A royal encounter - read all about it!

Just before Christmas four decades back, I helped raise the literacy levels of the British royal family. It was the winter of 1975-76. We were halfway through a UK working holiday, and I’d landed a job teaching for the pre-Christmas term at Bedales School in Hampshire.

Bedales was – still is – one of those places where the UK’s wealthy arties send their kids for a liberal education.

In my 12 weeks there, I taught poet Ted Hughes’ daughter, novelist Frederick Raphael’s son, and the youngest son of an actor called Sir Laurence Olivier, whom you may have heard of? Lovely kids, all of them, even if they reckoned I pronounced Shakespeare’s Danish tragedy as ‘‘Hemlut’’.

Another of my pupils was a small, friendly 14-year-old boy. Nothing exceptional about him, except that when the Headmaster mentioned him at my job interview, he also mentioned the on-site bodyguard.

The boy was called David, and since staff and students at Bedales address one another by first names, he and I soon got into a jokey morning routine. Me: ‘‘G’day, David.’’ Him: ‘‘Hello, David.’’ I taught him English. Tried to, anyway: his spelling was rotten and his punctuation atrocious. His younger sister Sarah, also at Bedales, was much more academic.

The family he’d been born into meant that even at his age, he had official letters to write and presentations to make. The Bedales headmaster wondered if I could try to help.

I was happy to. Not because of who he was, but because of what he was like: industrious, earnest, cheerful, eager. A thoroughly likeable young man.

So in a few one-on-one sessions, we talked about semi-colons and commas; paragraphs and sentences. I mentioned how using a style which echoes your spoken voice can make writing sound natural and appealing. He grasped the idea quickly, and his work began to edge upwards.

I was on my way to the staffroom one day, past the fishpond with its 100-year-old koi, when a figure built like a gun emplacement came around the corner.

‘‘Hello, sir,’’ went the bodyguard. (He always called me ‘‘sir’’; it always made me simper foolishly.) ‘‘Meant to tell you – David’s parents are really happy with his progress.’’

I wandered on, picturing two frequently photographed faces.

Alas, those faces were having their own problems. Just a year later, their marriage tore apart in a blaze of tabloid revelations.

Though David struggled with academic subjects, he was excellent at woodwork and craft. No surprise that he’s since become one of the UK’s leading furniture makers and designers. Stores in London’s swanky Burlington Arcade bear his name.

The 1975 Christmas break approached. One afternoon in the last week of term, he had an object on his desk. A handsome little box, top inlaid with different woods. ‘‘That’s nice, David,’’ I said – sincerely. ‘‘You made it?’’

He nodded. ‘‘It’s a present. For my auntie. Would you like to sign the card? The other teachers have.’’

His auntie ... I swallowed. I took my 20p ballpoint from Boots the Chemist and poised it above the Christmas card belonging to David Armstrong-Jones, aka Viscount Linley, only son of Anthony Armstong-Jones, Earl of Snowdon, and Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret Rose.

On the card, I wrote. ‘‘Merry Xmas, Your Majesty’’.