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mercilessly portrayed by cartoonists, did not help. Charles’s parents showed
considerable insensitivity in not taking Mountbatten’s advice to have them operated on
before subjecting him to public school life. Charles was, according to contemporaries,
picked on ‘maliciously, cruelly, and without respite’; he was intensely and conspicuously
lonely because any boy who made any attempt to walk with him or befriend him would
find himself followed by a crowd making slurping noises indicating that he was ‘sucking
up’ to the Prince. On the football field boys made it their business to cannon into the
heir to the throne as hard as they could. The writer William Boyd, a fellow-pupil,
overheard a gang of rugby thugs boasting, ‘We did him over. We just punched the future
King of England.’ 3
Such experiences mark a person for ever; it made Charles feel that no one would ever
like him for himself and even more painfully conscious of the gulf which separated him
from his peers. The ugliness and discomfort which characterize British public schools
make them more like prisons or corrective institutions. For someone brought up in a
Palace with every detail of life subtly attended to, Gordonstoun represented an extreme
culture shock. Windmill Lodge, the house to which Charles was assigned, was a low
stone and timber building with the most basic accommodation. Boys slept fourteen to a
dormitory in unpainted rooms with hard wooden beds, bare floorboards and naked
lightbulbs. The windows were left open at night, even when gales would blow in wind
and rain horizontally from across the North Sea.
Charles did not mind the discomfort or the emphasis on physical fitness and outdoor
activities nearly as much as he did the hostile atmosphere. Although he dutifully later
said in public that Gordonstoun had been good for him, he confessed that he had loathed
his time there and his letters to his friends at home make sad reading. The school was
good for him, perhaps, in the sense of making him self-sufficient and toughening him
up, which was what his father wanted. He took refuge in the countryside and the sea, in
music and in visits to his grandmother at Birkhall on the Balmoral estate. The Queen
Mother’s heart bled for her favourite grandchild. ‘He is a very gentle boy, with a very
kind heart,’ she said of him, ‘which I think is the essence of everything.’ When he
pleaded with her to get his parents to take him away from Gordonstoun, however, she
refused. In Charles’s case the embarrassing consequences and bad publicity for everyone
which would have followed such a move made it unthinkable. The press did not make
his life easy even at that distance from Fleet Street. A book of his essays was stolen, sold
and eventually published in a German magazine. Worse still, on one occasion when he
took refuge in a bar to escape from the curious crowds pressing round him, he panicked
when asked what he wanted to drink and said ‘Cherry brandy’ because he had drunk it
before while out shooting. He was overheard by a journalist and the story of the
underage Prince (he was fourteen) illegally buying alcohol made the headlines, causing
a major uproar which deeply embarrassed Charles and gave him his first bad experience
of press coverage. Not only was Charles humiliated by the episode but he was upset
when the Metropolitan Police removed his friend and protector, his detective, Donald
Green, from royal duty. ‘He defended me in the most marvellous way and he was the