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sending him. He went, but had to run the gauntlet of the crowd both going in and going
out – not an agreeable experience for an eight-year-old. On the third day Elizabeth kept
him at home while Colville personally telephoned the newspaper editors with her plea
that they withdraw their men and let her son go to school in peace. Once again it
worked and at the end of term Elizabeth and Philip attended the school’s Field Day.
Charles took a competent part in dismantling and setting up a field gun, earning a ‘Well
done, Charles,’ from his father. It seemed as if this first experiment had been a success
and his parents prepared to extend it. Philip had made it plain in an interview he gave
in the States that year (1956) what their educational objectives were for Charles. ‘The
Queen and F, he said, ‘want Charles to go to school with other boys of his generation
and learn to live with other children, and to absorb from childhood the discipline
imposed by education with others…’ 18
But for a boy like Charles whose upbringing and background had been so different
from his contemporaries, this was never going to be easy. From Hill House, Charles had
always been able to retreat within the familiar walls of Buckingham Palace and to the
security of Mabel Anderson. But on 23 September 1957, two months before his ninth
birthday, his parents deposited him at Cheam, the preparatory school in Hampshire
which had been attended by all the Mountbatten males including his father. He was
about to set his foot on the first rung of the ladder which represented the beginning of
the brutal rite of passage from childhood to adolescence of every British boy whose
parents could afford it – the British boarding-school. His mother went through the same
miserable time that every other mother does on sending her child off on that formidable
experience – a mixture of guilt at inflicting it, misery at the parting, apprehension about
how he would react and hope that everything would turn out all right. In Elizabeth’s
case the feelings were acute; it was only too evident that Charles was dreading the
prospect. She saw him shuddering with horror on the long train journey down from
Balmoral; Charles later remembered the first days at Cheam as the loneliest of his life.
Just a few hours after his arrival, the young maths master who had been detailed to
keep an eye on him looked out of a window and saw one small boy standing
conspicuously apart, ‘a solitary and utterly wretched figure’. At Cheam the boys were
just that much older and therefore less innocent and more formidable than they had
been at Hill House. They had all been told that the Queen’s son was one of the twelve
new boys that term and that the Queen wanted him to be treated just like anyone else,
but it was just not possible for them to do so. ‘Charles himself, his biographer Anthony
Holden wrote, ‘had no experience at all of forcing his way into a group of strangers,
winning the acceptance of his peers…’ Elizabeth knew that her son was miserable
during his first years at Cheam, but felt that it was something he would have to bear in
order to prepare himself for his future position.
The boys were not hostile, but the herd instinct made them wary of someone so
obviously ‘different’; the unwritten code of honour made them unwilling to be seen to
‘suck up’ to the Queen’s son. Charles learned then that it was often the nicest boys
whom he would have most liked to make friends with who hung back and the ones who