Free Prince William by Penny Junor Page B

have ever met … also one of the best and truest of individuals’, and he looked after him and paid for his care to the end.
    Banishment to the nursery was no hardship for the boys; it was customary in aristocratic families and, besides, William adored Barbara Barnes. Every morning when he woke up he would go and climb into bed with her before they both got up for breakfast. He might then go and sneak into bed with his mother for a second cuddle of the day. His mother would always be his mother, but he had an undeniably strong and loving bond with his nanny too. It was hardly surprising. She was the one who was always there: she comforted him when he fell and hurt himself, reassured him when he woke in the night, distracted him when he was upset, battled with him and managed his tantrums, read to him, deciphered his childish chatter and answered his endless questions. She did everything a mother would and loved him as a mother would.
    It was, after all, what she had been hired to do; what every good and caring nanny does. The homes of the aristocracy are filled with retired nannies who live on with the family long after the children have grown up. They are loved like family and are no threat to the mothers they help or stand in for – they are simply another anchor in the child’s support system. But Diana’s old insecurities began to surface. She didn’t consider what removing Barbara would do to William; here, she thought with the selfishness of a child. She wanteda hundred per cent of his affection, just as she wanted a hundred per cent of her husband’s. She had lost the latter battle, but she could fix the former. Giving the flimsiest of reasons, she showed Barbara Barnes the door.
    The irony is that in suddenly cutting Baba, as he called her, out of the four-year-old’s life, Diana was inflicting on her son the same painful feelings of loss and bewilderment that she herself had struggled with when her mother suddenly disappeared from her life at the age of six.
    William understood nothing of his mother’s insecurities and had no comprehension of why Baba had gone. Had he, perhaps, been so naughty he had driven her away? Once she was out of the house, she was out of his life and Diana entertained no contact. Barbara was invited to his confirmation ten years later because Charles recognised she had been an important part of his life. William never forgot her either. Barbara Barnes was one of the most important names on the guest list at his wedding twenty-five years after she vanished from the nursery.
    Two other nannies followed, Ruth Wallace and Jessie Webb, but neither stayed for more than two or three years. Finally Olga Powell slipped seamlessly into the role. She had been deputy to all three nannies, in place since William was six months old, and remained with him until his mother’s death in 1997. Both boys stayed in touch with her after her retirement and, in her eighties, she was another prominent name on the wedding-guest list.
    But something died in William the day his beloved Baba left; he became less outgoing, less trusting, less inclined to make himself vulnerable.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END
    In 1998, more than a year after Diana’s death, I wrote a book that attempted to discover the truth about the relationship between the Prince and Princess. I called the book Charles: Victim or Villain? because I wanted to determine, if possible, which of the two he was. Had he caused Diana’s problems, as she had suggested in her famous Panorama interview, by his obsession with Camilla Parker Bowles, or had Diana gone into that marriage already damaged and Charles had returned to Camilla Parker Bowles because he couldn’t cope with her erratic behaviour? Had he, in short, been a villain, or was he as much of a victim as Diana?
    The conclusion I came to, after talking to many of the key people in their lives during this period, was that there were no villains.
    While