![]() I fell properly out of love with Charles in the 70s. ![]() The latter continued but the former ended soon after: so a half victory. I painted the inside of my parents' garage with the names of my favourite rock bands and organised a demonstration at my school to end the Vietnam War and the school cadet force. I had discovered cigarettes, gatherings and W B Yeats. I trundled on, keeping a low profile at school, and avoiding unwelcome attention till Jimi Hendrix went 'All Along the Watchtower' and Charles and I walked our separate ways.īack from Australia, and off to Cambridge, he discovered hunting, shooting, fishing and playing polo. From him, I learned how to become my own person, to be a teacher and a book-writing headmaster.īack to the 60s though. Iconoclastic and wildly irreverent, his successor taught me it was all right not to conform in a regime in which I never felt comfortable.Ĭharles wearing a huge bearskin and the uniform of Colonel of the Welsh Guards - taking part in Trooping the Colour in 1978Įvery Wednesday afternoon, he shot me off at breakneck speed in his white Rover V8 to play golf at nearby Knole Park, where he cheated shamelessly, as he did when I stayed with him in school holidays at his family retreat near Fort William. My own Timbertop experience came from my encounters with an intellectually brilliant headmaster, Robert Ogilvie, who in 1970 replaced the austere and forbidding Michael McCrum at Tonbridge School. Because if it doesn't happen to a child while at school, it might never occur. Education had to be about so much more, I reasoned, than merely the passing of tests and exams: the development of the whole person with all their varied talents, no less. When, many years later, I became a headmaster, I was influenced by those same ideals. Many of Charles's lifelong passions crystallised at that time, above all those for the sacredness of the environment and a rounded education. But in 1966, he went off to the sun, to the Australian outback for six golden months at Timbertop, the remote offshoot of Geelong Grammar School where the boys were given a prolonged exposure to nature. It was a remorselessly grey decade with smog, snow and slush. The prince came of age in the 60s, and so did I. I learned from you and opted to play at scrum half at the back of the pack where my ears remained a tweak-free zone. I still get empty feelings in the pit of my stomach on Sunday afternoons.īullied at school, Charles had his ears pulled and pinched in rugby scrums. I longed for exeats when we could come home, and then counted the hours till it was time to go back to school again on Sunday evenings. He was not happy or very good at school, and neither was I at my boarding school – Tonbridge, in Kent. It later dried out but I was wet from tears at their heartlessness.Ĭharles went off to board at Gordonstoun in Scotland in 1962, when he was 13. So Michael and Peter seized my favourite teddy and rammed it up into the hole to stop the rain. When driving to our annual holiday – a farm in South Devon – along the A30, the canvas roof on my parents' old Rover began to leak. They understood me and they never let me down. Travelling by train to and from school, mine would hop along the tops of the hedgerows just outside the carriage window. I wonder whether Charles, like me, sought solace in imaginary friends. My life changed for ever when my favourite nanny, Annette, returned to Holland when I was aged just two. So too did nannies (is there a connection?). Teddy bears figured largely in both our lives. Charles was lonely and sensitive as a small boy, and so was I. Writer Anthony Seldon says he saw the royal as a brother But I never told them I didn't like it.Ĭambridge University student Charles pictured browsing a newsstand in 1969. I always thought they stuck out so much because my siblings regularly pulled them. ![]() Michael and my other brother Peter said my ears stopped me winning races at school because of wind resistance. My friend Simon had his pinned back, but the future monarch taught me to wear my flappy appendages with pride. I loved gazing at photos of the prince in newspapers. In his Hill House school blazer, short trousers and cap, Charles looked just like my big brother, who set off each morning to catch the suburban train (numbered 70) to Dulwich College Prep School. But we loved playing on the floor with the same Tri-ang 00 train sets and hated being dressed up in horrid 50s crochet jerseys with silly animal patterns. True, Charles lived in a bigger house than ours, which was in Petts Wood, Southeast London. He was born in November 1948, exactly halfway between my older brother Michael, born in 1942, and me, born in August 1953.
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