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large bottles of bubble bath into the Windsor Castle swimming-pool. Unlike Charles, he
had an easy relationship with his father, even though he was more than a little in awe
of him. In 1973 he had followed Charles to Gordonstoun, which by then was
coeducational and generally more relaxed than it had been when his brother had left it
six years earlier. Unlike Charles, he arrived at Gordonstoun ‘full of bounce’ and the boys
retaliated. After one dormitory fight he got a crack on the head which put him in the
school sanatorium for two days; ‘he’s a very tough and independent fellow,’ a master
commented. His father appreciated his toughness, saying, ‘he’s a natural boss’, and
seems not to have realized that some of the aggressive self-confidence was assumed as a
natural defence and that beneath the surface Andrew was more sensitive and less
confident than he appeared. Like Charles, Andrew had been sent for a spell of ‘getting
to know the Commonwealth’ – in his case, Canada – attending Lakefield College School
in Ontario in the intervals of his time at Gordonstoun. Like Charles, he had taken a
parachute training course and learned to fly, but instead of sending him to university his
father decided that he should become a full-time naval officer and enrolled him at
Dartmouth Royal Naval College in 1979. He was to sign up for a naval commission for
twelve years with special training as a helicopter pilot. At twenty-one he qualified as a
helicopter pilot and joined 829 Naval Air Squadron, flying Sea Kings from the carrier
HMS Invincible.
Elizabeth herself became the focus of the growing media interest in the Palace which
had been fed by the Waleses’ marriage. At 7.15 a.m. on the morning of 9 July 1982, she
awoke to hear the door being opened and footsteps approaching her bed. Instantly she
was aware that it was not her footman, Paul Whybrew, who was out exercising the
corgis. So she said in a loud headmistressy voice, ‘It’s too early yet for tea’, hoping that
it was some innocent person who had opened the door by mistake and who would be
frightened off when they heard her voice. Instead, someone crossed the room, opened
the curtains and then sat on her bed. It was a thirty-one-year-old schizophrenic, Michael
Fagan, wanting to talk to her about his family problems. She pressed the night alarm
button which rings in the corridor outside. No one heard it; the policeman had gone off
duty as usual at 6 a.m. when the domestic staff arrived. The footman was out with the
dogs and the housemaid hoovering in another room with the door closed in order not to
disturb Her Majesty. She made two telephone calls asking for police to be sent, but there
was no immediate response. According to Fagan, she did not appear either nervous or
worried and when he asked her for a cigarette she used that as a pretext to manoeuvre
him out into the corridor where they met a maid with a hoover. ‘Bloody ‘ell, Ma’am,
what’s he doing here?’ the maid exclaimed – Fagan, apart from anything else, was
barefoot – and took him into a nearby pantry to look for cigarettes. The footman
returned with the corgis to see Elizabeth standing outside the pantry with her finger to
her lips, ‘Ssh’, then she pointed for him to go in, where he talked to Fagan and offered
him a drink. Finally a policeman came along and started to rough Fagan up, then a
plainclothes man sauntered along the corridor to be startled by Elizabeth shouting, ‘Get
in there!’ Elizabeth, according to staff, remained cool as a cucumber while they were