THERE are many heartbreaking stories about Charles as a young prince but one that perhaps best captures his vulnerability and insecurity dates back to when he was just eight years old.
He was having lunch at Broadlands, the home of his great-uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina, and was given a bowl of wild strawberries.
The little boy began to methodically remove the stems and Edwina told him, “Don’t take the little stems out. Look, you can pick them up by the stems and dip them in sugar.”
Moments later Charles, red-faced and head bowed over his bowl, was spotted by his cousin, Pamela Hicks, trying to put the stems back on.
“That was so sad,” she recalled. “And so typical of how sensitive he was.”
Making things all the harder for poor Charles was the way he was treated by his father – the one person whose approval he craved the most.
Prince Philip thought his son soft and weak and believed it was his job to toughen him up.
In an interview when Charles was 20, the prince was asked whether his father had been a strict disciplinarian and if he’d been told to “sit down and shut up”.
“The whole time, yes,” Charles replied.
Sally Bedell Smith, author of The Lonely Heir and Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, says Philip was “a blunt instrument” unable to resist personal remarks.
“He was sarcastic with his daughter, Anne, as well. But Charles’ younger sister, a confident extrovert, could push back while the young prince wilted, retreating farther into
