SKIING IN THE SNOW

MY FIRST SKIING jaunt was early in the early ’90s, taking to the slopes with Cliff Richard, another new boy on the piste, and our friend Charles Haswell. As I was still less than enamoured of flying at the time, I took the train and met them at the picturesque Austrian resort of Lech am Arlberg. Through the window of the train, I spotted small dots on the mountainsides at about 10,000 feet. People? Impossible! Well, even if they were, at least I’d never have to ski down from there. The lower, gentler slopes would be fine for me. Wrong. After one day on the nursery slope our guide had me in a chair lift heading up to the Kriegerhorn, the nearest mountain, in a pretty fierce blizzard. At the top there was a biting wind. Cliff was concerned. Not for his safety, but for his showbiz persona. His face was going numb with the intense cold. ‘I can’t smile properly,’ he shouted above the storm.

‘I’m not sure anyone’s going to notice in this weather,’ I shouted back.

‘Even so, it’s a bit worrying.’

To my surprise, I made it down the mountain without serious mishap. Well, until the last 50 yards or so, when I overegged it a tad in the confidence department and virtually fell into the hotel, a flurry of arms, legs and one ski. I found the other ski about 100 feet away buried in snow.

The following day I spotted a guy in the hotel foyer who looked familiar. He obviously felt the same about us. ‘Hi guys, we knew you were here.’

Who was he? A spy? Superintendent of the skiing police? Press? No, he was royal protection officer Ken Wharfe. He explained that our presence was known as they had to check the other guests before the Princess of Wales and Princes William and Harry were booked in. It was all very relaxed and great fun, Diana being happy to join in our regular sessions when we got the guitars out after dinner. Don’t think me lazy or plagiaristic but let me lift one Lech session from Cliff’s book, where Diana asked if William and Harry could join the singing session one night.

We agreed that it shouldn’t be too late because they had to go to bed, so Diana suggested we do it at about eight o’clock, after the boys had had their meal and before we had ours. So Mike and I joined them in the empty bar and I sang all my hits … after one of the songs I stopped for a moment and Harry said, ‘Do you know “Great Balls of Fire”?’ I said, ‘Of course, but how on earth do you know it?’ … He said, ‘Because Mummy likes it…’ So I sang it and Harry was beside himself with excitement. He grabbed a Toblerone packet that was lying on the table and, using it as a microphone, gyrated like Michael Jackson while Mike and I did the number.

There have been some extraordinary groups in the history of music, but a five-piece featuring the future King of England, the Princess of Wales, Prince Henry of Wales and the most successful British singer of all time must cap the lot. I recently had a note from William, who remembered the Lech days with great fondness.

I did make it down from 10,000 feet by the second year, but there were a few hairy moments, like a 100-yard-long ice path about two feet wide, with a mountain on the left and a sheer drop on the right. I made God all sorts of outrageous promises during those 100 yards if I came through it safely. I hope he doesn’t remember them. OK, it wasn’t the most graceful descent, but that was never part of the plan. Actually there was no plan, unless it was ‘Come down as upright as possible and if upright isn’t possible, try to slither down without being spotted’. Harry was fearless, although the royal security team kept an eye on the two princes from a discreet distance. I seem to remember the boys carrying some sort of tracking device with an alarm, so if they got into difficulty of any kind, Ken and his team would lock onto their co-ordinates and locate them within minutes.

In March 1992, Prince Charles came out to join the royal party, and he and Diana invited Cliff, Charles Haswell and me to have supper with them on the Sunday. Unfortunately, circumstances dictated otherwise. On that day, Diana’s father, Earl Spencer, died. There were already dozens of photographers outside the hotel, but that now intensified. What a ghastly situation for her and the boys. A father and grandfather passes away and you’re in a goldfish bowl until a suitable flight can be organised. It was difficult to know how to commiserate without being intrusive. I wrote a note with a small poem and slipped it under her door. Two weeks later I received the most gracious and charming letter from her, at a time when she must have had many more pressing matters to attend to. I was very touched.

Amazingly, neither did she forget the dinner. We re-convened at Charles H.’s house in Barnes some while later. Of course we sang a few songs as she’d insisted we take the guitars along. We even had a rehearsal in Cliff’s kitchen. Heaven knows why we bothered rehearsing, as we rattled through some old favourites with Ken joining us on a third harmony here and there. Someone commented that he sang like a bird, so I called him ‘Canary Wharfe’, which Diana thought was a terrific name for him. We’d all adopted daft names when skiing, like the Count of the Mount, the Artiste of the Piste, the Lush of the Slush and the Wizard of the Blizzard.

One year, a TV crew came out to film Cliff’s antics on the slopes, so we all tried to look as professional as possible. We were instructed to ‘stand in a line and all hold one ski in the air’. Of course I slipped, and the rest went down like ninepins. Uncool.

A bonus of skiing in Lech was the indoor tennis centre, despite the higher altitude causing the ball to whizz through the air that much faster. The most magical aspect of Lech was the horse-drawn sleighs, their festive bells jangling as they pulled us up the mountain through the sharp evening air to a wooden restaurant another thousand feet up.