‘It’s important,’ Diana told a nurse, ‘that the first time William sees his brother, I’m holding him in my arms.’
Today the conventional wisdom is quite the contrary. Embracing the new baby is the very worst way to present a new child to a sibling, goes the modern orthodoxy, since it introduces the new arrival as a strange object that is physically blocking the older child from the maternal embrace that it craves. First hugging the older child is the twenty-first-century way, after which mother and child should turn together to look down on the newcomer in its crib – and, by happy chance, that is almost exactly what happened in the Lindo Wing in September 1984.
As soon as William arrived at the hospital and emerged from the lift with his father, he went scampering down the corridor, calling out for his mother. Startled, Diana’s bodyguard knocked over the screen outside her door, which brought Diana jumping out of her bed to see what the commotion was – to look out of the door and see William running towards her.
The princess instantly and instinctively opened her arms to pick up her son with delight, kissing him and cuddling him – and it was therefore from the spontaneous embrace of his mother that William looked down to see his younger brother for the first time, swaddled in a white blanket. Jumping onto the floor, William rushed forward at once to plant a kiss on the baby’s forehead, then sat on the bed and held the newborn warmly in his arms.
When the family went back to Kensington Palace, it was William who led the way in the presentation of the baby to the staff below stairs, smothering his little brother in kisses – though he did also attempt the odd headbutt on the new arrival. For years the world would be struck by the fondly possessive way in which young William liked to display his younger brother and show him off proudly – almost as his favourite toy. And it all started in the Lindo Wing from an episode of baby-and-child-care-gone-mildly-wrong. Don’t knock the Spock.
The moment Diana had started producing children, Prince Charles felt quite sure that his wife needed a nanny to help her look after them, and he had no doubt who that nanny should be – Scottish-born Mabel Anderson who had looked after him as a child. Diana did not agree. She wanted to raise her children herself, and if she did turn to anyone for help, it would not be to Mrs Anderson who in 1982 was fifty-six years old, the same age as the Queen.
A compromise was reached, with Diana agreeing to the hiring of Barbara Barnes, the forty-two-year-old daughter of a Norfolk forestry worker. Ms Barnes did not wear a nanny’s hat and uniform, but she had been recommended on the basis of fourteen years’ loyal service to Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting, Anne Glenconner, whose five children she had nursed with intelligence and care.
‘I’m not a graduate of any sort of nannies’ college,’ said Barnes in her only brief contact with the press. ‘I’ve accumulated my knowledge from many years of experience.’ She might have added that as a grammar school graduate she had acquired mastery of Latin and Greek and could also speak very good French. She saw no special problems in bringing up a royal baby, she said – ‘I treat all children as individuals … I’m here to help the princess, not take over.’
That turned out not to be the case, since Barnes rapidly discovered that she had to serve as nanny to her employer as much as to her offspring – though she had had some experience of this with Anne Glenconner’s brilliantly crazed husband Colin, who was prone to dramatic outbursts and fits.
‘Lord Glenconner,’ Nanny Barnes would say firmly when she discovered him standing on the table stamping his feet and screaming at the top of his lungs. ‘Will you get down and be quiet? You’ll frighten the children.’
‘And he did,’ recalls Anne Glenconner. ‘Just like that.’
The princess was by now suffering from bulimia and the accompanying self-harm that had reached the stage of her slashing her arms and wrists. Barnes soon found herself bandaging the princess’s bloodied limbs – and she stepped in firmly to assert control.
‘Barbara guarded the nursery floor like the Vatican,’ one member of the Kensington Palace staff recounted to author Ingrid Seward. ‘Trays would be grabbed and doors would be shut. It was her kingdom.’
Barnes was equally firm with the children, not allowing them comfort blankets and refusing them shoes until they had learned to walk properly. When they did get their first footwear, Nanny insisted on classic Start-Rites with button straps that were shaped to the boys’ feet. Trainers were banned.
‘She achieved the remarkable feat,’ wrote Seward, ‘of having both William and Harry sitting up straight before their first birthdays. They were made to say “Please” and “Thank you” almost as soon as they could talk.’
Within this social discipline, however, both William and, in due course, Harry were allowed extraordinary freedom. This was in accordance with Diana’s liberal Spock-based ideas, which were shared by Barnes – whom William, and hence the whole family, called ‘Baba’. With Charles proving to be an equally worshipping and indulgent parent, William became a law unto himself – loud and boisterous and earning the nickname ‘His Royal Naughtiness’ following his poor behaviour at his brother Harry’s christening in December 1984. The little prince had wriggled continuously and rolled his eyes with real insolence towards his father when he was not allowed to cuddle his baby brother.
It was part of a pattern. William had developed the habit of sticking out his tongue at people as well as wielding his water pistol with gay abandon – squirting at least one guard at Highgrove who remained standing obediently at attention until he was soaked through. The prince
