Prince William (28 page)

One of the voices William listened to during that time was Kate Middleton's. She was also away from her comfort zone for the first time during that first year and was as daunted by some elements of this new life as he was.

Kate had been one of the least pushy of the girls he met in that first year. She had a quiet, confident presence and was friendly and laughed easily. She was the sort of person with whom it felt safe to open up a little, someone who had depth and empathy. They were both a long way from home and their backgrounds were very different, but by coincidence, they had both been Raleigh venturers to the same place in Chile the year before. Kate's expedition had followed immediately after William's, so they knew many of the same people and places and could compare notes, share stories and laugh about the discomforts together. They immediately had a bond. They were also, they discovered, both keen tennis players, swimmers and skiers and all-round sports enthusiasts. And they were both studying History of Art, so they went to lectures
together and for coffees afterwards, and for drinks in the pubs and wine bars; they swam and surfed together and played tennis on the university courts. As time passed it developed into a close and mutually supportive friendship.

There had been no thunderbolt when they met. Asked for her first impression of William during their engagement interview, Kate said, ‘I actually think I went bright red when I met you and sort of scuttled off, feeling very shy about meeting you.' As commonly happens, she started going out with a fourth-year student, Rupert Finch; and William's eye was also roving elsewhere. According to their fellow students, most girls' reaction to him at that time was, ‘What a nice guy, and looking back he was cute, but girls didn't go, “Wow he's so good looking”.' (Except perhaps for the Americans who fell at his feet.) Kate was said to have had a photograph of William on her wall at school but she knocked that myth on the head when asked about it in their engagement interview. ‘There wasn't just one, there were about twenty,' said William. ‘He wishes,' said Kate. ‘No, I had the Levi's guy on my wall, not a picture of William, sorry.' To which William replied, ‘It was me in Levi's, honestly.' The truth is, it was more than a year before they were anything other than very good friends, and making each other laugh was an important part of it.

Kate left little impression on the academic staff at St Andrews, who confess that when lecturing to a sea of faces, it's rare for one to stand out. ‘She was another girl in a pashmina,' one said. ‘I wouldn't have remembered her at all if I hadn't seen something in the newspaper in the second semester. When I read about her charismatic personality … well, maybe it's developed – but it wasn't that obvious then. Sometimes students passing through you know are headed for great things, but I didn't notice her in four years.' Those organising the Raleigh expedition have no strong memory of her either. They too, like university professors, are processing hundreds of young people every year and one more girl battling the elements, with unwashed hair and no make-up, in grubby jeans, is easy to miss. When Malcolm Sutherland looks
back at photographs of Kate in Chile, compared with how she looks now, he can't believe it's the same girl.

But part of her allure for William was that she didn't stand out. Today, with the designer frocks, the killer heels, the make-up and the perfectly tended hair, she looks as though she was made for the red carpet, but that wasn't how she looked when William fell in love with her. She looked like any number of attractive young girls, with a good figure and ready smile. She was natural and relaxed, pretty without ever looking as though she was trying too hard. Although her parents were extremely wealthy and she had been to a top school, she wasn't a ‘Sloane Ranger' or a ‘Ya', as so many of the girls he knew in Gloucestershire and London were – and like so many of the girls who hung around him at St Andrews too. Her parents were resoundingly middle class; she spoke without an exaggerated upper-class accent, and she was refreshingly shy, yet intelligent and strong.

Not so shy, however, that she wasn't prepared to stride down an improvised catwalk in the Students' Union wearing little more than a bra and pants – but it was for charity, and compared with what some of the other models had on she was modesty itself. It was an annual event called Just Walk, said to be ‘Scotland's most prestigious fashion show' – and for the record did not happen at the 5-star St Andrew's Bay Hotel but at what is arguably the ugliest and tattiest building in the town. The event is entirely run by students to raise money for charity while supporting up-and-coming fashion designers, and William is said to have paid £200 for his ticket and seen Kate in an altogether new light, apparently remarking to his friend, ‘Wow, Fergus, Kate's hot!' The flimsy dress, designed by Charlotte Todd, who was then a fashion student, was intended to be a skirt but someone decided it would look better worn as a dress. The photograph has become as iconic as the picture of Diana in her diaphanous skirt. As for the dress itself, it lay boxed in the bottom of Charlotte's mother's wardrobe for eight years and was sold at auction in 2011 for a staggering £78,000.

