How Harry wrote Spare as imagined by Hilary Rose
”So I’m sitting in the dog basket with a blanket over my head. It’s my safe space. Meg and I are going through all the key points I want to say in my book, which is an autobiography, but it will be written by someone else not me, because duh.
“So let’s take it from the top,” says Meg, who is sporting a smokey eye, a nude lip and just a hint of a frown to show that she’s concentrating, but prettily, and not so much that it might cause wrinkles later.
“Let’s go,” says the ghostwriter.
“Wait,” I say. “Can you hear me under the blanket? Am I muffled?”
“Yes,” says Meg. “But it’s for the best. Start talking.”
“Well,” I say. “I was two and Willy stole my train set. It was Henry the green engine and I really, really loved Henry the green engine and he knew that, which is why he stole it, the bastard.”
“Oh, my love,” says Meg. “How you suffered.”
“And we had to share a bedroom at Balmoral,” I say, warming to my theme, “and his half was bigger.”
“Is that mathematically possible?” says the ghostwriter. “For one half to be bigger?”
Meg frowns at him, but prettily.
“Willy had a double bed as well,” I say, and that clinches it.
Meg says let’s fast-forward to the bit where you’re embarking on active service in Afghanistan, because no one else in the royal family has ever served in the military, or something, possibly because they’re a bunch of pacifist wusses.
“Didn’t your brother serve in the military?” says the ghostwriter.
“Your father? Your uncle Edward?”
I shrug.
“They didn’t see active service.”
“I think your uncle Andrew went to the Falklands?” he says to the dog.
Meg freezes. The dog retreats.
“Moving on,” says Meg.
“I didn’t just risk lives, I ended them! I shot 25 Taliban fighters!” I say proudly, bursting out from under the blanket and flexing my pecs. “Twenty-five of them! I counted!”
Meg eyes me while chewing prettily on a pencil, but not so much as to ruin her lipstick.
“You counted all the way to 25?” she says. “That’s wonderful, honey, I’m so proud. But we need to make sure your book speaks to an American audience who might one day vote me into the White House. So, were you standing in your knowing at the time? Or sitting in your authenticity? Or did you maybe not kill them, but try to talk to them about the choices they’ve made in life, and how meditation might help?”
I snuggle back under the blanket and think about it for some time.
“No, I was sitting,” I say in the end. “Definitely sitting, in an Apache helicopter gunship with guns and bombs and stuff to blast the bastards to smither—”
“Um, the blanket seems to be twitching in your lap.” says the ghostwriter. “Could you straighten it?”
I take a deep breath and think about chickens.
“I’m not sure bragging about how many people you’ve killed is a good look,” he says.
“But no one is looking at me,” I protest. “I’m under a blanket. And besides, they were foreigners.”
Meg winces.
“I think William and Kate told me to say that,” I say. “Or maybe I won’t say exactly who in the book, I’ll just leave it hanging. That worked brilliantly before.”
“Let’s move on, honey,” says Meg soothingly, and the blanket starts to twitch again.
My mobile rings. It’s my psychic.
“See that palm tree over there?” she says.
“Wow!” I say. “You’re not here in California, you have no idea we’re surrounded by palm trees, but you still know there’s a palm tree over there! That’s incredible.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Isn’t it. Anyway, that palm tree over there? It’s Henry the green engine. He’s trying to send you a message. It might be ‘choo choo’ but the connection isn’t strong today.”
She hangs up.
“So,” says Meg, consulting her notes. “You say that you lost your virginity to an older woman, in a field, behind a pub. Are we sure we want to stick with that? We could make it ‘in a bed, with a beautiful young woman who you were madly in love with, by the light of the full moon’.”
“But that isn’t true,” I say.
Meg shrugs.
“And I mounted her like a stallion,” I say proudly. “A ginger one.”
“Wait,” says the ghostwriter. “Is Jilly Cooper ghostwriting this book? Or me?”
“Jilly who?” says Meg, glancing up from her copy of How to Sue The Press Until They Only Write Things You Like.
“And another thing,” I say. “The Nazi uniform? William and Kate told me to wear it. And the cocaine I snorted? That too. And the weed. Or maybe it was my dad who told me to smoke the weed. I forget. Does it matter?”
“No,” says Meg. “It’s the gist we’re interested in. Get to the bit where we’re married and living in Kensington Palace.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Except we were in a grotty little cottage with roses round the door and Willy and Kate were in a big flat with oil paintings and antiques and stuff. It’s not fair.”
“I thought the dream was something more like Soho House?” says the ghostwriter. “I thought you wanted vegan paint and yoga studios, grey and white with little pops of colour provided by oversized vase of peonies?”
Meghan stares at him.
“That’s not the point,” she says.
“It isn’t?” he asks.
“No. Their stuff was from the V&A. Ours was from Ikea.”
“And his bedroom was bigger than mine when I was ten,” I add, helpfully. “And it probably still is. And where’s my Henry the green engine?”
“Carry on,” says Meg, and I get momentarily distracted thinking of a young Barbara Windsor doing chest exercises in a bikini.
“And Willy hit me and knocked me over,” I say. “Or at least I said he did, and that’s all that counts, and what are the chances of him suing? Zero.”
Meg smiles.
“I’m a big boy now,” I add, “and I didn’t hit him back, I told him to get out. Although if I’d been in my Apache helicopter gunship I might have —”
“Shhh,” says Meg, and I subside, and we move on to how awful Camilla might have been, and yet as it turns out wasn’t, but let’s focus on the first bit.
“I was worried that she would be a wicked stepmother,” I say.
“Camilla?” says the ghostwriter. “Remind me. Housewife and mum from Wiltshire who had the misfortune to fall in love with the man who would be king?”
“That’s the one,” I say. “She could have been a wicked stepmother and that is my truth. Would she give me a poisoned red apple? Would I wake up in a bed with a pea in the mattress? If I throw down my hair will a princess be able to climb up and rescue me?”
“Wait,” says Meg. “I think you’re confusing your fairy stories.”
“Is that bad?” I ask, puzzled. “I thought that’s what we told Oprah, and you said it was good.”
“That was then,” she says. “We need to co-ordinate our fairy stories now. So, no peas. No apples. Yes, my love, they are part of our five a day, but trust me on this. And give up on the hair.”
The psychic calls again with a message from Mum. It’s something about a Christmas tree ornament that Archie has broken, and the ghostwriter nods and says if Princess Diana was getting in touch from beyond the grave it would definitely be about Christmas tree ornaments, and can we get to the bit where William says Meghan was difficult, rude and abusive?
“Aha!” I say. “He was brainwashed. By the beastly press. You might think they wrote that Meghan was a breath of fresh air and just what the royal family needs and hurrah for Meghan BUT back in 2016, in invisible ink, between the lines, they made up beastly lies about her.
“And that’s what Willy read. And believed. Because he’s a bastard and he was born first and I wasn’t and he stole my toy train.”
“And it’s not fair?” finishes Meghan.
“You’re so right,” I tell her. “And that is why I love you.”
“Everything’s going to be OK, my little ginger stallion,” she says.
I get off her lap and we go through to the kitchen.
“That dog bowl is triggering,” I tell her.
“I know, my love,” she says. “But get back in the basket and put the blanket over your head. I love it when you do that. It suits you.”