Of all the New Zealand royal tours Jane Phare has covered, none was more memorable than the 1983 visit of Charles and Diana—and their baby son William. Twenty-eight years later, she's off to London to watch that baby get married.
The first thing I noticed about William, second-inline to the British throne, was his legs. It was April 1983 and this future king of Great Britain - dressed in a romper suit and cardy - was being carried across the tarmac at Auckland International Airport on the hip of his nanny, Barbara Barnes.
The waiting press pack were allowed close to the Royal Air Force Boeing 727 - specially fitted out with a cot bolted to one wall - so I was able to get a good look at those chubby royal legs.
All other eyes were on his mother, who emerged from the aircraft looking like a movie star. She and Prince Charles ignored the plan to get straight into the waiting limos and instead strode over to greet the crowd of 3000 fans waiting behind a fence.
Nanny Barnes stuck to the original plan and hustled her 10-month-old charge, blond and tanned after his weeks in Australia, to a waiting car. As she passed close by I noticed his legs. They were very ... well, red. Could this possibly be a case of royal sunburn? Surely not. It was a small observational detail, but it was invaluable later that day.
At the start of each royal tour, the international and local press gather for an informal, off-the-record party with the royals. This is their chance to eyeball each other and chat informally before beginning the gruelling, hectic and, at times, boring weeks of royal touring. We were to spend hours on the road together, the press sometimes herded into a noisy Air Force Hercules that dripped condensation relentlessly on my 1980s perm.
So we gathered that evening at Government House in Auckland and waited for the Prince and Princess to come down the stairs from their quarters, drinking wine and eating crustless sandwiches. Another Herald journalist and two photographers (all men) stood with me, feigning boredom as time wore on.
Suddenly, Diana and Charles swept into the room without warning. Charles went one way into the crowd and Diana walked up to us, hand outheld, smiling that famous smile. She was a tall, willowy vision - all porcelain skin, big blue eyes and a sweep of blonde fringe.
My three colleagues were mesmerised. They froze, their mouths hanging open. No words came out. One of them, Paul Lewis (Herald on Sunday Sports editor), hastily pushed his sandwich into his other hand - the one clutching a gin glass - and didn't seem to notice the bread oozing like little sausages from between his fingers.
In desperation, I took a punt. "Did William get sunburned in Australia? I noticed his legs were red when you arrived at the airport," I blurted.
Diana's face came alive. Like any new mum she was happy to talk on her favourite subject.
"No, no," she laughed. "He's just learned to crawl and he's rubbed his legs."
She was obviously delighted. At 10 months, William had been slow to master the crawling milestone and the ever-watchful British press had already commented on that fact.
Such was the fascination with the royal baby - we already knew he had six teeth - that this was big news. Royal carpetburn. But, in line with the off-the-record agreement for these parties, it was not to be written about.
It remained a secret until eight days later when the world would see the royal crawl for themselves after Prince Charles carried his young son across the lawn at Government House and placed William on a rug for his only photo-call of that tour.
And crawl he did. What the world saw were happy family photos - even if Charles was somewhat stiffly dressed in a navy blazer and tie - with baby William in his cream and apricot romper suit playing with a Buzzy Bee.
But those of us standing nearby were waiting for the young prince to burst into tears. He was, after all, surrounded by a mob of strangers - scores of journalists, photographers, and camera crew, household staff, tour officials and security police - all staring at him.
Far from being startled by the sudden din from dozens of camera motor drives going off in a frenzy, William grinned, lurched forward and began his first public crawl - towards the photographers .When we laughed after he crawled to the edge of the rug and peered underneath, he obliged with a repeat performance.
No stage fright for this boy. He was a natural.
His mother, by comparison, was still slightly awkward and reticent, keeping her head mostly down while she gazed at William. This was, after all, his photo-call.
It wasn't until it was all over that I saw Diana really relax. Walking down a covered walkway back into the house, out of range of the camera lenses, she swung William high over her head, mother and baby laughing at one another. It would have been a shot worth thousands, had anyone caught it on film.
And so we had our first close look at William Arthur Philip Louis - names Kate Middleton will need to memorise if she is to avoid fluffing her lines as Diana did on her wedding day.
For the British "ratpack", well used to royal tours, the presence of a baby along for the ride was a first. But Diana, and by defaultWilliam, was a trendsetter. William was the first royal baby to be born in hospital after his mother, breaking with royal tradition, gave birth at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington.
The Princess again broke with royal tradition, refusing to leave her son behind in England during the tour. Neither would she travel separately. The first- and second-in-line to the throne flew on the same plane. (The Queen never toured with her children and never travelled on the same plane as Charles).
A royal baby on tour caused a frenzy of speculation. Would the young prince suffer jetlag? How many disposable nappies would be needed? (The agreed number appeared to be 300.) Would the royal cot accompany him? (It did.)
Meanwhile, in Auckland, Lady Beattie, the wife Sir David Beattie, New Zealand's then Governor-General, was determined to turn the top floor of Government House into a welcoming and private base for the young family.