Yet William was never supposed to have been there that night,
for what turned out to have been such a seminal moment in the history of the monarchy. Colleen had assured Niall Scott that he would not be going to the event, so Niall had allowed the media in to take photos of the catwalk show. ‘Five minutes after I'd opened the Union doors to the press,' he says, ‘William walked round the corner with his mates and into the hall and sat down at the table right at the end of the runway. The press thought they'd died and gone to heaven. I thought I might be destined for a slow death with no chance of heaven. I called Colleen, who was mildly displeased, but she is about the calmest woman I've ever met. That was when I learned that William, on occasion, would lead even his most trusted minders a merry dance.'

Kate's female contemporaries describe her as ‘a sweet girl with no airs or graces, who was quiet and not outrageously flirty, but someone who always enjoyed attention from guys.' She struck those who shared lectures and tutorials with her as seeming rather vulnerable. She would sit quietly with one male friend (apart from those where she overlapped with William) and didn't hang around with the girls in her year. She didn't seem to like the ones that hung around William. They say she was diligent, in that she went to lectures and seemed to put in more work than most. ‘I felt slightly sorry for her,' says one. ‘I think she was more of a guy girl than a girly girl, but she was good fun and she laughed a lot. She was very chatty, very sporty, didn't normally wear make-up and always looked good.'

Having been educated at Marlborough College, a prestigious co-educational public school in Wiltshire, Kate was very comfortable in mixed company – unlike so many students who arrive at university from single-sex schools. She had done well at Marlborough and excelled at sport, egged on by her parents, Michael and Carole. They were fiercely ambitious for their eldest child. They were always there at the courtside or on the touchline or at the swimming baths to cheer their daughter on in matches and competitions.

Michael and Carole had both made their fortune in life through sheer hard work. One profile writer once said rather sniffily that
Kate's lineage ‘can't be traced much further back than the suburbanisation of Berkshire'. They were not members of the landed gentry, they had not been handed their fortune on a plate. They had come from modest origins and worked for every penny they owned. And after years of hard graft in the airline business – he as a member of ground staff, she, until she had children, as an air hostess – they had hit on a brilliant business plan. It grew out of Carole's experience as a stay-at-home mother with her young children. They created a company called Party Pieces in 1987, providing inspiration and supplies for parties for every age group, and shipping them out by mail order. Nearly twenty-five years later it is the UK's leading party company, and they have made enough money to have put their three children through public school and university and been able to pay a sizeable share of Kate's wedding costs.

They live in a comfortable five-bedroom detached house overlooking farmland in the village of Bucklebury in Berkshire, where they support all the local independent shops and are regulars at the local pub, the Bull Inn, in neighbouring Stanford Dingley. Michael, one of life's natural gentlemen, is loved by everyone in the village; Carole is a go-getter, a tough businesswoman who has been the force behind Party Pieces and the family's social ascent. Opinion about them is divided (there's nothing like fame on top of social climbing for dividing opinion), but it is universally agreed in the village that they are a happy family and have lovely, unassuming, friendly children.

HOPE STREET

By the time William returned in September 2002 the ‘wobble' was well and truly behind him and he was much more confident, as so many students are in their second year. The sun was shining and he had decided that he rather enjoyed life in the ‘auld grey toun'. Most students move out of halls in their second year, and along with three friends, one of whom was Kate, he had rented a smart flat in Hope Street, which belonged to friends of friends. It was another central and attractive part of the town and a conventional move for wealthier students. His other flatmates were Fergus Boyd and Olivia Bleasdale, a friend of a friend and formerly at Westonbirt (a girls' boarding school half a mile from Highgrove, many of whose pupils he'd met at local pubs and parties).

