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Chapter 1 - Worlds Apart

With every imaginable privilege available to him and flunkies on hand to attend to his every whim, William should have enjoyed a dream upbringing. But ironically it was Kate who had the more enviable start in life, basking in the warmth of her family’s stability, security and love.

Catherine Elizabeth Middleton was born on 9 January 1982, to mum Carole and dad Michael in Reading’s Royal Berkshire Hospital. Just over eighteen months later she was joined by a sister, Pippa, and, three and a half years after that, a brother James arrived. Carole Goldsmith was working as an air hostess in the 1970s when she met her man. Michael Middleton was a pilot whose powerful masculine looks made him very popular amongst female flight attendants. After a brief time dating, Michael and Carole married in Chiltern, Buckinghamshire, in 1980.

Kate was born two years later and spent the first 13 years of her life growing up in the village of West View, near Bradfield Southend, Berkshire. Her parents had bought the four-bed semi-detached Victorian villa for £35,000 in 1979 – and it was from here that they made a very important life decision. It is one that has almost certainly contributed to Kate’s position today. They were determined to give everything to their children and agreed that international jet-setting was not compatible with family life. They left the airline industry to set up Party Pieces, a mail-order company supplying packs of goodies to guarantee the perfect kids’ bash. Appropriately, wedding kits and princess costumes are amongst the items now shipped by the family firm’s successful online operation.

In 1987, Carole launched the business from a back-garden shed, later expanding into a small industrial unit in nearby Yattendon. Eight years on, the growing firm moved base again into converted farm buildings a mile down the road. In the same year, the family paid £250,000 for a home in the village of Bucklebury. The five-bedroom detached property set within woodland is now worth more than £1 million.

Kate experienced an idyllic childhood, growing up in picture-postcard English villages with parents who packaged and sold fun for a living. A blog she wrote on the Party Pieces website years later provides a telling insight into her carefree youth. She portrayed herself as a happy and outgoing child who loved to dress up as a clown in giant dungarees at fancy dress parties. She described her best party memory as ‘an amazing white rabbit marshmallow cake that Mummy made when I was seven’. Musical statues, she revealed, was a favourite game because she had ‘always been a keen dancer’. Party bags were best, she said, when they contained ‘anything that Mummy would normally never allow me to have. They were always such a treat.’ She recommended cooking parties for girls and camping parties for boys because they were ‘a great way to get Daddies involved’. And she admitted she had suffered a ‘cake disaster’ during James’s birthday when she forgot to add self-raising flour and turned a flat sponge into a trifle cake.

When William and Kate speak about their respective childhoods, her innocent memories must seem a million miles from some of his painful recollections. His youth was blighted by the trauma of his parents’ marriage breakdown and the tragically premature death of his mother – all played out in the media spotlight.

Life began promisingly enough for Prince William Arthur Philip Louis Wales, the boy destined one day to become the 42nd monarch since William the Conqueror took the English throne in 1066. His birth at St Mary’s Hospital in London on 21 June 1982 was met with a 41-gun salute, the sounding of bells and rejoicing that reverberated around Britain and beyond. It came 11 months after Prince Charles, the Queen’s eldest son, had tied the knot with the then Lady Diana Spencer.

Their fairy-tale ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral was watched by a worldwide audience of 750 million people who were transfixed by the pomp and pageantry.

‘Diana made it her mission to give them a sense of fun, freedom and – most importantly – normality.’

William inherited his mother’s good looks, his father’s inquiring nature and – as the passing years would reveal – the House of Windsor hairline. Prince Harry was born just over two years after William, and the two were to become close friends and allies.

They were brought up in palatial surroundings, with nanny Barbara Barnes keeping a watchful eye over them in their early years.

Being a Prince certainly had many advantages over being a commoner. William once received a £60,000 scaled-down Jaguar car for his birthday, making Kate’s clown dungarees look rather small beer in comparison. On another occasion, he jokingly threatened a school rival with his grandmother’s soldiers during a row.

But as he got older, there was no hiding from the fact that his parents’ marriage was collapsing in front of his – and the nation’s – eyes. Whoever was to blame for the relationship’s failure – and everyone had an opinion – there was universal sympathy for William and Harry when Charles and Diana split in 1992. At an age when Kate was playing musical statues, William was caught in the middle of a brutal separation that infamously contributed to the Queen’s ‘annus horribilis’.

In spite of this, even Charles and Diana’s worst critics would concede that individually they had done their very best for their sons. Diana made it her mission to give them a sense of fun, freedom and – most importantly – normality. Charles was determined that they would not suffer the torment that he had endured at the tough Gordonstoun public school in Moray, Scotland. He also fought to shield William and Harry from the prying eyes of the newspapers and television cameras.

But nothing could prepare them for the shocking death of their mother in a car crash in the Pont de l’Alma road tunnel, Paris, on 31 August 1997. William was just 15 years old – and Harry only 12 – as they walked solemnly in her funeral procession from St James’s Palace to Westminster Abbey. It is a testament to both boys’ strength of character that such a heartbreaking ordeal did not send them spiralling out of control.

Diana would have been proud that her desire for her sons to be grounded shone from them even after she died. It was to prove a quality in William that a girl like Kate would find especially appealing.