Park House was a home of atmosphere and great character. On the ground floor was the stone-flagged kitchen, the dark-green laundry room, domain of Diana’s foul-tempered ginger cat called Marmalade, and the schoolroom where their governess, Miss Gertrude Allen – known as ‘Ally’ – taught the girls the rudiments of reading and writing. Next door was what the children called ‘The Beatle Room’, a room devoted entirely to psychedelic posters, pictures and other memorabilia of Sixties pop stars. It was a rare concession to the postwar era. Elsewhere the house was a snapshot of upper-class English life, decorated with formal family portraits and regimental pictures, as well as the plaques, photographs and certificates which were testimony to a lifetime spent in good works.
From her pretty cream bedroom in the first-floor nursery, Diana enjoyed a pleasant prospect of grazing cattle, a patchwork of open fields and parkland interspersed with copses of pine, silver birch and yew. Rabbits, foxes and other woodland creatures were regularly seen on the lawns while the frequent sea frets which softly curled around her sash windows were evidence that the Norfolk coast was only six miles away.
It was a heavenly place for growing children. They fed trout in the lake at Sandringham House, slid down the banisters, took Jill, their springer spaniel, for long rambles, played hide-and-seek in the garden, listened to the wind whistling through the trees and hunted for pigeons’ eggs. In summer they swam in the heated outdoor swimming pool, looked for frogs and newts, picnicked on the beach near their private hut at Brancaster and played in their very own tree house. And, as in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five children’s books, there were always ‘lashings of ginger beer’ and the smell of something appetizing baking in the kitchen.
Like her elder sisters, Diana was on horseback aged three and soon developed a passion for animals, the smaller the better. She had pet hamsters, rabbits, guinea pigs, her cat Marmalade, which Charles and Jane loathed, and, as her mother recalls, ‘anything in a small cage’. When one of her menagerie died, Diana dutifully performed a burial ceremony. While goldfish were flushed down the lavatory, she normally placed her other dead pets in a cardboard shoe box, dug a hole beneath the spreading cedar tree on the lawn and laid them to rest. Finally, she placed a makeshift cross above their grave.
Graveyards held a sombre fascination. Charles and Diana frequently visited their brother John’s lichen-covered grave in the Sandringham churchyard and mused about what he would have been like and whether they would have been born if he had lived. Charles felt that his parents would have completed their family with Diana while the Princess herself felt that she would not have been born. It was a matter for endless unresolved conjecture. In Diana’s young mind her brother’s gravestone, with its simple ‘In Loving Memory’ epitaph, was a permanent reminder that, as she later recalled: ‘I was the girl who was supposed to be a boy.’
Just as her childhood amusements could have originated from the pages of a 1930s children’s book, so Diana’s upbringing reflected the values of a bygone age. She had a nanny, Kent-born Judith Parnell, who took the infant Diana for walks around the grounds in a well-used, highly sprung perambulator. Indeed, Diana’s first memory was ‘the smell of the warm plastic’ of her pram hood. The growing girl did not see as much of her mother as she would have wished, and less of her father. Her sisters, Sarah and Jane, her seniors by six and four years respectively, were already spending mornings in the downstairs classroom when she was born and by the time Diana was ready to join them they were packing their bags for boarding school.
Mealtimes were spent with nanny. Simple fare was the order of the day. Cereals at breakfast, mince and vegetables for lunch and fish every Friday. Her parents were a benign though distant presence and it wasn’t until Charles was seven that he actually sat down to a meal with his father in the downstairs dining room. There was a formality and restraint to their childhood, a reflection of the way Diana’s parents had been raised. As Charles recalled: ‘It was a privileged upbringing out of a different age, a distant way of living from your parents. I don’t know anyone who brings up children like that any more. It certainly lacked a mother figure.’
Privileged yes, snobbish no. At a very early age the Spencer children had impressed upon them the value of good manners, honesty and accepting people for what they were, not for their position in life. Charles said: ‘We never understood the whole title business. I didn’t even know I had any kind of title until I went to prep school when I started to get these letters saying: “The Honourable Charles”. Then I started to wonder what it was all about. We had no idea that we were privileged. As children we accepted our circumstances as normal.’
