Growing Up Without Her

This was the William the public saw last week, a tall, luminously handsome young man, dignified without stiffness, murmuring his thanks to the well-wishers lined up outside Kensington Palace. The next day he took the place he had chosen for himself, behind his mother's coffin, and, it seemed, never took his eyes off the ground as he walked with the other men of the family to her funeral.

And he will soon be able to take refuge in Eton, a traditional boarding school of the English ruling class. There, where talking to reporters is an offense punishable by expulsion, he will be allowed to mourn in the privacy he has already chosen to assert, in refusing to pose for his upcoming school photo. He can seek support and advice from his "supervisor," who meets weekly with a small group of boys over coffee in the master's kitchen. Those who've been there say Eton is very protective of its students in times of family trouble, although by way of a subtle process that doesn't involve a lot of discussion about "feelings." All last week, as the tabloids were whipping the masses into a frenzy of demands for the royal family to show more emotion, Eton was doing its best to assure that nothing of the sort would occur within its walls. Boys returning for the start of classes were greeted, as everywhere else in Britain, by flower-strewn portraits of Diana in every shop window, leading one youngster to fret that the constant reminders might prove upsetting to William. "Well, then," his father told him, "it will be your duty never to mention her. You must pretend that nothing has happened and just carry on." "Of course, what happened to Diana was a terrible tragedy," one of William's former masters said last week, before Diana was even buried. "But Prince William is not a little boy. He cannot grieve forever; he must learn to take it."

If this strikes many Americans as a somewhat austere prescription for a teenager whose mother died suddenly--well, it probably would seem the same to Diana, who generally tried to meet life's vicissitudes with a hug and a good cry. It is William's unique fate to be a child of both Diana and the Windsors, to carry the burden of a thousand-year-old royal lineage into an era in which pride is the only sin the public cannot abide. The trick to reigning in the next century will be to keep one lip stiff while the other trembles on the verge of tears. If anyone can pull it off, it is the son of Diana and Charles.

© 1997