Wills: ‘Mum was
Harry: Even talking now I can feel the hugs she gave us
WILLIAM ON COPING I kept saying to myself that my mother would not want me to be upset Her death ‘was like an earthquake’ – and ‘utterly devastating’. It took him seven years to get over the shock. But, says William, she lives with him always... and was there on his big day
IN THE revealing new interviews, William and Harry open up in agonising detail about the enduring scars they bear over the loss of their mother.
And they speak in extraordinary depth about how they coped with unrelenting grief as they made the journey from boys to young men.
While Harry admits crying over his bereavement just twice in 20 years and speaks of his bewilderment that so many strangers were upset, his elder brother recalls the experience as ‘utterly devastating’.
The starkly contrasting effects on the boys may be partly explained by their respective ages at the time of Diana’s death in August 1997. Harry, just 12, was arguably too young to fully comprehend the enormity of what had happened, and said he even came to believe that ‘not having a mum was normal’.
Watching a nation pouring its collective heart out, he candidly recalls wondering: ‘How is it that so many people can be crying and showing more emotion than I actually am feeling?’
Harry spoke earlier this year of ‘shutting down all of my emotions’ for nearly 20 years, and it is hard to imagine what the psychological legacy of that detachment would be on such a young boy. It makes his recent admission that he came ‘close to a breakdown’ in his late 20s all the more powerfully moving.
William, on the other hand, was 15 and already in the midst of coping with all the issues visited upon any adolescent, let alone one destined to be a king. ‘There’s nothing like it in the world, there really isn’t,’ he says in the ITV film. ‘It’s completely and utterly like an earthquake’s just run through the house and through your life and everything.
‘It’s just… your mind is completely split and it took me a while for it to sink in. You know, losing someone so close to you is utterly devastating, especially at that age.
‘I think it really spins you out – you don’t quite know where you are, what you’re doing and what’s going on.’
For both princes, Diana was a presence long after her death, and William even says of his wedding in 2011: ‘I did really feel like she was there.’
Touchingly, the boys tried to help each other through their darkest hour, though William admits they were ill-equipped for the task. ‘The family came together, and Harry and I tried to talk as best as we could about it, but, being so small at that age, it’s very difficult to communicate or understand your feelings,’ he says. ‘It’s very complicated.’
William adds that, at his lowest ebb, he would draw inspiration from his mother’s memory.
‘Slowly, you try to rebuild your life and you try to understand what’s happened, and I kept saying to myself that my mother would not want me to be upset, she’d not want me to be down, she’d not want me to be like this,’ he recalls. ‘She was extremely good at showing her love. She was extremely good at showing what we meant to her, and what feelings meant, and how important it was to feel.’
He adds: ‘I kept myself busy as well, which is good and bad sometimes – but it allows you to get through that initial shock phase... I’d say, as much as maybe five to seven years afterwards.’
Either of those dates takes William to his early 20s, when he was an undergraduate at St Andrews, where he met Kate Middleton. Student life gave him a chance, however brief, to experience something akin to a ‘normal’ existence, away from the strictures of Eton and the stuffiness of life in the public eye.
But he explains that Diana’s spirit is constantly at his side: ‘There are not many days that go by that I don’t think of her, you know. Sometimes sad, sometimes very positively. I have a smile every now and again when someone says something, and I think, “that’s exactly what she would have said”, or, “she would have enjoyed that comment.” ‘So they always live with you, people you lose, like that. And my mother lives with me every day. I give thanks that I was lucky enough to be her son and that I got to know her for the 15 years that I did.
‘She set us up really well. She gave us the right tools and has prepared us well for life in the best way she could, not, obviously, knowing what was going to happen.’
William says he even felt his mother’s presence at his wedding to Kate at Westminster Abbey in 2011, 30 years after his parents married in 1981. He recalls: ‘Beforehand I had a lot of time to think about it. When it came to the wedding, I did really feel that she was there… there were times I looked to someone or something for strength – and I very much felt she was there for me.’
At one point, leafing through family photographs with Harry, William observes poignantly: ‘Time spent with her, the feeling of having her around and being loved as a family or as a son, I think those are the most precious special memories to me.’ Harry makes it clear he buried his grief much deeper
than his brother, and so finally unearthing it years later was all the more painful.