Their royal next-door neighbours simply fitted in to a social landscape of friends and acquaintances who included the children of the Queen’s land agent, Charles and Alexandra Loyd, the local vicar’s daughter Penelope Ashton, and William and Annabel Fox, whose mother, Carol, was Diana’s godmother. Social relations with the royal family were sporadic, especially as they only spent a small part of the year on their 20,000-acre Sandringham estate. A royal visit to Park House was such a rare event that when Princess Anne said she would call round after church one Sunday there was consternation in the Spencer household. Diana’s father didn’t drink and staff frantically searched through the cupboards looking for a bottle of something suitable to offer their royal guest. Finally they found a cheap bottle of sherry, which had been won in a church bazaar, lying forgotten in a drawer.
Occasionally Princess Margaret’s son, Viscount Linley, and the Princes Andrew and Edward might come to play for the afternoon but there certainly weren’t the comings and goings many have assumed. In fact the Spencer children viewed their invitations to the Queen’s winter home with trepidation. After watching a screening of the Walt Disney film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the private cinema, Charles had nightmares about a character called the Child Catcher. For Diana it was the ‘strange’ atmosphere of Sandringham itself which she hated. On one occasion she refused to go. She kicked and screamed her defiance until her father told her that it would be considered very bad manners if she didn’t join the other children. If anyone had told her then that one day she would join the royal family she would have run a mile.
If the atmosphere at Sandringham was uncomfortable, at Park House it became unbearable as Diana’s little world fell apart at the seams. In September 1967 Sarah and Jane went to boarding school at West Heath in Kent, a move which coincided with the collapse of the Althorps’ 14-year marriage.
That summer they decided on a trial separation, a decision which came as a ‘thunderbolt, a terrible shock’ to Charles, horrified both families and shocked the county set. Even for a family with a penchant for turning a drama into a crisis, this was an exceptional event. They remembered how their marriage in 1954 was trumpeted as ‘the society wedding of the year’, their union endorsed by the presence of the Queen and Queen Mother. Certainly in his bachelor days Johnnie Spencer was the catch of the county. Not only was he heir to the Spencer estates, he also served with distinction as a captain in the Royal Scots Greys during World War Two and, as equerry to the Queen, he had accompanied her and Prince Philip on their historic tour of Australia shortly before his marriage.
The sophistication exuded by a man 12 years her senior was no doubt part of the attraction for the Honourable Frances Roche, the younger daughter of the 4th Baron Fermoy, who was an 18-year-old debutante when they first met. With her trim figure, vivacious personality and love of sports Frances caught the eye of many young men that season, among them Major Ronald Ferguson, father of Sarah, Duchess of York. However, it was Johnnie Spencer who won her heart and, after a short courtship, they married at Westminster Abbey in June 1954.
They obviously took the words of the Bishop of Norwich to heart. Just nine months after he had declared at their wedding: ‘You are making an addition to the home life of your country on which, above all others, our national life depends’, their first daughter Sarah was born. They settled for a country life
; Johnnie studied at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester and, following an uneasy spell on the Althorp estate, they moved to Park House. Over the next few years they built up a 650-acre farm, a sizeable chunk of which was bought with £20,000 of Frances’s inheritance.
Tensions soon simmered beneath the impression of domestic harmony and marital bliss. The pressure to produce a male heir was ever-present and there was Frances’s growing realization that a lifestyle which had seemed urbane to her in her youth was, on mature reflection, dull and uninspiring. The late Earl Spencer said: ‘How many of those 14 years were happy? I thought all of them, until the moment we parted. I was wrong. We hadn’t fallen apart, we’d drifted apart.’
