Cawthorne Windsor Spares

The Prince Harry and Prince Andrew Soap Opera!
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78334-257-0
Verlag: Gibson Square
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

''Uncanny parallels' DAILY MAILWho is more spare, Harry or Andrew? You decide! Spares Prince Harry and Prince Andrew have rarely been out of the news since 2019. They both have proved to have a rare knack for creating a royal soap opera and turning their humdrum lives into a major embarrassment to their family. Royal author Nigel Cawthorne unravels their princely lives in this dual portrait and asks. Join this frank and hilarious celebration of this royal double act. Covering all the stations of the cross for royal pain from wives, money, relatives, having to scrounge for millions, being turfed out of the HRH club.

Nigel Cawthorne started his career as a journalist at the Financial Times and has since written bestselling books on Prince Philip, Princess Diana, and the history of the royal family, as well as provided royal news comment on national and international broadcasters.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cawthorne, Nigel

Leseproben

1

‘What dreams may come’

Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

Recently, I dreamed I was back on the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Sir Galahad. Again. I used to dream like this often in my twenties and thirties. Then the dreams went away. I’m not sure why, but getting married and having children probably helped, and leaving the Army. That night they came back. I’m not sure why. They still come.

The dreams are always disturbing, but strangely, since they arise from the same event, often different. Themed dreams. I’m not sure diversity in dreams is a good idea—better just one bad dream that repeats itself over and over. At least I could get used to it, possibly even bored, which would be wonderful.

They run through the senses in random order. The smell-taste combi one is the worst—the smell of burning human flesh. Not an unattractive smell at all. A bit like barbecuing pork but stronger, richer, more promising. My mouth waters in the dream. Army ‘compo’ rations cooked on a small hexamine burner on which we subsisted down South are sustaining but flavourless. Burning flesh smells good—until you realise what it really is, and the appetising smoky top-notes are the result of damp combat jackets.

My mouth didn’t water on the day—it was dry, desert dry with a peculiar metallic taste, a result of the flames and, if I’m honest, the fear. But it waters in my dreams and on waking my mouth is full of saliva.

For many years now, I have written by way of home-grown therapy about a fictional character, Colonel Jacot of the Celtic Guards (bien cuit in the Falklands in a missile strike on the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Oliver Cromwell). He wears black gloves all the timeto hide and soothe his burned hands, and has rough, Gothic, smell dreams—the smoke from his own burning flesh (a twist which I was spared) rising into his nostrils like a burst of overpowering incense. They send him over the edge, his extensive self-medication with Veuve Clicquot (what many of us took to—at five pounds a bottle in the duty-free Rhine Army it seemed a waste not to drink it) and in his case cocaine, storing up trouble for the future and his relationship with his girlfriend—a French lady spook.

I haven’t written yet about Jacot’s experiences during the pandemic—the third in the series is set in Venice just before the dreaded virus hit. But if he had contracted Covid and lost his sense of smell he would have been grateful. If you can’t smell in real-life you can’t have a smell dream, I assume.

What’s fact for many of us who survived 8th June is that sleep becomes unwelcome because it is difficult to control dreams—the subconscious runs riot. Shakespeare has a lot to say about sleep—Macbeth, Caliban and Henry IV all long for sleep for different reasons. Hamlet’s famous musings are on death, not sleep, but make the point.

Most of us know insomniacs or people who can’t sleep much but would like to. Billions of pounds, dollars and euros are spent every year on sleeping pills. Sentries, night workers, airport staff, nurses, doctors, policemen, are required to stay awake through the night—sustained by tea and coffee and if it is still permitted, cigarettes. But most of them as they come to the end of their shifts must be looking forward to a good kip even if it is in daylight hours. There are few accounts of those who are desperate to stay awake.1

There are sound-themed dreams, too. Not a great genre, to be honest. Shouting is all right, ‘Get down, get down,’ was a sensible instruction. The closer you were to the deck, wherever you were on the ship, the less likely you were to be killed or wounded. Unless you were unlucky enough to be at the back of the ‘death zone’ of the tank deck. Everyone in the queue behind Welsh Guardsman Simon Weston perished. It didn’t matter what they did.

