Backstage, Catherine was also making merry. DONT WALK had captured the imagination of the entire campus. Only the very hottest chicks had been selected to rehearse and parade – and Kate was determined to dazzle for the cause.
Take a look at the photo of her in the second picture section – does that look like a conventional dress to you? It was, in fact, a long see-through petticoat-style skirt designed by Charlotte Todd to be worn from the waist down with some chunky knitwear round the shoulders. But at the last minute Kate had decided she would not wear the shift around her waist as a skirt – she discarded the knitwear and hoiked the blue silk belt up above her boobs to create a transparent mini-dress, with her black bra and knickers showing through.
That is how she emerged and paraded down the catwalk to raucous cheers. No wonder William was impressed!
‘Wow,’ he whispered to Fergus Boyd, ‘Kate’s hot!’
Here was a fresh dimension to William’s solid, reliable lecture-note-taker and future flatmate that he had not expected – well, not this soon at least. The urgency of the 9/11 cause created an atmosphere that night which pushed the boundaries for all concerned – helped by liberal quantities of Red Bull, according to one participant.
DONT WALK would go on from this 2002 debut to be repeated annually at St Andrews, becoming the most successful student-run charity fashion show in the UK. Over the years it has raised more than £300,000 for good causes from ecology to homelessness, with DONT WALK (still minus its apostrophe) coming to mean ‘Don’t walk on by …’
So the couple’s personal spark had been lit at a charity occasion of the very type they would spend their lives encouraging and attending – and 9/11, which dominated those early years of the century so tragically, had another consequence. The US and UK governments would shortly send troops to clear Bin Laden and his followers out of their safe havens in Afghanistan – and in due course Prince Harry would serve in that war.
That March evening at the DONT WALK after-party, William and Kate were seen with their arms around each other. This had happened before – just a month or so into their first term together at a party at which William was getting seriously hit-upon by a pushy female student. The prince was being really polite, but he couldn’t shake her off, and the girl did not get the hint – until suddenly Kate appeared out of nowhere behind him and put her arms around William.
‘Oh sorry,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got a girlfriend’, and he and Kate went off giggling together.
‘Thanks so much,’ he mouthed to her.
‘Kate was the only girl in the room who could have done that,’ commented Laura Warshauer, an American history of art student who described the incident to Katie Nicholl.
This was an example of how William and Kate had been friends – ‘mates’ almost, but not boyfriend and girlfriend, from virtually the beginning at St Andrews. That started to change from 26 March 2002, which was not so much the date of an encounter as a refreshing of the screen – the revealing of a new Kate. The couple were also seen kissing towards the end of the DONT WALK after-party and making no attempt to hide it, although one source thought they did see Kate pulling away slightly. During the first term she had had a boyfriend, Rupert Finch, an attractive fourth-year law student, whom she had been seeing less of since the Christmas vacation.
Now William and Kate definitely became an ‘item’, even if friends were not sure of the details – it was not considered ‘friendly’ to probe – and the outside world knew still less.
‘After the event,’ recalls Simon Perry, London editor for People magazine, who visited St Andrews several times in 2002, ‘it became clear that the March fashion show must have been some sort of turning point. But at the time we had no idea at all. We could not tell who was who.’
Kate Middleton was very good at keeping herself out of the papers, not least because her St Andrews friends were so close and loyal – and that loyalty extended across the student body as a whole. A decade or so later, after the couple had finally got married, details would start to creep out about the events of 26 March 2002, since the fashion show had turned out to be historic in its way. But at the time there was silence. Whether or not they had ever encountered William personally – and many had not – St Andrews students took pride in keeping their traps shut. Those who had mobile phones texted warnings when they suspected snoopers were in town.
‘We saw William that spring and summer with various friends, male and female,’ says Perry. ‘But it was not until the autumn of 2002, when their flat-share started, that we could begin to put names to faces – and even then it was not obvious that William was specially with Kate, rather than with, say, Olivia Bleasdale.’
Conspiracy had been built into the essence of William and Kate’s relationship from the start. It had to be – vis-à-vis the outside world. Through the academic year of 2002–3 the two of them would emerge from 13A Hope Street at different times most mornings, heading in different directions. William’s switch to his geography major, with an entirely different faculty building and timetable, made this separation easier. But even when the couple socialised together in the evening, meeting up for meals or drinks or parties, they always seemed to be mixed and mingled with different groups of friends, among whom they jostled and