As cracks appeared in the façade of unity, the atmosphere at Park House soured. In public the couple were all smiles, in private it was a different story. While the freezing silences, heated exchanges and bitter words can only be imagined, the traumatic effect on the children was only too evident. Diana clearly remembered witnessing a particularly violent argument between her mother and father as she peeked from her hiding place behind the drawing-room door.
The catalyst which provoked that indignation was the appearance in their lives of a wealthy businessman, the late Peter Shand Kydd, who had recently returned to Britain after selling a sheep farm in Australia. The Althorps first met the extrovert, university-educated entrepreneur and his artist wife, Janet Munro Kerr, at a dinner party in London. A subsequent arrangement to go on a skiing holiday in Switzerland together proved a fatal turning point in their lives. Peter, an amusing bon viveur with an attractive bohemian streak, seemed to possess all the qualities Johnnie lacked. In the exhilaration of their affair Lady Althorp, 11 years his junior, did not notice his bouts of depression and black moods. That would come later.
On their return from holiday Peter, then aged 42, moved out of his London home leaving behind his wife and three children. At the same time he began to see Frances secretly at an address in South Kensington in central London.
When the Althorps agreed to a trial separation, Diana’s mother moved out of Park House into a rented apartment in Cadogan Place, Belgravia. It was then that the myth of ‘the bolter’ was born, that Frances had left her husband and deserted her four children for the love of another man. She was cast as the selfish villainess of the drama, her husband the innocent injured party. In fact when she left home Lady Althorp had already made arrangements for Charles and Diana to live with her in London. Diana was enrolled at a girls’ day school, Charles at a nearby kindergarten.
When Frances arrived at her new home, to be followed weeks later by her children and their nanny, she had every hope that the children would be relatively unaffected by her marital breakdown, especially as Sarah and Jane were away at boarding school. During term-time the younger children returned to Park House at weekends while their father, Viscount Althorp, stayed with them in Belgravia when he visited London. They were bleak meetings. Charles’s earliest memory is playing quietly on the floor with a train set while his mother sat sobbing on the edge of the bed, his father smiling weakly at him in a forlorn attempt to reassure his son that everything was all right. The family was reunited at Park House for half-term and again during the Christmas holidays. But, as Mrs Shand Kydd later stated: ‘It was my last Christmas there for by now it had become apparent that the marriage had completely broken down.’
That fateful visit was marked by a distinct absence of seasonal goodwill or tidings of joy for the future. Viscount Althorp insisted, in spite of his wife’s fierce objections, that the children return permanently to Park House and continue their education at Silfield School in King’s Lynn. ‘He refused to let them return in the New Year to London,’ she said.
As the legal machinery for divorce ground into action, the children became pawns in a bitter and acrimonious battle which turned mother against daughter and husband against wife. Lady Althorp sued for custody of the children, an action started with every hope of success as the mother usually wins – unless the father is a nobleman. His rank and title give him prior claims.
The case, which was heard in June 1968, wasn’t helped by the fact that two months earlier Lady Althorp had been named as the ‘other woman’ in the Shand Kydds’ divorce while, most galling of all, her own mother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, sided against her. It was to be the greatest betrayal of her life and one she never forgave. The Althorps’ divorce went through in April 1969 and a month later, on 2 May, Peter Shand Kydd and Lady Althorp married in a quiet register office ceremony and bought a house on the West Sussex coast where Peter could indulge his love of sailing.
It was not just the adults who were scarred by this vicious legal battle. However much their parents and the family tried to muffle the blow, the impact on the children was still profound. Subsequently, family friends and biographers have tried to minimize the effect. They have claimed that Sarah and Jane were barely troubled by the divorce as they were away at school, that Charles, aged four, was too young to understand while Diana, then seven, reacted to the break-up with ‘the unthinking resilience of her age’ or even regarded it as ‘fresh excitement’ in her young life.
The reality was more traumatic than many have realized. It is significant that at one time in their lives both Sarah and Diana have suffered from debilitating eating disorders, anorexia nervosa and bulimia respectively. These conditions were rooted in a complex web of relations between parents and daughters, food and anxiety and, to use the jargon, ‘malfunctioning’ family life. As Diana said: ‘Parents were busy sorting themselves out. Always seeing my mother crying. Daddy never spoke to us about it. We never asked questions. Too many changes over nannies, very unstable, the whole thing.’