The four friends had decided it would be fun to share a house several months before, and the combination worked well. William and Kate were still nothing more than good mates when they moved in, but as the year progressed their relationship shifted a gear. As William said in their engagement interview, ‘It just sort of blossomed from there really. We just saw more of each other, hung out a bit more and did stuff.'

Hope Street had innumerable student flats and there was no shortage of parties that went on noisily into the night. But not all the flats in Hope Street belonged to students and one was taken by a part-time lecturer called Dana. ‘The poor girl was plagued with students partying three times a week,' says Brendan Cassidy. ‘She was really suffering, on the verge of tears because she couldn't sleep. One night she got up and went and knocked on the door
of one to ask them to keep the music down. The door was opened and who was in the hallway but William! It didn't make a blind bit of difference. I tried to get the people in College Gate [the university's administrative offices] to do something about it and I don't know whether it was because they couldn't do anything or whether they were aware that William was involved, but either way they did nothing.'

Anyone who invited William to a house party had a visit beforehand from his PPOs to give the flat or the building a quick security check and they would then get a call to say that William was on his way. Once he was there, he was no different from any other student. He dressed in jeans or chinos and shirt, with a collection of bracelets around his wrist, accumulated on his travels; he danced (he would say badly), he drank too much, he laughed and joked – memorably, on one occasion, over a rabbit vibrator that one of his hostesses had been given for her birthday. The only times in four years he dressed up were for ceilidhs and reeling balls, where he showed off his Scottish dancing enthusiasm but, despite being entitled to don a kilt, he firmly stuck to black tie. As he said in an interview at the end of his second year, he had only ever worn a kilt in private. ‘It's a bit draughty,' he laughed. ‘But I love Scottish dancing – it's great. I'm hopeless at it but I do enjoy it. I usually make a complete muck-up of the Dashing White Sergeant, I do throw my arms dangerously about and girls fly across the dance floor.'

Of course university wasn't just a round of parties. Some nights he and his housemates stayed in and cooked, taking it in turns. He revelled in the novelty of everyday life that most people take for granted. ‘I do a lot of shopping – I enjoy the shopping, actually. I get very carried away. I cook quite regularly for them and they cook for me.'

Household chores were also shared between them. ‘We all get on very well and start off having rotas, but, of course, it just broke down into complete chaos. Everyone helps out when they can. I try to help out when I can and they do the same for me, but usually you just fend for yourself.'

In my day as a student, apart from hotels, there was not much more than a dodgy Chinese and a fish-and-chip shop – and breakfast was a bacon roll at Pete's greasy spoon café on Market Street. The pubs served beers and spirits and maybe the odd salted peanut; wine was only served in restaurants and the word gastro had not attached itself to anything north of Hadrian's Wall. The town virtually closed down after 10 o'clock at night. By the time William was an undergraduate, the town had been revolutionised. There is still only one small, old-fashioned cinema, weirdly called The New Picture House, but in addition to the pubs, which have smartened up almost out of recognition, there are wine bars, like the pubs, all selling food, there are restaurants of every persuasion, Starbucks and Costa coffee bars, all manner of civilisation that had been absent in my day. As the university has grown in size and become more fashionable, and the student population more cosmopolitan and sophisticated, and in some cases wealthy, the town has grown to meet the market.

A favourite haunt of William and his friends was Ma Belles, a cosy bar and restaurant in the basement of the Golf Hotel in the Scores, one of the oldest and most traditional hotels in the town. Upstairs there are tartan carpets and cockaleekie soup, while downstairs an array of exotic cocktails are on offer, as well as coffee, afternoon teas and bar meals. Afternoon teas sell at £8.50, mojitos at £6.50 and champagne at £56 a bottle or £11 a glass. It is a cross between the bar in the American sitcom
Cheers
, and the Central Perk coffee house in
Friends
. It is big and spacious with bare, wooden floorboards and comfortable deep leather sofas, banquettes in the window seats, and giant television sets tuned to rolling sports channels. Whenever Aston Villa was playing, Ma Belles was where William was to be found glued to the TV, sitting at the bar on a high stool with a pint of cider by his side, loudly cheering the team on.