A royal duty, p.26
A Royal Duty, page 26
I returned home almost reluctantly. ‘If you want anything, just call me,’ I said.
The princess’s address book was packed with names from all walks of life. Whenever she met anyone for the first time, she could make them feel as if they had been a friend for life. Articles began to appear in newspapers, detailing her ‘charmed circle’. If the princess was spotted socializing with someone or attending a therapy session, journalists concluded there was a deep, lasting, best-of-friends association. The Boss had many friends, but there was only a small inner circle, headed by Lucia Flecha de Lima, who was best friend, mother-figure and counsellor rolled into one. Lucia’s husband, Paulo, had been transferred from London to the Brazilian embassy in Washington but even the different time-zones failed to send the friendship out of synch. Lucia would set her alarm for three o’clock in the morning so that she could talk to the princess at the start of her day. If the princess needed advice or consolation, she rang Lucia. I faxed a never-ending stream of letters and messages across the Atlantic to her. Being a friend to the princess meant being a friend on twenty-four-hour call and Lucia accepted this. She was there every single time for the princess.
‘I couldn’t cope without her. She’s marvellous. She’s like a mother to me,’ the princess said, time and time again. In August 1994, the princess went to Washington. In May 1995, Lucia came to London. At Christmas 1996, the princess stayed with Lucia. Back and forth across the Atlantic, that friendship bridged its long-distance divide and became stronger as time went on.
In London, the princess’s surrogate family came in the form of Rosa Monckton, Susie Kassem, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, Richard Kay and Dr Mary Loveday. These people, like myself, saw the princess at her most raw and knew everything in return for non-judgemental friendship. They understood her better than anyone else and loved her for the person she was.
The Duchess of York’s presence was a guaranteed pick-me-up for the princess. Wide-eyed and bounding up the stairs full of energy, she was a survivor, like the Boss, and there were constant phone calls of support between the two.
They sat in the sitting room, deep in serious conversation or laughing, comparing the knife wounds left in their backs by the royal household. I built up a vicarious trust with the duchess through the princess and a friendship developed. Even when she knew the Boss was out, the phone would ring in the pantry and the familiar, Sloaney voice would cheerily say: ‘Hi, Paul, it’s the duchess.’
She could be as confused about people’s motives as the princess. ‘Why do people say such hurtful things about me all the time? I don’t know what’s expected of me,’ she would say.
Like the princess, she believed in karma. ‘What comes around, goes around,’ they both said.
I listened to her like I listened to the princess, and felt terribly sorry for her. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘remember what the Boss says – kill people with kindness and never let them know they’re getting you down.’
I recall those conversations, over the phone or at KP, fondly every time I look at a framed picture the duchess sent me at the end of 1994, showing her with her little daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie. At the bottom, she wrote a special message: ‘Dear Paul and Maria, thank you so much for your incredible kindness and support. Words are not enough but thank you. With bestest wishes – Sarah.’
Outside the trusted circle of the princess’s closest friends, she knew exactly what to tell and what not to tell each person. Each one brought a specialism or an experience to the table, which meant she counted on their advice or wisdom. The princess compartmentalized her friendships and preferred to meet individuals one-to-one. Her friendships were like an assortment of boxes and I knew which box she was opening, why she was opening it and where it was ranked in her life. Being at the centre of her world meant becoming a trusted messenger. When the princess was away, she gave me permission to look through her address book, find a name, ring a number.
With Harold Brown gone and the princess wondering who around her she could trust, my role as butler began to evolve in 1995 into personal assistant, messenger, driver, delivery boy, confidant. I stepped in at times when she chose not to use her chauffeur, PR guru or private secretary because she didn’t want professional eyes witnessing certain friendships, messages or private missions.
‘Paul, stand by the fax machine now and don’t leave it until it’s all come through.’ The voice of the princess travelled down from the first-floor and reached me in the pantry.
1995 was the year when the princess trusted me to handle her correspondence, from the professional to the most personal and secret. She started to shield information from Patrick Jephson’s eyes and divert faxes from his office at St James’s Palace. She had heard a rumour that he was growing dissatisfied and seeking employment elsewhere. She confronted him with it and his response didn’t convince her that he would remain at KP indefinitely. She became wary and put a distance between them that was never bridged again. ‘How does he expect me to communicate with him on highly delicate and detailed discussions regarding my marriage and my future when I don’t even know whether he will be here in the future?’ she said. A new fax machine for the princess’s personal use was installed in her sitting room, placed on the carpet under her desk, hidden by the sofa positioned directly in front. There were numerous occasions when I walked into the sitting room to see her and found no one there.
‘Your Royal Highness?’ I called, turning to go into the drawing room.
‘I’m down here,’ said a voice from out of nowhere. The princess was on her hands and knees under the desk, trying but failing to operate the fax machine. Technology, like cooking, was not one of her strong points.
‘It’s hopeless. I’m hopeless!’ She would laugh with self-mocking humour.