The long-overdue refurbishment was done on a budget - $100,000. (Compare that with the $43 million bill for the latest refurbishment of Government House, completed last month.)
In 1983, threadbare patterned carpet was replaced with plain beige. Tatty curtains, older than Diana, were torn down. An upstairs suite of rooms was repainted in pale colours. While expensive fabrics were used in the bedrooms, hallway chairs were recovered in cheaper, striped cotton twill - old fashioned mattress ticking.
A kitchenette was installed at the end of the hallway to heat Prince William's bottle, and a child-proof gate installed at the top of the stairs. In the nursery was a wooden Laloli highchair, the type generations of Kiwi kids sat in during mealtimes.
Lady Beattie, skilled at sewing, took me through the newly refurbished suite of rooms shortly before the royal couple arrived. She and other women had put in hundreds of hours sewing baby quilts, a "William's Book" of cloth animals and a ribbon-edged mosquito net decorated with hand-sewn miniature horses. It was a choice between that or corgis, Lady Beattie said.
Propped in William's sunny nursery - twice the size of his nanny's room next door - was a rabbit dressed in an All Blacks jersey and the Buzzy Bee, once pulled along by the Beatties' son Simon. And there was another handme- down, Simon's blue English pram which Lady Beattie restored after Doris, the family's Airedale terrier, had wrestled with the fringed canopy. Whether the highly active, crawling baby prince ever sat in this pram is doubtful.
Instead, each afternoon while his parents were on tour, William was popped into a carseat in one of two white Ford LTDs and taken on secret outings - to beaches, the Domain and Cornwall Park - accompanied by his nanny, minders and detectives in an unmarked car.
The baby seats were installed by former Auckland Medical School senior lecturer Tord Kjellstrom who, with the Ministry of Transport and Plunket, was lobbying hard to persuade Kiwi parents to use carseats for their children. What better way than to have the royal parents lead by example. Having convinced Charles and Diana to have local carseats installed in William's limos, Kjellstrom was summoned to Government House to fit them.
Sadly, it was a seatbelt that might have saved Diana's life during the high speed dash in a Paris tunnel 14 years later - a mistake that left the Prince and his brother, Harry, motherless.
It was a Sunday afternoon in August 1997 when the phone rang in my office. Diana had been in a car accident in Paris, a colleague told me. The Princess had a broken arm, but her companion, Dodi al-Fayed, was dead. Later the phone rang again. Diana, Princess of Wales, was dead.
That news turned what was a slightly tedious afternoon of editing News Review pages for the New Zealand Herald into a frantic news day as I helped write and co-ordinate news pages for what was to be the biggest story of the decade.
With the 12-hour time difference, it would be hours before Britain woke to find its Queen of Hearts gone, hours before British journalists started churning out the copy that would eventually spew from our printers.
We learned that 15-year-oldWilliam and his 12-year-old brother Harry had been woken in the pre-dawn hours at Balmoral Castle in Scotland and told their mother had been in a terrible accident. A short time later, they were told she was dead.
It was from her that William and Harry experienced a different side of life - boogie-boarding, eating hamburgers, rides in fun parks, shopping, skiing. It balanced the hunting, fishing, walks with Corgis and roaming rugged Scottish countryside they had with their father and grandparents at Balmoral.
That Sunday was supposed to be a day of reunion with Diana in London. The young princes were due back at boarding school after spending the August school holidays at Balmoral.
Instead they stayed put, eventually emerging through the gates to walk among the piles of bouquets and tributes. We watched as a solemn-faced William wiped a tear from his eye, dropping his head low in that manner so reminiscent of his mother in her early "Shy Di" days.
A week after Diana's death, the whole world grieved as we watched her "boys" walk bravely down the Mall to Westminster Abbey with Prince Charles, Prince Philip and their uncle, Earl Spencer.
In front was their mother's coffin, wreathed in flowers, on a horse-drawn gun carriage. Nestled in a small circular wreath of white rosebuds was a card, the word "Mummy" written in childish handwriting.
The lasting memory of that long procession from Kensington Palace to the Abbey is one of eerie silence; just the clip-clopping of the horses' hooves, and the muted grief of thousands of mourners flanking the route.
Fourteen years on William, now a self-assured and affable young man, will again stand in the Abbey - this time for his wedding. His mother will not be there.
This time, William will travel back down the Mall accompanied by his bride, Catherine. On her ring finger, next to a shiny, new wedding ring, will be Diana's sapphire and diamond engagement ring - a possession William has described as "precious" to him.
The pair will make their way to Buckingham Palace in the same 1902 state landau that carried Charles and Diana from St Paul's Cathedral on their wedding day in 1981.
Twenty-eight years after first seeing the baby prince, I'll be in London on Friday to watch him get married, waving a black, silver-fern Kiwi flag and waiting outside Buckingham Palace to see the royal kiss, before rushing back to the hotel to file my story.
His mother would have turned 50 this July. If she had been alive, my bet is that she would have been enormously proud of her eldest son and that she would have got along just fine with her new daughter-in-law.
