Patel

Charles chapter 2

Chapter 2

Charles had middling success in his coursework—with the exception of his declamatory ability—but he found a creative refuge in the art room presided over by a kind and somewhat effete master in his 20s named Robert Waddell. The prince gravitated toward pottery rather than painting—“like an i***t,” he later said. Classical music served as a balm as well. His grandmother had taken him to see a concert by cellist Jacqueline du Pré, inspiring him to take up the instrument at age 14. “It had such a rich deep sound,” he recalled. “I’d never heard sounds like it.”

Gordonstoun nearly extinguished Charles’s budding interest in Shakespeare, as he and his classmates “ground our way” through Julius Caesar for standardized tests. The Bard came alive only after the arrival in 1964 of a new English master, Eric Anderson—like the art teacher Waddell, also in his 20s—who encouraged Charles to act in several of Shakespeare’s dramas. In November 1965 he played the lead in Macbeth. His interpretation, said Anderson, evoked “a sensitive soul who is behaving in a way that is really uncharacteristic of him because of other forces.” Charles was excited about the prospect of his parents’ coming to see a performance. But as he “lay there and thrashed about” onstage, he wrote in a letter, “all I could hear was my father and ‘Ha, ha, ha.’ ” Afterward, he asked Prince Philip, “Why did you laugh?” “It sounds like the Goons,” said his father—a dagger to the heart of a young man so eager to please.He similarly disappointed Philip in team sports, although he did develop considerable skill in the more solitary pursuit of fishing, along with traditional upper-crust shooting. At 13, Charles shot his first stag, steeling himself to the sight of the beast being eviscerated by servants on the hillside at Balmoral.

In 1961, he took up polo, eager to follow his father. “I was all for it,” said Charles. “At least you stay on the ground”—as opposed to jumping over fences in fox-hunting. By 1964, Charles was applying himself to the sport more seriously. That year, he also started playing practice matches with Philip at the Household Brigade Polo Club, on Smith’s Lawn, at Windsor Great Park. Still a censorious figure, Philip nevertheless was idolized by Charles. The young prince began to mimic his mannerisms—walking with one arm behind his back, gesturing with his right forefinger, clasping his hands for emphasis, and pushing up the sleeve of his left arm.With renewed determination to give his son backbone, Philip made the unusual decision to send him to Australia at age 17 for two terms in the outback at Timbertop, the wilderness branch of the Geelong Church of England Grammar School, in Melbourne. Other than a trip on the Britanniato Libya, at age five, it was Charles’s first time leaving Europe.

Philip assigned David Checketts, his equerry—an aide-de-camp entrusted with logistics—to supervise his son’s stay Down Under. Unlike other royal advisers, the 36-year-old Checketts was decidedly middle-class. The product of a state-run grammar school, he had served in the Royal Air Force. His down-to-earth manner put the uncertain prince at ease.

Charles and Checketts arrived in Australia in early February 1966. They were greeted by a daunting contingent of more than 300 reporters and photographers that the prince endured with gritted teeth. At Timbertop he shared a bedroom and sitting room with a handpicked roommate, Geelong’s head boy.

The prince was liberated by the informality of a country where, as he quickly discerned, “there is no such thing as aristocracy or anything like it.” For the first time, he was judged on “how people see you, and feel about you.” Students and masters treated him as one of them, and to his surprise he felt little homesickness. He was mildly teased as a “Pommie,” Australian slang for Englishman, but faced none of the sadistic hazing endemic at Gordonstoun.

The boys did only a modicum of studying. Timbertop was all about physical challenges, which Charles now embraced with surprising success. He undertook cross-country expeditions in blistering heat, logging as many as 70 miles in three days—climbing five peaks along the way—and spending nights freezing in a sleeping bag. He proudly relayed his accomplishments in his letters home.He encountered leeches, snakes, bull ants, and funnel-web spiders, and joined the other students in chopping and splitting wood, feeding pigs, picking up litter, and cleaning out fly traps—“revolting glass bowls seething with flies and very ancient meat.” It was a more physically testing experience than Gordonstoun, “but it was jolly good for the character and, in many ways, I loved it and learnt a lot from it.” On his own terms, in the right circumstances, he showed his toughness and proved to his father that he was not, in fact, a weakling.

On weekends he relished ordinary life with David Checketts’s family at the farm they rented near the small town of Lillydale. He indulged his passion for fishing, helped David’s wife, Leila, in the kitchen, played with their three children, and watched television in his pajamas. In completely relaxed surroundings he perfected his talent for mimicry by performing routines from his favorite characters on The Goon Show, which to his “profound regret” had ended its run on the radio in 1960. One of his best efforts was Peter Sellers’s falsetto “Bluebottle.”

Charles reveled in the sheer Goons silliness. (Seagoon: “Wait! I’ve got a hunch!” Grytpype-Thynne: “It suits you!”) Later in life he would rely on a sense of absurdity as an antidote to his oppressive surroundings. Goons humor, typically British, was all about breaking the rules, which carried an extra frisson of pleasure for the heir to the throne.Charles enjoyed his six months in Australia “mainly because it was such a contrast to everything he couldn’t stand about Gordonstoun,” said one of his advisers, recalling the bullying that had so tormented him. He also showed his mettle during some 50 official engagements—his first exposure to crowds on his own. “I took the plunge and went over and talked to people,” he recalled. “That suddenly unlocked a completely different feeling, and I was then able to communicate and talk to people so much more.” The Australians, in turn, discovered “a friendly, intelligent, natural boy with a good sense of humor,” said Thomas Garnett, the headmaster of Timbertop, “someone who by no means has an easy task ahead of him in life.” When he left, in July 1966, his mates gave him a rousing “three cheers for Prince Charles—a real Pommie bastard!