognized my Basil Fawlty quote but because she recognized that I had been trying to tell a joke. She laughed as a reflex, whether she understood it or not. Later I learned that she would laugh at anything. Sometimes I thought you could read her the phone book in a funny voice, then look at her expectantly, and she would laugh. She was that desperate to be happy. Happy people laugh a lot, so she would laugh whenever she could – and often when she should not.
This made her a quick pupil for anyone who had the nerve to tell her something really filthy or offensive. That was a double thrill for her – she could be shocked and amused at the same time. Smut was a sure-fire way of getting her to laugh. It would not be a natural, convivial sound, however, but a great, honking, nasal guffaw. The more offensive the joke, the more unattractive would be her reaction. She also enjoyed the shock she could achieve by repeating the worst from her collection. Needless to say, we did not plumb quite those depths on the first day. It took a week at least.
If I had expected a lively, informed debate about the function and purpose of a modern constitutional monarchy, I was wrong. This was a relief, although as a politics graduate I was keen to study the reality at close quarters. I felt like a medical student with a theoretical understanding of anatomy who is suddenly confronted by a real patient. Only in this case, I suspected that the patient was free to prescribe her own treatment.
Our conversation cantered along at a surprisingly easy pace. I gleaned little about my prospective duties, except that one of them at least was to fill a lunchtime with polite chat. Nor was I asked to reveal much about my own background. I assumed this was because she was already well briefed on my personal details, but later I realized she was not really very interested in where I came from, only in whether I would be bearable to have around for a year or so.
Like many of the family into which she had married, she only reluctantly acknowledged that her staff had a life either before or beyond their contact with her. Employees came and went with such rapidity that this was possibly an understandable reaction. Sometimes she certainly did make a conspicuous and generous effort to be a concerned employer – more so, in fact, than most other royal people – but it did not come naturally. In any case, nothing enforces the concept of royalty being different more effectively than a bit of healthy indifference towards the underlings.
The underlings, therefore, had to look after themselves. It did not take me long to realize that, whenever I was uncertain what to do next in any royal situation, usually the best option was to do nothing and enjoy whatever pleasurable compensations were to hand. A sense of humour was essential survival equipment in the palace jungle (but nothing too clever). So was an ability to enjoy food and drink.
To these I secretly added an ability to enjoy plane-spotting. It turned out to be quite useful. Many of my tensest moments were experienced in royal aeroplanes, but surprisingly often I could deflect the Princess’s fiercest rocket with a calculated display of nerdish interest in what I could see out of the window.
As it happened, I was able to indulge this lonely vice almost immediately as I caught the bus back to Heathrow. Farewells at KP were polite but perfunctory and Richard and Anne gave no hint as to the outcome of my interview. Richard ventured the comment that I had given ‘a remarkable performance’, but this only added to the general air of theatrical unreality. I was pretty sure I had eaten my first and last royal Jersey Royal.
Back in Scotland, my despondency deepened as I inhaled the pungent aroma of my allocated bedroom in the Faslane transit mess. It was not fair, I moaned to myself, to expose someone as sensitive as me to lunch with the most beautiful woman in the world and then consign him to dinner with the duty engineer at the Clyde Submarine Base. And how could I ever face the future when every time the Princess appeared in the papers I would say to myself – or, far worse, to anyone in earshot – ‘Oh yes, I’ve met her. Had lunch with her in fact. Absolutely charming. Laughed at all my jokes …’
Now thoroughly depressed, I was preparing for a miserable night’s sleep when I was interrupted by the wardroom night porter. He wore a belligerent expression so convincing that it was clearly the result of long practice. No doubt drawing on years of observing submarine officers at play, he clearly suspected he was being made the victim of a distinctly unamusing practical joke. In asthmatic Glaswegian he accused me of being wanted on the phone ‘frae Bucknum Paluss’.
I rushed to the phone booth, suddenly wide awake. The Palace operator connected me to Anne Beckwith-Smith. ‘There you are!’ she said in her special lady-in-waiting voice. ‘We’ve been looking for you everywhere. Would you like the job?’
TWO (#ulink_b8b83f24-9b52-5d43-a580-e686cccde169)
IN THE PINK (#ulink_b8b83f24-9b52-5d43-a580-e686cccde169)
Some events can be seen as milestones only in retrospect, while at the time they pass almost unnoticed. This was not such an event. The court circular for 28 January 1988 spelt it out in black and white: Jephson was going to the Palace and an insistent inner voice told me his life would never be the same again.
Reaction among my friends and relations was mixed. The American, Doug, thought it was a quaint English fairy tale. My father thought it inevitably meant promotion (he was wrong). My stepmother thought it was nice (she was mostly right). My brother thought it would make me an unbearably smug nuisance (no change).