The therapy which he sought at William’s suggestion brought home the enormous emotional burden he had carried as a boy.
‘I was so young. I grew up sort of thinking that not having a mum was normal. I think it was a classic case of, “Don’t let yourself think about your mum and the grief and the hurt that comes with it, because it’s never going to bring her back and it’s only going to make you… make you more sad.” People deal with grief in different ways, and my way of dealing with it was just by basically shutting it out, locking it out. The 10 years that I was in the army, I just dug my head in the sand and it was just... it was just white noise. And I went through a whole period of having to try to sort myself out.’
Harry spells out his pain in extraordinarily intimate detail, explaining how he missed the first and most basic comfort a child can know – the loving hug of a mother.
‘She was our mum, she still is our mum. Of course as a son I would say this, she was, the best mum in the world. To myself and William she was just the best mother ever.
‘She would engulf you and squeeze you as tight as possible – and being as short as I was then, there was no escape, you were there, and you were there for as long as she wanted to hold you. Even talking about it now I can feel the hugs that she used to give us and... I miss that, I miss that feeling. I miss that part of a family, having that mother to be able to give you those hugs and give you that compassion that I think everybody needs.’ Harry says his mother is a constant presence in his thoughts, as she is in William’s – a fact that does little to dull the pain.
‘It has been hard and it will continue to be hard,’ he says.
‘There’s not a day that William and I don’t wish she still was around, and we wonder what kind of a mother she would be now, what kind of a public role she would have, and what a difference she would be making.’
William also reflects on that loss which the princes share with so many people they encounter. ‘My heart goes out to all the people who have lost loved ones. You know, it does connect you, it’s a very sad club you don’t want to be a member of, but you do all have a shared sort of pain that you can immediately understand and see in anyone when you meet them.’
William sums up Diana’s abiding legacy to her two sons in the film’s closing moments when he says: ‘I think she’d be proud Harry and I have managed to come through everything that’s happened, having lost her, and that gives me positivity and strength to know that I can face anything the world can throw at me. We felt incredibly loved, Harry and I. I’m very grateful that that love still feels there, even 20 years on. I think that’s a huge credit to her that I can still feel that love.’ contrast, the William and Harry interviews, which, like their mother’s, were conducted at Kensington Palace, are likely to meet universal approval. The Princes emerge as assured, confident, well-adjusted adults, who have continued their mother’s charity work in a way that would have made her proud.
William appears the most sombre, and speaks in a measured tone. His brother is breezier and, typically, uses humour to deflect often painful subjects.
Both talk about how they struggled to make sense of being robbed of their mother at a crucial stage in their development.
To William, in the throes of adolescence, it was as if an ‘earthquake had run through the house’. He says: ‘Your mind is completely split and it took a while for it to sink in. Losing someone so close to you is utterly devastating.’
Harry reveals that he has only cried twice since she died – and says he grew up thinking ‘not having a mother was normal’.
Elsewhere in the ITV interview, part of a 90-minute documentary marking the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death:
William says he talks constantly to his own children, George and Charlotte, about ‘Granny Diana’ who, he says, would have ‘loved them to bits’.
Harry recalls being puzzled by the ‘outpouring of love and emotion’ from people who had never met her, thinking: ‘How is it that so many people who have never met this woman, my mother, can be crying and showing more emotion than I was feeling?’
Harry reveals that he found letters about Diana’s work on land mines, dated the day she died, at Kensington Palace only last month.
William says that he spent years managing his grief by keeping busy.
Harry recalls her sense of mischief, and says: ‘Her motto to me was: you can be as naughty as you want, just don’t get caught’.
The Princes say that, as the anniversary approached, they felt compelled to be more candid in order to celebrate her life and offer ‘a tribute from her sons’.
At a screening of the film for the media, William said: ‘Harry and I felt that it was an appropriate time to open up a bit more about our mother. We haven’t really spoken so publicly about her... and we felt this was the right time to do it. We won’t be doing this again.’
He added that the film was intended ‘to remind people of the person she was and what she was like as a mother – the warmth, the humour – which hasn’t really come across before’.
HARRY ON COPING It’s hard. There’s not a day we don’t wish she was still around