But screaming, the noise men make who are dying or about to die, with no possibility of escape, was an awful, primal, desperate sound as loud and nerve-shredding in my dreams as on the day. Followed always by silence. No hope of rescue. Those who had been wounded calling out to their comrades in agony had either been consumed by the flames; or were too close to death and in too much pain to make any further sound.

Sight dreams are the easiest to deal with. Like many English schoolboys of my vintage, I was brought up on war films. The Dambusters and Where Eagles Dare remain on instant notice to move for rainy winter afternoons. Consequently, violence and sometimes gore had been present in my visual memory since the age of seven when I first went to prep school.

Life in the 1960s, except for a brief period around the World Cup of 1966, was still dominated by the war; many of our teachers had been combatants. The headmaster of my prep school had been a badly burned Battle of Britain Hurricane pilot, and one of the famous plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe’s ‘guinea pigs’ at East Grinstead. So, in a strange irony I was used to seeing someone nearly every day for five years of my young life who had been badly disfigured by flames.

I particularly remember his hands—gnarled and discoloured. Plenty of Welsh Guardsmen with those to this day.

He didn’t talk about the war much but would occasionally grant us eager schoolboys an anecdote or two. Vera Lynn singing at the Royal Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead has stuck in my mind, as has the emblem of the Guinea Pig Club which he showed us one day—a guinea pig sprouting RAF pilot’s wings set on top of a burning aircraft.

And every time I see the spire of Salisbury Cathedral only a few miles from where we live, I am reminded of him—one day at twilight after many hours in the cockpit he became disorientated, anxious to find somewhere to land before darkness fell and not quite sure where he was. He feared he would crash or be forced to bail out in the middle of nowhere. Then, as darkness was almost upon him, he caught sight of an object on the horizon which he turned hopefully towards—the spire of Salisbury Cathedral from which he was able to calculate a course to the nearest RAF airfield and put down safely.

Because sight is so dominant in the senses it loses the power to shock the unconscious; the dream re-runs the cinematic reel that recorded an event which is pre-loaded anyway. The memories that lie deeper in the cerebral cortex, like smell, produce a more powerful and disturbing effect. With the added hazard of acting as triggers. It was the sweet, seductive fragrance of a newly baked madeleine that triggered Proust’s nostalgia fest.

Touch dreams have been limited, thank God. I doubt if it has been the case for those who were wounded—even light burns on the hands are hugely painful, as anyone who has burned themselves in the kitchen knows. A few times, touch has been the theme for the night. Oddest of all was the squeezing sensation required in using a morphine syrette; a bit like emptying a small tube of superglue or crushing a large wasp in kitchen towel. Not a bad memory, as morphine works quickly. A casualty writhing in agony will be at least slightly comforted and become easier to handle in less than a minute—though not for long. There wasn’t enough morphine for the multiple doses required.

The stickiness and slipperiness of burns casualties as we carried them was something I hadn’t expected on the day—the awful sensation that the leg or arm you are holding isn’t as solid as it should be. The liquid stays on your hands—persistent and difficult to remove. Turning the volume up on a radio set was a shock—the human fat on my hands slipped on the dial. The same effect is produced in everyday life by picking up a slug. At first the fingers feel sticky in a routine way, but slug slime is more difficult to remove than expected. As every gardener knows, a good scrub plus some gel is usually required to get rid of it—and you can feel it reducing layer by layer. Same with the fat dripping from burned human flesh. It doesn’t really come off—at least not in the conditions we experienced. And it decays, smelling worse as it does.

Mr Trumper’s Extract of West Indian Limes along with all my other kit was destroyed in the attack—it would have been useful to sprinkle about in the days that followed. Smelling a bit smoky wasn’t too bad but starting to smell like a decomposing corpse was a trial. Months later we were all sent letters informing us that we could make a financial claim for any non-military kit destroyed. The Ministry of Defence kindly paid the full replacement price of my Minolta camera (borrowed from my father) and a couple of books—by Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse. But it refused to...