Although I would never have admitted it, I thought I must be pretty clever, and I apologize belatedly to everyone who had to witness it. That was lesson one: breathing royal air can seriously damage your ability to laugh at yourself. It is sometimes called ‘red carpet fever’ and usually only lasts a few months, but severe cases never recover and spend the rest of their lives believing in their own acquired importance.
I reported to the offices of the Prince and Princess at the end of April. In those halcyon days their staff occupied a joint office in St James’s Palace. The couple shared a private secretary, a comptroller, a press secretary and numerous administrative officials who helped run an organization some hundred strong. They themselves lived at KP and made the journey to ‘SJP’ when required.
In the Prince’s case this was frequently and – unlike his wife – he kept an office at St James’s for the purpose. Given the clutter of books and papers with which he usually surrounds himself, this elegant room – all limewash panelling and thick carpet – seemed strangely anonymous, its few personal touches almost an afterthought. The cleverly concealed lighting and carefully selected antiques seemed to have taken priority. Its enormous desk was naked but for a photo of William and Harry, while from the mantelpiece an unusual triple-portrait photo of his mother, aunt and grandmother looked down on the inmate with matronly appraisal. The place smelt of polish and expensive fabrics and in every way satisfied what I suppose are masculine preferences in orderliness and understated good taste. It was a constant reminder – along with its equivalent in cars, clothes and other accoutrements – that the heir’s cares were shouldered in at least tolerable comfort.
The penalty of operating out of two palaces was the amount of time – and often anxiety – expended on getting from one to the other. My tendency to plan journeys to coincide with the sedate passage of the Household Cavalry always raised my blood pressure. I almost came to believe that the Mounted Division only ventured out in splendour to block Constitution Hill when they had word that the Princess had summoned me to an urgent meeting in KP.
There were benefits too. Even the most conscientious private secretary could sometimes be grateful that his boss kept at a distance from the office. Moreover, when peace and quiet and decent coffee were elusive at SJP, I often took refuge in the tranquillity of the KP Equerries’ Room. The house staff always kept a warm welcome and would let you raid the pantry. Also, more often than I cared to admit, it was useful to be ‘unobtainable’ while stuck in traffic somewhere on Kensington Gore, although the fitting of mobile phones to office cars made this an increasingly dodgy excuse.
The Wales household occupied offices in St James’s that had previously been used by the Lord Chamberlain’s Department. The previous occupants’ more sedate tastes were apparent in the dense brown carpet and heavy furniture. Against the sober backdrop of high ceilings, ornate plasterwork and yellowing net curtains the youthful Wales staff sometimes seemed like children who had set up their office camp in an abandoned gentlemen’s club. The average age could not have been more than 22, and the secretaries were almost without exception from backgrounds where girls were expected to be seen and heard and enjoyed being both.
At that time the office worked as one unit with Their Royal Highnesses’ private secretary – the genial Sir John Riddell – presiding over a team which, on the surface at least, owed equal loyalty to both. I soon discovered, however, that the Princess’s small component was still regarded as a minor addition to what was essentially an enlarged bachelor establishment. This was especially evident in the planning of joint programmes, when, as if part of the natural order, the Princess’s requirements took second place – and sometimes not even that, unless the Prince’s staff were gently reminded of her involvement. Despite this, thanks to a lot of goodwill, it was an addition that was loftily tolerated, despite its perceived irrelevance to the main work of the organization.
The private secretary’s room lay at one end of a string of smaller offices on the first floor of York House. At the other end a swing door separated us from the decidedly grown-up world of the Central Chancery of the Orders of Chivalry. Between the two I found offices for the deputy private secretary, the comptroller and the lady-in-waiting, interspersed with larger shared offices for lowlier forms of life such as equerries and secretaries.
My predecessor Commander Richard Aylard and his opposite number, the Prince’s equerry Major Christopher Lavender, shared an office that seemed to be the size of a small ballroom, inelegantly partitioned to make a small adjoining space for three secretaries (or ‘lady clerks’ in Palace-speak). I was planted behind a small table in a corner, from which I could observe the veterans at work. Now, I thought, I’ll find out what an equerry actually does.
Many people then – and since – made dismissive comments about equerries being needed only to hand round gin and tonic or carry flowers for the lady-in-waiting, both tasks being about on the limit of my perceived ability. I performed these tasks on numerous occasions, but even at the outset I knew there must be rather more to a job which provoked such envy and contempt. I had an idea – reinforced by a helpful introductory letter from Richard – that I was expected to help implement the Princess’s programme and generally act as a kind of glorified aide-de-camp.
Listening to the confident instructions being rapped out by Richard and Christopher in a series of seemingly incessant phone calls, I was gripped by panic. How would I ever know what to do? How would I ever develop the easy blend of nonchalant authority and patient good humour that seemed to be the better courtier’s stock in trade? Especially when all the time my novice high-wire act would be under unblinking scrutiny from royal employers, sceptical colleagues and – worst of all – the royal press pack.
