When his mother died I was contacted by people I know and reminded I’d written a novel in which I’d made the Prince of Wales a major character and had him behave in a manner unbecoming of a prince or,come to that,a meth-dealer. Now he’s being crowned King,they asked,where are you going to hide? Having made our head of state out to be a root-rat and a rascal,where you gunna go? To each person who contacted me I replied,“No,no,no. Nothing to do with Charles. It was all made up. A fictional prince.” But the book was about an English prince who turned up at a high country campus of a private school in Australia – so who was I kidding?
I couldn’t remember the book too well. Forgetting what happens in a novel you’ve read might be an alarming memento mori,but it’s shallow distress compared to forgetting a novel you’ve actually written. Once the calls came in I searched the house for a copy ofLies I Told About A Girl and found one in a daughter’s abandoned bedroom and began to read.
We generally think of our past selves as faulty prototypes of our current self,comparatively guileless,not yet the fully rounded product. But I was pretty impressed with my younger self’s book. Set at Timbertop in 1975,its cast includes a kid who might be Murdoch’s son,a girl who might be Mal Fraser’s daughter,the Prince,and a shit-kicker who was,essentially,me. It contains sex and death and The Dismissal and was meant both as a romance and a satire. I’m broadminded enough to think the book very funny.
I wrote this of my Prince. “After these millennia of suffering royalty people have a right,when they hear the word ‘prince’ to think of a young man who believes the world was invented as a board game for him to play and all the people in it tokens to be hunted along at dice toss ... He should have believed it. Everyone had told him it was true. The blood of kings,tasted and pronounced vintage by God,runs in you. Nannies,footservants,tutors,retainers,fawning statesmen,diplomats,virtuoso sycophants,presidents and Oxford dons had told him this. Tenors had sung it to him... But somehow he didn’t believe it. He never got past his own lopsided smile in the mirror as the core of himself.”
I think that paragraph was distilled from conversations I’d had about Prince Charles with Michael Dudley de Burgh Collins Persse. He was my English teacher at school. It was rumoured among us kids that as a wild Queensland youth he’d killed another young man in a game of rugby and this had wrought a Damascene conversion in him,making him the serene figure we knew. That rugby story was schoolboy tosh. But he had known a tragedy that surely shaped him as the caring figure he became. Collins Persse was chosen as tutor for the Prince of Wales during his time at Geelong Grammar. A monarchist and historian with an almost supernatural memory,he knew Charles’ family history better than Charles did. In Charles’ defence,Collins Persse knew everyone’s family history better than they did.
Collins Persse gave me 59 out of 60 for fifth-form English. I accept the near-perfection of the mark as an encouragement rather than a true measure of my work. He loved the English language and was its fervent evangelist,and knew I could be bought.
The Prince of Wales and Collins Persse became lifelong friends. I watched my old master on TV at all those weddings. Not long afterLies I Told About A Girl was published I was at a school reunion and sheepishly shook his hand,keenly aware my novel had taken liberties with his prince and friend,for which I apologised,pleading an artist’s flighty morality and heedless egotism. “HRH is broadminded,Anson,” he told me in his whispery voice. “He thought the book very funny.”
Whether Charles actually readLies I Told About A Girl,or an old teacher was doing his ex-student a kindness,I don’t know. It sounds now like another attempt by Collins Persse to encourage me. But I,in my own vainglorious way,have come to imagine his remark as a blurb for the book. Bugger Oprah Winfrey endorsing your potboiler. Imagine picking up a book and reading,“I’m broadminded ... I thought it very funny,” King Charles the Third.