“A profound shock” for the young prince
When Harry started school at Eton, it was just a year after his mother, Princess Diana, had died suddenly and tragically. At age 13, Charles’s younger son was still deeply affected by this trauma. Unlike William, who was accompanied by both his parents and his younger brother when he started at Eton, Prince Harry arrived by car with only Charles by his side. In Spare, Harry’s autobiography published in 2023, he reflects on this painful period, describing it as “a profound shock.”
The student prince: Harry at his desk in his dorm room.
It was all the more difficult because his older brother had specifically asked him not to speak to him. “Willy told me to pretend I didn’t know him. ‘You don’t know me, Harold. And I don’t know you,’” Harry wrote in Spare. “He was forging his own life, and he wasn’t willing to give that up.” Harry stuck to the rule, but broke it on one occasion, when his classmates shave his head: “I ran in circles. I wanted to reverse time. I wanted to scoop up the hair from the floor and glue it back on. I wanted to wake from this nightmare,” he wrote. ”Not knowing where else to turn, I violated the sacred rule, the one shining commandment never to be broken, and ran upstairs to Willy’s room. Instead, he laughed like the others. I recall him sitting at his desk, bent over a book, chuckling, while I stood before him fingering the nubs on my newly bare scalp.”
Harry in his dorm room at Eton. Students are allowed to decorate them according to their own taste, and Harry included a photograph of his mother, Diana, on the left.
