Angela Mollard: Has Harry ever really had a ‘home’?

The Duke of Sussex assured the Brits last week that the UK will always be home. During a trip back to her childhood town, Angela Mollard thought about Harry, and wondered what the concept means to him.

I have just been home. Except it’s not my home.

In fact it’s nearly three decades since I lived in the small provincial town where the soft grey-green hills block the easterly winds, carpet roses spill from the traffic islands and the lemons grow thick-skinned but extra juicy.

So much of the person I am can be attributed to this place: the pool where I swam lengths for hours a day learning that the best things require effort; the high school where honour meant more than being the best; the treehouse my brothers and I shared with a stream of foster kids who taught us, without it ever being stated, that everyone wasn’t as lucky as us. There are also the two intersections where I crashed two new 50cc scooters within a week of each other, proof that I would never have a future as a motorcycle courier.

The region is heady with memory but as I drove away last week I realised it wasn’t the place that was home but the person who made it so: my mum.

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I arrived in the midst of family turmoil. An uncle and a step-uncle had been diagnosed with terminal cancer within days of each other but still my mother plonked a homemade quiche loaded with vegetables on the table. Lamingtons, which she double dips with chocolate then coconut, sat in a Tupperware container in the fridge and apple cucumbers were left unpicked in the garden so I could enjoy that pleasure myself. Upstairs a pile of my favourite magazines sat next to the bed and the old clock which chimes every hour and which always keeps me awake at night had been switched to silent. How precious it is, I reflected, to feel so cared for and so known.

And then, because he and his wife were the source of some conversation, I thought about Prince Harry and wondered what home means to him. Probably not Kensington Palace where he grew up and which is now home to his brother, or Balmoral in the summer or even Highgrove, the country home where his father and Camilla host regular house parties. I doubt even Frogmore Cottage, the five-bedroom home he and Meghan decorated with great expense, feels like home in any true sense of the word.

Since Diana died, what has ‘home’ meant to Harry? Picture: Getty

In fact when he referenced “home” earlier this week, it was almost to reassure those who live on the patriotic isle. “The UK is my home and a place that I love,” he said. “That will never change.”

No, it won’t, but your nationality, the imprint on your passport, even the language and culture you’ve always known are not home. Home is the people who love you hardest, who tolerate your failings and idiosyncrasies and hold you close when the messy, horrible, heartbreaking stuff happens as it always does.

The Royal Family, for all it’s public service, has not always served its own particularly well. We learn to love first and foremost from how we were loved and Prince Charles has made it clear in biographies that his childhood was not a happy one. Doubtless he is a better father than his own was to him but it was Harry’s mother who did the deep loving, the fun loving, the unconditional instinctive loving that provides security and sense of self in the world.

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If Diana were alive Harry would have a home. She would have known and understood the challenges which have faced her second son and she would have provided a sanctuary for him, Meghan and Archie. As the child of divorced parents and having had a strained relationship with her mother, she would have empathised with Meghan’s discordant relationship with her father. Further, she would have tutored her daughter-in-law in what it means to be royal, from the perspective of an outsider, and provided ballast when the young family despaired of being in the spotlight.

William was 15 and Harry 12 when Diana died in a car crash in Paris in 1997. Picture: AFP

Home is not a place where our predicaments are necessarily solved but a place where others love us deeply enough to acknowledge what hampers and hurts us. It’s where we can act rashly or thoughtlessly yet know that we will be forgiven. It’s where we can put aside our “outside” persona and be our truest selves.

Prince William has established a new sense of home through the Middleton family. His wife’s solid parents and close-knit siblings have enfolded him and given his young family an alternate place of refuge away from the customs and courtiers that govern royal life.

It seems Harry and Meghan want to create their own version of home, outside the constrains of the royal family. Picture: AFP

Harry has no such shelter and Meghan’s family is too fractured and far away to offer the same and so in a move which could leave him even more stranded he’s chosen to build that sense of home for himself. I hope it works. I hope he finds peace. Perhaps in place of a mother who would have thrown her arms around him and made him his favourite treacle tart, he will forge a new softness and security with a woman who knows what he lacks.

And perhaps with time and age he and his brother will rebuild a small sense of home for each other.

Twitter: @angelamollard

Originally published as Angela Mollard: Has Harry ever really had a ‘home’?