‘Nine months of bootie’d goo’

Press, 2 December 1981, Page 18

‘Nine months of bootie’d goo’

The pregnancy of the Princess of Wales looks set to be the least discreet state of royal enceintement since the competitive Tudor, heir-bear-ing of the 15305.. Then queens bulked out their fronts with cushions; the better to parade their role. Our Princess has already donned a standard coatsmock months before she needs such tented accommodation. The expectancy has terminated the summer fairytale awfully fast. Three months and seven days married, and the romance changes to a history play. What can they be worried about at the Palace? Dynastic battles? Potential Cromwells? For much of the summer nuptials it seemed merely reassuringly archaic that the British royals thought in the terms and priorities of a vanished royally-ruled Europe: of alliance and religion, of virginity, of pomp and parades proclaiming the power of family and lineage. Now that pre-twentieth century thinking seems less charming, and without proper purpose any more. The future of the royal family was surely secure enough: we are not likely to turn Republican overnight if even a fraction of this summers popular enthusiasm was genuine. We were not even bored with the fairy-Princess fantasy: look at the adoring headlines hymning Diana before the news was let out (all referring to the lady as radiant, as though she were an element in a gas fire). Most of all, gynaecology is now so advanced that no-one needs to breed that young to give a child and mother a better chance of surviving, nor to ensure maximum output of princelings throughout the fertile years. Just when many of us hoped that marriage could be regarded as a difficult (and not necessarily permanent) estate to be unromantically entered upon, we were provided this year — more by the press than by the surprisingly realistic lead players — with a Royal edition of the old sloppy ever-afters, the kind of happy endings that cause so much pain to those who believe in them, pursue

them, and find them unrealisable. Now, without time for recovery, those of us who are trying to relate to children honestly and without sentimentality fear we are about to endure nine months of bootie’d goo, followed by a decade or more of careless media exploitation of regal childhood.

Only those aspects of it that can be cropped and printed for cute tabloid appeal, only that footage of it which will sweeten some hard cruel day’s bulletin of television news, will be shown to us: all the complexities of the awkward new family states will be ignored. The hell with us: what about the Princess?

Poor lady. She was melded into half a history-book pairing Charles-and-Diana, like William-and-Mary — before ever she grew to full maturity.

But she has been fighting back gallantly — consider her alarmed eyes and rainproofed manners that allayed even those Welsh valleys where the tumbrils are run on public transport. Given more time — for time used and experience seen through create character, not scboolday scrapbooks and designer-feath-ered-hats — the Princess would have expanded into an original public personality, one that could already reveal itself as less than superhuman, and very endearing. Now she is about to dwindle, at least through media lens and words, which is how we ail apprehend her, into one-third and probably very swiftly into one-fourth, of a conventional family group. That individual public face will never now be fully found, the complete persona never realised: picture captions to the Princess alone will always indicate where the children are at that time. All for the want of a few years, or even months, all for the unnecessary prolongation of a concept of matrimonial chronology that should have departed with the Hapsburg Empire.

No woman should have to produce so soon, so young: even the doctors, with their Neolithic belief in the urgency of young motherhood, don’t start to talk of “an elderly prima gravida” (first pregnancy) until the pregnant one is thirty.

Everyone wishes well to the Prince and Princess of Wales and their expected baby. But after the initial media euphoria, Veronica Horwell, “Sunday Times,” laments the end of the summer fairytale.