To the casual visitor Diana seemed happy enough. She was always a busy, tidy little girl, going around the house at night making sure all the curtains were drawn and tucking up the zoo of small furry animals which crowded her bed – she kept them all her life. She raced around the driveway on her blue tricycle, took her dolls for walks in her pram – she always asked for a new doll as a birthday present – and helped to dress her smaller brother. The warm, maternal, caring streak which characterized her adult life was becoming evident in her daily life. There were more frequent visits to grandparents and other relations. Countess Spencer often stayed at Park House while Ruth, Lady Fermoy, taught the children card games. In her elegant home, described as ‘a little corner of Belgravia in Norfolk’, she explained the intricacies of mah-jong and bridge. However, there was no disguising the bewilderment Diana felt.
Night-times were worst. As children, Diana and Charles were afraid of the dark and they insisted that the landing light was left on or a candle lit in their rooms. With the wind whistling in the trees outside their window and the night-time cries of owls and other creatures, Park House could be a creepy place for a child. One evening when their father casually mentioned that a murderer was on the loose in the vicinity, the children were too terrified to sleep, listening anxiously to every rattle, creak and squeak in the darkened house. Diana daubed luminous paint on the eyes of her cuddly green hippo so that at night it seemed as though he was keeping watch and looking after her.
Every night as she lay in her bed, surrounded by her cuddly toys, she could hear her brother sobbing, crying for his mother. Sometimes she went to him, sometimes her fear of the dark overcame her maternal instincts and she stayed in her room listening as Charles wailed: ‘I want my mummy, I want my mummy.’ Then she too would bury her head in the pillow and weep. ‘I just couldn’t bear it,’ she later recalled. ‘I could never pluck up enough courage to get out of bed. I remember it to this day.’
Nor did she have much confidence in many of the nannies who now worked at Park House. They changed with alarming frequency and ranged from the sweet to the sadistic. One nanny was sacked on the spot when Diana’s mother discovered that her employee was lacing her elder daughters’ food with laxatives as a punishment. She wondered why they constantly complained of stomach
pains until she caught the woman red-handed.
Another nanny beat Diana on the head with a wooden spoon if she was naughty, or alternatively banged Charles and Diana’s heads together. Charles recalled kicking a hole in his bedroom door when he was sent to his room for no good reason. ‘Children have a natural sense of justice and if we felt they were unjust we would rebel,’ he explained. Other nannies, such as Sally Percival, were kind and sympathetic and received Christmas cards from the ‘children’ long after they had left their employ.
However, the task of a new nanny was made all the more difficult because the children, bewildered and unhappy, felt that the nannies had come to take the place of their mother. The prettier they were, the more suspicious Diana was of them. The children put pins in their chairs, threw their clothes out of the window and locked them in the bathroom. In fact Charles’s childhood experiences confirmed him in his decision not to employ a nanny for his own children.
Their father sometimes joined the children for tea in the nursery but, as their former nanny Mary Clarke recalled, ‘It was very hard going. In those early days he wasn’t very relaxed with them.’ Johnnie buried himself in his work for Northamptonshire County Council, the National Association of Boys’ Clubs and his cattle farm. Charles recalled: ‘He was really miserable after the divorce, basically shell-shocked. He used to sit in his study the whole time. I remember occasionally, very occasionally, he used to play cricket with me on the lawn. That was a great treat.’
School simply cast the problem in another mould. Charles and Diana were ‘different’ and knew it. They were the only pupils at Silfield School whose parents were divorced. It set them apart from the start, a point emphasized by her former form captain, Delissa Needham: ‘She was the only girl I knew whose parents were divorced. Those things just didn’t happen then.’
Diana_Her True Story_In Her Own Words_25th Anniversary Edition Page 11
