Translate the following into Chinese
Beware the ‘spare’: let’s drop the need for a
second-in-line, and let Harry be the last
“My family had declared me a nullity. The Spare,” declares Prince Harry in his
new memoir, frustrated in a history lesson at Eton that the teacher expected him
to know the story of Charles Edward Stuart. He doesn’t want to think about it,
doesn’t want to know about history – “Why memorise the names of past spares?”.
And yet he has: they thread through his book, unspoken. Not just Princess
Margaret (who he notes once gave him a Biro for Christmas), all the others who
were No 2, and those who are to come. Harry was, as he sees it, “brought into
the world in case something happened to Willy”.
“The heir and the spare” was, he tells us, a “shorthand” about the two brothers
used by the entire family, and says it was what Charles told Diana after his
birth. The word “spare” is repeated so much that it is almost dizzying – and
recurs in the most heated incidents. When, he said, William pushed him, his
brother was “in full heir mode and couldn’t fathom why I wasn’t dutifully
playing the role of the spare”.
And, as the first sibling marries and has children, the No 2 becomes less
central, as he describes in the case of Margaret, lonely and without purpose,
and as he depicts himself post-army and pre-Meghan: eating takeaway alone and
watching reruns of Friends – “no longer the spare of the spare”.
In the past, the spare was urgently required in case the heir died. Many
monarchs have been spares; Henry VIII was the younger brother of Arthur, Prince
of Wales, who died at the age of 15 from an illness, perhaps sweating sickness.
Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, was the second spare, younger half-sibling to
Edward VI and Mary I, never intended to come near the throne.
Victoria was the ultimate spare – the daughter of the fourth son of George III,
only on the throne because all three elder sons died without living children.
Harry’s great great grandfather, George V, had been the younger brother. Albert
Victor, the eldest son, died in an influenza pandemic in 1892. Most recently,
the Queen’s father was No 2, after Edward VIII abdicated.
But these days, early deaths from influenza or, as in the case of the elder
cousin of Victoria, Princess Charlotte, dying in childbirth, are rare. Now,
Harry argues the role of the spare is fodder for the press, “a distraction” in
the “game” of journalists writing stories, briefed by offices.
As he puts it, he was conveniently branded the “naughty one” in order to take
the heat off other royals – and it never stopped. He admits to his times with
drugs and drink – but he’s clearly annoyed that he was not allowed to defend
himself against accusations such as cheating on an A-level exam, when the exam
board cleared him of doing so. Diana haunts the book: his inability to believe
in her death and the lack of a wider recognition of his long-term grief, so keen
was everybody to cast him as the “party prince”.
And, most of all, that (even though Prince Andrew put out statements saying he
hardly knew Jeffrey Epstein), Harry was discouraged from trying to stop stories
accusing Meghan of everything from killing the planet with avocado consumption
to attempting to kill the young Princess Charlotte with her bridal flowers,
stories with racist undertones or arguing she was breaking protocol by editing
magazines.
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