The royals - Kitty Kelley [81]
“We want him to go to school with other boys of his generation and to live with other children and absorb from childhood the discipline imposed by education with others,” said Philip. The Queen told the headmaster at Cheam to treat the future monarch like any ordinary student but to address him as Prince Charles. He could be plain Charles to the other boys, some of whom made fun of their future monarch’s soft pudginess by calling him “Fatty.”
The little boy who had been dressed in silk dresses and ribboned bonnets for the first two years of his life now faced bamboo rod canings from the headmaster. “I was warned,” Charles said years later, “that we would be beaten, and I got beaten [for dormitory horseplay]. I didn’t do it again. I was one of those people for whom corporal punishment actually worked.”
On the first day of school, Charles clutched his initial-embossed box of milk chocolates—his mother’s parting gift. He did not know how to share with the other boys and was too frightened to try. Leaving the loving arms of his nanny, his nurse, and his governess proved painful for Charles, who was shy and unaccustomed to making friends.
“He felt family separation very deeply,” said his nanny, Mabel Anderson.
“He would write Mispy every day,” said his sister, Anne. “He was heartbroken. He used to cry into his letters and say, ‘I miss you.’ ”
He wrote wistfully to his father. “Dearest Papa, I am longing to see you in the ship.” He drew a sailboat like the one Prince Philip raced at Cowes, the world’s biggest sailing regatta. He excelled in art and enjoyed drawing and painting pictures of his family. When he was six years old he drew a humorous Christmas card for his father, who was shown next to a vat labeled “Hair Restorer.” Philip had been fretting about his receding hairline and encroaching baldness.
Soon after he started school, Charles was reprimanded for saying a naughty word. “He may have picked it up from one of the workmen,” said Philip, “but I’m afraid he may equally have picked it up from me.”
After five and a half years at Cheam, where he failed mathematics and barely passed history,* Charles told his parents that he wanted to go to “Papa’s school,” which meant Gordonstoun, a Scottish citadel of cold showers and canings.
“I remember Philip discussing public [private] schools at one of our Thursday Club luncheons—those all-male get-togethers we had at Wheeler’s Tavern in Soho,” recalled harmonica player Larry Adler. “I told him I saw public schools as factories for manufacturing homosexuals. James Robertson Justice, a fine actor and a gruff Scotsman, joined the conversation.
“ ‘Oh, God, Adler, are you on that dreary hobbyhorse of yours again?’ he said. ‘I was buggered my first week at Eton. Did me no harm whatsoever.’
“ ‘Well, James,’ I said, ‘it was different with you, as everyone had to turn out to watch you being buggered because of the school motto: Justice Must Not Only Be Done, He Must Be Seen to Be Done.’ Philip howled with laughter.”
He felt that by sending his son to Gordonstoun in Scotland, he would protect him from the effete influence of the English public school system. He also said that the school in Morayshire was far enough from London so that Charles would escape the daily scrutiny of reporters. “Eton is frequently in the news, and when it is, it’s going to reflect on you,” he told his son. “If you go to the north of Scotland, you’ll be out of sight, and reporters are going to think twice about taking an airplane to get up there, so it’s got to be a major crisis before they actually turn up, and you’ll be able to get on with things.”
Charles finally consented and chose his father’s school, which he later regretted. “It was hell,” he said. “I failed my math exams three times,” he said. He also flunked German and struggled with science. He wrote sad letters every night, complaining about how his classmates treated him. “I don’t get any sleep… they throw slippers all night long