Modern fairy tale: Prince Philip and Kenya's place in love story

 

The gold Yale key turned in the lock, and my stomach lurched as the back door of Kensington Palace opened. I stepped inside and walked forward, as the heavy black door slammed behind me, sending an echo throughout the emptiness that lay ahead. It was as dark and gloomy as ever in that part of the palace, so I flicked the light switch. Nothing happened.

The bulb must have blown, I thought. Then I looked up to the ceiling and saw that the entire light fixture had been ripped out, leaving only dangling wires. I walked on, my footsteps echoing, to what had been the engine room of the ‘home’ I called KP, where tradesmen, staff and deliverymen had once busied themselves.

 I was in the middle of the lobby, once filled with the buzz of the refrigerator, the whirr of the ice-making machine, the swish of the dishwasher, the chatter of people coming and going. Now there was a void. The mail pigeon-holes were empty; black garbage bags, empty drawers and chairs lay about, discarded. KP looked as if it had been ransacked by thieves...”

These words by Paul Burrell, who was once Princess Diana’s butler, describe the heartbreak he felt when he went back to Kensington Palace (KP) where he had worked for the princess for many years before she passed away.

Cinderella-like stories

Burrell, in his book, The Way We Were, gives us a front-row seat to the lives of some of the members of the British royalty. For Princess Diana, her life was a fractured fairy tale; a far cry from “the happily ever after” in Cinderella-like stories. However, for Prince Philip, who died at the age of 99 on April 9, 2021, life became a fairy tale indeed.

He was unlucky as an infant as he was born in Greece, a few years after the assassination of his grandfather, King George I of Greece. The family had to be rescued by a warship from the hands of revolutionaries who would probably have wiped off the entire family.

The young Prince Philip first went to Paris. And then a few years later, he found himself in Britain, where he became the perfect “Prince of Nowhere” as he was royalty but with no throne. Life seems to have favoured Prince Philip as he later met and married Queen Elizabeth.

Kenya looms large in the love story between Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth. She technically became Queen on Kenyan soil; she was on a trip to Kenya on the day her father, King George VI, died on 6th February 1952. As narrated in the book, My Husband and I: The Inside Story of the Royal Marriage by Ingrid Seward, “four hours later, the royal party were resting back at Sagana Lodge...when an editor…. telephoned the princess’s private secretary, Martin Charteris… The editor anxiously enquired if the teleprinter reports coming in from London about the King’s death were true. It was news to Charteris.

By a twist of fate, a telegram sent to Government House in Nairobi had not been decoded because the keys to the safe holding the codebook had been misplaced. A thoroughly unnerved Charteris checked the news with Buckingham Palace and immediately contacted Sagana Lodge… He then woke a slumbering Prince Philip to tell him of the news.

Adored her father

 It was 2.45pm local time and already 11.45am in London. According to Parker, “Philip… took the Queen up to the garden and they walked up and down the lawn while he talked to her… And then she came back to the Lodge – and one just thought, this poor girl who really adored her father, they were very close. And I think I gave her a hug and said how sorry I was. And then suddenly, I thought, my God, but she’s Queen!’”

And that’s how Prince Philip became one of the world’s most famous husbands. He was wild—with a jarring personality—labelled anything from witty to mischievous, rude, racist and all. Some British newspapers have made a compilation of most of his famous gaffes. One of the most outrageous ones was when he met Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo in traditional Nigerian robes in a 2003 meeting and the Prince bantered, “You look like you’re ready for bed.” Prince Philip also once famously asked an Australian Aborigine: “Do you still throw spears at each other?”

Controversy aside, he lived his life to the full and to the ripe age of almost a century (he died two months short of his 100th birthday). As Mikhail Iossel recently wrote in The New Yorker magazine, “Life is a perishable proposition of rapidly diminishing returns. You could’ve become this or that; you could’ve been here and there and everywhere” but for Prince Philip, he seems to have chosen both his position and place well. It can now be said that, “once upon a time”, a prince lived a life straight out of an English fairy tale; magical, enchanting and spellbinding.   BY DAILY NATION