The royals - Kitty Kelley [80]
Philip worried about his son’s frailties and tried to toughen him up. “I want him to be a man’s man,” he said. Fit, tough, and handsome, Philip played cricket and polo, crewed in yachting races, drove carriages, piloted planes, and shot grouse with zest. He wanted his son to do the same. Philip gave Charles a cricket bat for his first birthday and later taught him how to play. He gave him his first gun and taught him how to shoot. He taught him to swim, to ride, to sail, and to hunt. He later introduced him to painting and polo and arranged for flying lessons so he could pilot his own plane. Charles then survived strenuous naval training to take command of a coastal minesweeper, but he could not shed the image of a wimp.
A nail-biting child, afraid of the dark, Charles longed for his father’s approval and overcame his fear of horses to ride and his seasickness to sail. He was not a natural athlete like his sister, but he pushed himself hard in sports, sometimes to the edge of recklessness.
Hardly an indulgent parent, Philip spanked Charles whenever he hit his sister or pulled her hair. And that was often. “When we were children, Charles and I used to fight like cat and dog,” said Anne. Philip told Charles that he had to take his spankings “like a man.”
“Act like a man,” was his father’s constant refrain. “Be a man.” Once, after a mild scolding from his nanny, Charles ran to his father. “I’m so sick of girls, Papa,” he said. “Let’s go away and be men by ourselves.”
Sometimes Philip’s preoccupation with manliness bordered on homophobia. “I remember when the Queen and Prince Philip were shown the newly done up Porchester house,” said the British decorator Nicholas Haslam. “They brought Prince Charles with them but left him in the car when they went inside. The hostess asked, ‘Wouldn’t you like to let Prince Charles accompany us?’
“ ‘Good God, no,’ said Prince Philip. ‘We don’t want him knowing anything pansy like decoration.’ ”
Even so, the Queen’s footman noticed a feminine effect on the young boy. “At the time he was first sent to school, Charles was already showing signs of succumbing to the cloying, introverted atmosphere that pervades the Palace,” he said. “He was the object of considerable petticoat influence.”
So many women exercising so much authority over his son annoyed Philip. “Nothing but nannies, nurses, and poofs,” he said, referring to the household staff, which was mostly homosexual.* He insisted his son be educated outside the Palace. The Queen objected, but Philip pointed to her sheltered childhood and reminded her that she rarely met a commoner who was not a servant. “Charles must learn to mix with other lads on the same level,” he said. The Queen preferred to continue her son’s education inside the Palace with the private tutor, Miss Katherine Peebles (“Mispy”), who had been teaching Charles since he was five years old. Philip argued that while the small, spry Scotswoman was a nice person, she had no formal training and no university degree. Consequently he did not think she was qualified to educate a future king. She had proved adequate at taking Charles and Anne on field trips to the zoo, the planetarium, and the museums, but now that Charles was eight, he needed to get out of the Palace and begin his formal education. “That means school—a real school,” said Philip.
The education of Charles became a matter of great debate inside and outside the Palace. Regular newspaper headlines asked “Why Can’t the Royal Children Go to School—Must It Always Come to Them?” and “Have We the Right to Cut Prince Charles Off from Normal Pleasures So Early in Life?”
The Queen reluctantly agreed to send her son to Hill House, a London day school. He arrived wearing a gray coat with a black velvet collar. The other children wore the school’s uniforms. For the next year Philip suggested his own preparatory school, the Cheam School, where Charles would board, share a dormitory with nine other boys, and sleep on wood-slatted beds. Again the Queen resisted, but Philip badgered her. Finally