Despite being the human equivalent of Marmite when it comes to the Royal Family, I’m sure there’s nobody who didn’t feel for Prince Harry as he made that long flight back from California to the UK, reeling from the terrible news of his father’s cancer diagnosis.
And although I don’t know him, I can well imagine some of the thoughts that might be tormenting him as he reflects on his strained relationship with King Charles.
Regrets over past spats. Fears for what lies ahead for his dad. Determination to rebuild bridges in whatever time they have left – which everyone hopes will be many years.
My dad was about as far from King Charles as you could possibly be.
Raised in a working-class Liverpool district by parents who didn’t encourage him educationally, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps to give me all the privileges he didn’t have.
A nice, detached home in a leafy Home Counties suburb with great schools, money to fund university and gap years.
But this gap in our upbringings put distance between us. Like Charles and Harry, we developed different world views and values. He was surprised by my diverse, confident friendship groups. He had old-fashioned views that I found racist and sexist.
His own father had been cold and bad-tempered; his mother had suffered from depression and had her emotions dulled by decades of prescription drugs, so my dad had never witnessed the family love and warmth that came so easily to my mum.
He struggled to communicate his feelings sensitively and I began to avoid provoking his temper. We never had the big conversations – everything was mediated through my mum.
This changed with his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.
While MS may lack the ‘shock factor’ of cancer and the terrifying spectre of rapid decline, my dad had the primary progressive kind, so was not going to get better.
I’d known nothing about the condition before. When he broke the news I cried, knowing it was bad, but I didn’t understand what was to come.
I soon saw.
It was devastating to watch a man who had been so strong and capable wither away, stripped, one by one, of life’s joys and dignities – the ability to leave the house independently, to walk, to enjoy food (MS can cause problems swallowing), to control his bowels.
Seeing him cry for the first time, from the pain he was enduring and his fears for the future, was terrible.
But with everything else that was lost, we also lost that awkwardness that had characterised our relationship as adults.
The difficulty of tricky conversations was overshadowed by the awfulness of his disease, which put our trivial differences in perspective.
As his disease progressed and became the ‘new normal’, we began to talk to each other – really talk – and I started to understand and see him as a person, rather than as just a grumpy dad.
He told me about his cold treatment and distance from his own father, and on one occasion said how he was glad our own relationship was warmer. Being ill had also softened his personality and he would voice more empathy towards others.
I told him I was enjoying our conversations. ‘We should have had more of them,’ he said, sadly.
Of course, it wasn’t a 180-degree transformation – he was still him and I was still me. We weren’t suddenly the Waltons.
His dreadful predicament put any grievances I had to the side, and he too was able to find the words to talk about his own father, his childhood, his feelings.
As he lay in his hospital-issue bed, looking back over his past and his regrets, I found him human and – perhaps for the first time – relatable.
His illness also put me (very occasionally, when my mum wasn’t there) in the role of carer.
One of the worst moments for him was when I had to change his bedsheets after an accident. He was sobbing, mortified at what he perceived as his loss of dignity, and that a child should have to do that for a parent.
But when I fed him soup from a spoon, it was perhaps the closest to him I’d ever felt.
MS was an enormous price to pay for a thawing in our relationship, but I am still thankful we had the opportunity to know each other better.
Like Harry, I also live abroad, and I remember the call from my mum, about five years after his diagnosis, to say my dad had taken a turn for the worse. At first she hoped he’d pull through, and declined my offer to fly back at once.
He died a few days later, so my own flight home was for the funeral.
With luck, and the excellent medical care that he will doubtless be receiving, Charles may recover, giving him and Harry time to repair their fractured relationship.
Palaces, titles, tabloid splashes, best-selling autobiographies, multi-million-dollar Netflix deals – the royal milieu is miles from my family’s.
But Harry is also simply a son who has pursued a life that his father can’t really understand, and their very human generational differences, tricky in-law politics and awkward family get-togethers are played out, in some way, in homes up and down the land.
Every adult child who has had an imperfect relationship with a parent will understand how Harry must be feeling.
As he sits by his father’s side, I hope he can shake off past grudges and bitterness and simply reach out as a child to an ailing parent, using the fear and shock of this diagnosis as a path to greater understanding and closeness.
And I hope that with the clarity conferred by serious illness, Charles can embrace his prodigal son.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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