My panic deepened as I contemplated my first task. Thinking he was easing me in gently, Richard had thoughtfully given me the job of writing a memorandum to the Princess outlining programme options for a forthcoming visit to the West Country. I stared transfixed at the notepad in front of me, my mind as blank as the paper. The letterhead grandly announced the writer as ‘Equerry to HRH the Princess of Wales’ and I dumbly wondered if I would ever have the temerity to sign anything that followed.
Eventually a lucky inspiration came to me. On the pretext of familiarizing myself with the office filing system (a feat still incomplete seven years later), I sauntered into the secretaries’ room. The girl-talk came to a temporary halt as three laughing pairs of eyes appraised me.
‘We’ve decided to call you PJ,’ the senior secretary said. ‘We can’t possibly call you Pat in the office and there’s already a Patrick in BP.’ Thinking of other things I could – and no doubt would – be called, I decided to accept this tag without protest. The secretaries’ nicknames were acutely observed and tended to become universally accepted. Compared to some, I was fortunate.
‘Can I help you, PJ?’ asked the girl with the eyes that laughed the most. Jo had already been introduced as my secretary and was thus a crucial partner in the adventure that was about to begin. I explained my predicament and she rummaged in a filing cabinet that I could not help noticing seemed to act as an overflow for her handbag as well as secure storage for sensitive papers.
‘We’ve got some examples here somewhere which you could copy …’ With a triumphant toss of chestnut hair and a jangle of bracelets, she handed me some files in the distinctive dark red of the Wales office. ‘When you’ve drafted it, I’ll type it for you. But we’d better get a move on. The Bag closes in half an hour.’
This was obviously an important piece of information. I checked the instinct to rush back to my desk and instead asked what the ‘Bag’ was. The girls looked at each other significantly. ‘That is the Bag.’ A manicured nail indicated a red plastic pouch the size of a small pillowcase. It sat in isolation on one of the less cluttered shelves next to a basket of papers on which I could glimpse Anne’s distinctive writing.
The Bag came to rule my life. It was the main means of written communi-cation with KP and so carried the whole catalogue of information, advice, pleading, cajoling and obfuscation which seemed to comprise our output. It also carried our letters of petition, contrition and – occasionally – resignation. These were mixed with bills, pills, fan mail, hate mail, and any private mail that had not already gone directly to the KP breakfast tray. Those envelopes had to be delivered unopened on pain of death, but it was by no means obvious which were entreaties from ardent suitors and which were complaints about office incompetence from loyal subjects. A secretary who could sniff the difference (sometimes literally) was worth her weight in gold.
In return the Bag welcomed us each morning with the overnight products of the royal pen. Schoolday comparisons with waiting for prep to be marked were inescapable, especially when alternative programmes such as the one I was struggling to draw up for the day in the West Country had been submitted for consideration.
The art, I discovered, was to submit the options in a way which led the Princess imperceptibly to the desired choice. The quickest way to learn that art was to watch what happened at the receiving end. Often, when I had been out with her all day, the Princess would find the Bag waiting in the car that came to collect us. It could be a tense moment. If we had enjoyed a good day, a bad Bag could take the shine off it in a second; and it took a very good Bag indeed to restore shine to a day that had been lousy.
She would snap the little plastic seal, pull back the heavy zip and delve inside. Balancing the inner cardboard file on her lap, she quickly sorted the papers into piles. Fashion catalogues or designers’ bills were dealt with first; then press cuttings; then loose minutes from the secretaries about things like therapists’ appointments or school events for the boys; then personal mail – some of it saved for private reading later; then real work – memos from me that required a decision, outline programmes, draft speeches, invitations, suggested letters … the list was endless.
She would hold out her hand for my pen, then go to work. She was quick and decisive – and expected me to be the same. This was at least partly to draw a distinction between herself and the Prince, whose capacity to sit on paperwork was legendary.
What worked best was to reduce a complicated question to a few important points – the bits she really had to know – and then offer two alternative answers. It was pretty basic staffwork, but quite intellectually satisfying. Soon I could anticipate fairly accurately her reaction to most questions. If I expected her to go for option A (‘Yes please’) but for reasons too complicated to explain I wanted her instead to pick option B (‘No thanks’), all I had to do was explain that A, while superficially attractive, risked controversy/conflict with another member of the royal family/bad press. ‘We don’t want to do that, do we, Patrick?’ she would say and I would look judicious, as if weighing up the pros and cons, and then agree with her. The pen would mark a big tick next to option B and everybody would be happy.
Mind you, she would not have been the Princess of Wales if there had not also been times when she would do the exact opposite out of spite. It seldom had anything to do with the pros and cons then. Eventually, however, I could sometimes predict these moods too. Then the procedure was reversed: all I had to do was extol the virtues of option A and she would automatically tick option B. It was a great game.