After a few more weeks of facsimile frustration, the machine under the desk was abandoned. Instead, she started to utilize my machine downstairs, underneath my desk in the pantry. She handed me sensitive documents to send and wait for the replies to come through. She sent personal mail overseas by fax to ensure immediate receipt, instead of having to rely on drawn-out communication via the post.
On one occasion, she trusted neither the fax nor the post. ‘Paul, I would like you to deliver this letter by hand,’ she said, handing me a letter. I looked at the sealed envelope. The name was familiar. And so was the address – overseas.
My eyes conveyed my surprise at such a long-haul mission. ‘I know it’s a long way but it is important,’ she said.
‘Consider it done,’ I told her, and kept hold of the envelope until she left on a visit abroad. In the time she was away, I boarded another plane to a different destination for a two-day trip and dropped the letter into the hand that would pen the reply. By the time the princess returned to KP, I was back on duty to welcome her home.
‘Mission accomplished,’ I said.
In January 1995, the chattering classes were still ruminating over Prince Charles and his relationship with the mistress with whom he had confessed to having an affair, Camilla Parker Bowles. Speculation intensified when, eleven days into the new year, her divorce was announced from Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles following a two-year separation. But the princess’s attention and serious concern had been diverted elsewhere – to the relationship between her husband and his assistant Tiggy Legge-Bourke. Even the press was training its sights in her direction, further arousing the suspicions of the princess.
‘THE KISS’ was the front-page headline in the Daily Mirror, showing Prince Charles skiing with friends, which included Tiggy Legge-Bourke. In a series of photographs the prince, wearing a red bobble hat, put his arm around her and kissed her ‘in a show of affection’. His private secretary Richard Aylard explained to reporters: ‘It’s not unreasonable for him to kiss her on the cheek, it is perfectly ordinary.’
The princess didn’t agree and she felt the relationship was crossing the line far too soon after the assistant’s recruitment. In fact, so suspicious was she that she regarded Camilla Parker Bowles as yesterday’s news. She felt Tiggy Legge-Bourke was getting too close to Prince Charles as well as to William and Harry. As far as the princess was concerned, she was still married and two other women were circling dangerously around her territory.
Don’t ask me why I did it, but as everyone sent me cards and presents for my thirty-seventh birthday on 6 June 1995 I decided to send a gift to Mum in Grassmoor. I wanted her to receive a little something to mark the anniversary of my birth. Via a garden centre in Derbyshire, I arranged for the delivery of a stone trough filled with flowering plants to last the summer. A simple message dictated over the phone was written on a card and placed among the greenery.
When she opened the door of the same terraced house where I had grown up, she was, typically, wearing her pinny. ‘I think you’ve got the wrong house, duck. It’s not my birthday,’ she said, as Dad later told me.
Then she started to read my message and was overwhelmed. It wasn’t often Mum received flowers. It was the first time she had ever received them from me on my birthday and my words had moved her. When I heard her tearful joy over the telephone at KP that afternoon, I vowed to do the same every year. Two weeks later, she was raving about her blossoming trough in the garden when she and Dad came to the Old Barracks for the night before I drove them to Heathrow airport and waved them off on a dream holiday to America and Canada.
When the telephone rang at two o’clock in the morning on 15 June, my subconscious state told me it would be the princess, who was away on an engagement in Russia. She was the only person who ever phoned at such an unearthly hour. A crisis, personal or otherwise, must have happened. Maria got up to answer the telephone. Moments later, she was sobbing. ‘How am I going to tell him? How am I going to tell him?’
The princess! What’s happened? I shot out of bed and bolted across the landing into the sitting room where Maria was still on the telephone.
It was my brother Graham. Mum had collapsed in the street in Ottawa, Canada, and died instantly from a massive heart-attack. She was fifty-nine.
The next morning, the princess rang to check on life at KP where she was due to return two days later on the Saturday to be with William and Harry. As soon as I heard her voice, I broke down. ‘What on earth’s the matter, Paul?’ she asked.
In my devastation, I explained how Mum’s heart had given way, how she had seemed so healthy before she left. Then I told her how lost Dad was, stuck in Canada, struggling to organize the release of Mum’s body to return home.
‘Leave it to me, Paul. We’ll get on to it straightaway.’
One call from the Princess of Wales’s office to the British High Commission in Canada sorted all the technicalities that surround a sudden death in a foreign country. In the middle of a hectic schedule in Russia, the princess took charge of events in Canada to help the grieving in England. She even took the trouble to ring and speak to Dad in his hotel room in Ottawa. She spent around thirty minutes comforting him, reassuring him that someone from the high commission would be with him at all times, the release of the body was being organized and his flight back to Britain was paid for.
‘On your return, I would like you to come to London with your sons. I would like to see you,’ she told Dad.
As soon as the princess arrived back at the palace that Saturday, I was with her in the sitting room. I sat on the sofa, cried and apologized, and she sat down with a comforting arm round me. I had known how good, how strong, how compassionate she had been with others and there I was, embraced by that caring nature that had touched so many strangers over so many years.
