Prince Harry was just a 12-year-old boy when he lost his mother, Princess Diana.
In the years that followed, the prince, now 41, has often spoken about his anguish at ‘not having that many memories of my mother’.
It wasn’t until he started therapy that he began to recall details of their time together that was tragically cut short after the Princess of Wales died in a fatal car crash in Paris nearly 30 years ago.
Writing in his memoir Spare, Harry confessed: ‘All my life I’d told people I couldn’t remember the past, couldn’t remember my mum, but I never gave anyone the full picture. My memory was dead.
‘Now, through months of therapy, my memory twitched, kicked, sputtered. It came to life. Some days I’d open my eyes to find Mummy… standing before me. A thousand images returned, some so bright and vivid that they were like holograms.’
These included memories of his mother stuffing his school socks with sweets, jumping up and down on Diana’s waterbed with his brother Prince William, and even enduring terrifying paparazzi chases while sitting in the backseat of the car.
The Duke of Sussex revealed that, during therapy, he was asked to carry a bottle of his mother’s favourite perfume – First by Van Cleef and Arpel – to help jog his memory.
After sniffing the familiar scent, which he compared to ‘a tab of LSD’, Harry’s brain was almost instantly taken back to a particularly joyful moment in his mother’s Kensington Palace apartment.
Prince Harry was just 12 years old when Princess Diana tragically died in a car accident on August 31, 1997. Writing in his tell-all memoir Spare, Harry, now 41, revealed how after ‘months’ of therapy he was finally able to recall a number of suppressed childhood memories