Much later, the game became less fun. The Princess bought a shredder and would unblushingly destroy papers that displeased her, then accuse me of not showing them to her in the first place. This enabled her to claim that she was not being supported, that her office (me) was incompetent, etc., etc. After a few such happy experiences, I learned to keep duplicates of anything that might end up in her shredder. I would then produce them when the original mysteriously ‘disappeared’. She hated that.
On my first day, of course, I knew none of this. Back at my temporary desk, I perused the files Jo had given me. One, labelled simply with ‘Merseyside’ and a date, was thick with papers and looked as if it had already made several arduous journeys to Liverpool in the rain. The other was pristine, contained two small sheets of pink paper and was labelled ‘Savoy lunch’.
‘Merseyside’ looked more promising, so, ignoring the background sounds of efficient equerries at work, I delved into its dog-eared contents. These read rather like a story whose plot assembles only gradually. Some characters – such as the Prince and Princess – we already know from previous novels in the series. Others we know by title if not yet as distinct personalities – the Lord Lieutenant, the Chief Constable, the local director of the Central Office of Information. Others again are complete new-comers whose place in the coming narrative is tantalizingly obscure. Will the leader of the Acorns Playgroup outbid the chairperson of the Drug Awareness workshop in the competition for the selector’s eye? Are the patronages they represent in or out of favour and will this affect their chances? Or will all be bulldozed aside by the requirement to fête the opening of a semiconductor factory whose oriental masters might repeat their largesse in another unemployment blackspot if given sufficient royal ‘face’?
Such musings crowded into my mind as I composed my first memo for the Bag. What style would be best? I had already seen a document addressed to the Queen in which, as precedent demands, the writer opened with the sonorous ‘Madam, With my humble duty …’ and, although I relished such verbal quaintness, it did not seem right for the lively Princess who had given me lunch. The examples I found in the ‘Merseyside’ file were more reassuring, opening with a simple ‘Sir’ or ‘Ma’am’ and proceeding to describe complex choices in simple, straightforward English. The only peculiarities I noticed were neat abbreviations for unwieldy royal titles (‘YRHes’ for ‘Your Royal Highnesses’) and a brisk respectfulness (‘As YRH will recall …’).
Eventually Jo forced me to hand over my meagre draft. Once printed on thick office stationery, its tentative phrases took on an air of authority which quite had me fooled until I saw my signature at the bottom. Early days, I thought to myself, as I saw it committed to the Bag which was then promptly sealed. ‘I’m going to the High Street during lunch so I can drop the Bag at KP nice and early. You never know, we might get it back this afternoon,’ said Jo, making for the door.
I returned to my corner and sought comfort in thoughts of lunch. Suddenly the phone on my desk rang. I went into shock. It had not rung before. What should I do now? Everybody else was already talking on their own phones, so this one was down to me.
It rang again, sounding louder. In my nervous, beginner’s state it even sounded royal. I picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’ I said, clearing my throat. That didn’t sound very pukka, I thought.
‘Hello?’ said a man’s voice. It was crackly and faint, but vaguely familiar. ‘Who’s that?’ The voice sounded rather tetchy.
‘Who’s calling?’ I asked, trying to sound as if I was getting a grip.
‘It’s the Prince of Wales speaking,’ said the voice. Definitely tetchy. Panic.
‘Oh … sorry Sir. Um …’
Richard had finished his call and, from the far side of the room, his antennae had already picked up my plight. Dabbing a key on his fiercely complicated-looking phone, he cut in smoothly. ‘It’s Richard here, Sir …’
I imagined I could hear the relief in His Master’s Voice. What a great start, I thought.
The phone came to rule my life just as much as the Bag and, by its nature, it proved a shrill and insistent mistress. I admit now that I was too often ready to allow my patient secretaries to screen calls, so I was left at the end of the day with a callback list which reproachfully catalogued awkward conversations shirked and good news still untold.
My excuse – and it seemed a good one – was that I was fully occupied with priority calls, mostly from the Princess. She was a virtuoso with the instrument and I quickly came to measure the mood of the day by the first syllable of her morning greeting. It might have been telepathy, but I sometimes felt as if I knew just from the sound of the ringing tone that it was her. Taking a deep breath, I would pick up the receiver. Sometimes she would come straight through, calling from the car or her mobile. At other times she would be connected by the Palace switchboard.
The familiar voices of the imperturbable operators could spark a reply in neat adrenaline. I became quite good at interpreting the subtle nuances of their voices too. Some are indelibly linked in my mind to traumatic events of which they were the first harbingers. Invariably kind, often humorous, sometimes wonderfully motherly, they must have assisted unwittingly at many executions. On a shamefully rare visit to their subterranean den, I was not surprised to see knitting in progress.