She spoke about fate, the meaning of life, the meaning of death, her spiritual beliefs, the final moments she had shared in that hospital room with her friend Adrian Ward-Jackson, experiencing ‘the journey of his soul’. ‘Paul, the spirit stays around after death. Your mum is still with us. Believe in that. You’re strong. You need to be strong,’ she said.
The next day was Father’s Day. Dad and my brothers Graham and Anthony drove to the palace for that desperate weekend. Mum’s body was still in Canada, due to return the next day.
We met the princess at the police barrier on the drive. She was wearing a sweatshirt, purple cycling shorts and trainers, and she had left William and Harry in the nursery. She embraced Dad and my brothers one by one. Then, linking her right arm with Dad’s left, she said: ‘Let’s go for a walk.’
On that warm afternoon, Dad and the princess walked in front, we three brothers walking close behind. We went into Kensington Palace Gardens, up the Broad Walk running through the centre of the park towards Bayswater Road, then turned right within the park to the Italian Gardens, continuing through Hyde Park, past the Serpentine Gallery, towards the Albert Memorial, then back full circle to the palace. We were walking and talking, all five of us, for forty-five minutes.
Without a baseball cap, the princess was instantly recognizable. When a passer-by tried to take a photograph, she extended her arm politely and asked: ‘Please don’t.’
Despite his grief, Dad was concerned about the princess being exposed in a park. ‘You don’t have to do this for us. You’re being noticed. We should go back to the palace,’ he said to her.
‘Graham, I think I’ll be okay with your three strapping sons around me.’ I think that was the only time Dad raised a smile all weekend.
We walked back with the princess to the orangery beside the state apartments. ‘If there is anything I can do, Graham, just tell Paul.’ She embraced my family one last time, then disappeared through a door set in the brick wall. Dad couldn’t get over how kind the princess was, and how much time she had spent with us all.
Later that evening, Dad wanted to be alone and he went outside to sit on the bench on the green that stretched out in front of the Old Barracks. I looked down from the first-floor sitting-room window and there he was, with his back towards us. And the princess was beside him again. She had been returning home in her car when she spotted him from the drive. She had pulled over and walked across the green to join him. I looked down, thinking how odd it was to be watching my dad with her. I watched his head moving as he talked, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. Then he broke down, weeping on the princess’s shoulder.
Mum came home on the Monday. We buried her that same week. On the eve of the funeral, her coffin rested on the altar at Hasland Church where she was christened and married, and where Grandma and Grandad Kirk were buried. We filled the church with white flowers of every description. We lit candles in her memory. Each one of us then had a private moment. I stood and placed my hand on the polished wooden lid, bowed my head and closed my eyes, remembering what the princess had said: ‘Your mum is still with us.’
At the funeral we couldn’t see the coffin because it was covered with a wild garden of flowers. As the other relatives and friends drifted away after the service, I stood by the graveside with Graham. That was when he told me Mum’s secret: her decision to burn Cunard’s job offer.
We went back to No. 47 Chapel Road. Mum’s handbag and knitting were on a chair in the back near the fire.
As Dad flicked on the kettle and my brothers, sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews milled around the house, I sat down and opened her handbag. Inside, there was a powder compact with a Royal Yacht Britannia crest on the lid, a present from my days with the Queen, and a lipstick. The only other item was her battered red purse, which, typically, contained not one penny. But there was a folded card. It was the message I had sent in the stone trough on my birthday: ‘Mum, just a little something for suffering so much pain to bring me into the world on this day 37 years ago. With all my love, from your eldest – Paul X.’
Family was important to the princess, but it was unfortunate that hers was not as close-knit as her inner circle of friends. Her sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, was a regular visitor from Lincolnshire. Out of all the Spencers, she was the closest. Her mother, Frances Shand Kydd was a virtual recluse on the Scottish island of Seil but visited when she could. In fact, the princess saw more of her stepmother, Raine Spencer, than she did of her own mother and lunched with her at least once a month, sometimes at Cecconi’s, just off Bond Street, because that was her late father’s favourite restaurant.
But while there was a constant stream of visitors to KP, it did nothing to fill the silence in the late afternoons and early evenings when the princess might find herself alone. With William and Harry away at school or at Highgrove, the void had to be filled.
‘I hate the silence in this home,’ she said, as she sat reading Vogue or Harpers & Queen on a Saturday morning. Music filled some of the space but she missed the physical presence of what she called ‘the small people’. ‘Paul, ring your boys and ask them to come up,’ she said.
The sound of feet running around the apartment, the childish screams, the videos playing on the television, Harry’s PlayStation being hijacked, it all helped take away the loneliness. Alexander and Nick got the free run of a palace without knowing that, just by being there, they made the princess feel happier. ‘Do you want something to eat?’ the princess would ask them, leaning against the doorway of her boys’ sitting room, and she would go to Darren McGrady in the kitchen and ask him to feed two hungry boys their usual – burger and chips.
Alexander and Nick loved going to KP. They ran up the front drive, racing each other to the back door and into my pantry before bolting up the stairs to where the Boss would be waiting, more often than not on the telephone to a friend.
‘Hi, Princess.’
‘Hi, Princess.’
The double yell of my two boys would echo back down to me in the pantry.
