The school itself was welcoming and friendly enough. Run by headmistress Jean Lowe, who gave evidence on Lord Althorp’s behalf during the divorce case, it had a real family atmosphere. Classes were small and teachers were generous with house points and gold stars for achievements in reading, writing or drawing. Outside was a tennis court, a sandpit, a lawn for playing netball and rounders as well as a garden for weekly ‘scavenger hunts’. Diana, unused to the hurly-burly of school life, was quiet and shy although she did have her friend Alexandra Loyd to keep her company.
While her handwriting was clear and she read fluently, Diana found the scholarly side rather confusing. Miss Lowe remembered her kindness to the smaller children, her love of animals and general helpfulness, but not her academic potential. She was good at art as well, but her friends couldn’t explain why she burst into tears for no apparent reason during a painting class one sunny afternoon. They remember that she dedicated all her pictures to ‘Mummy and Daddy’.
As she muddled through her ‘tables’ and Janet and John books, Diana became increasingly envious of her younger brother, who was remembered as a ‘solemn’ but well-behaved little boy. ‘I longed to be as good as him in the schoolroom,’ she said. As with all siblings there were fights which Diana, being bigger and stronger, invariably won. As she pinched, Charles complained. Soon he realized that he could wound with words, teasing his sister mercilessly. Both parents ordered him to stop calling his sister ‘Brian’, a nickname derived from a slow and rather dull-witted snail who featured in a popular children’s TV show, The Magic Roundabout.
He had sweet revenge with the unexpected help of the local vicar’s wife. Charles recalled, with relish: ‘I don’t know whether a psychologist would say it was the trauma of the divorce but she had real difficulty telling the truth purely because she liked to embellish things. On the school run one day the vicar’s wife stopped the car and said: “Diana Spencer, if you tell one more lie like that I am going to make you walk home.” Of course I was triumphant because she had been rumbled.’
While the sibling competition was an inevitable part of growing up, far less bearable was the growing parental rivalry, conscious or not, as Frances and Johnnie vied with each other to win the love of their children. Yet while they showered their offspring with expensive presents this wasn’t accompanied by the affectionate cuddles and kisses that the children craved. Diana’s father, who already had a reputation locally for organizing splendid fireworks displays on Guy Fawkes Night, laid on a wonderful party for her seventh birthday. He borrowed a dromedary called Bert from Dudley Zoo for the afternoon and watched with evident delight as the surprised children were taken for rides around the lawn.
Christmas was simply an exercise in extravagance. Before the big day Charles and Diana were given the catalogue for Hamleys, a large toyshop in London’s West End, and told to tick what presents they wanted Father Christmas to bring. Lo and behold, on Christmas Day their wishes came true, the stockings on the end of their beds bulging with goodies. ‘It makes you very materialistic,’ said Charles. There was one present which gave Diana the most agonizing decision of her young life. In 1970 she was a guest at the wedding of her cousin Elizabeth Wake-Walker to Anthony Duckworth-Chad held at St James’s Piccadilly. For the rehearsal her father gave her a smart white dress and her mother an equally smart green dress. ‘I can’t remember to this day which one I got in but I remember being totally traumatized by it because it would show favouritism.’
That tightrope was walked every weekend when Charles and Diana took the train with their nanny from Norfolk to Liverpool Street station in London where their mother met them. Shortly after they reached her apartment in Belgravia the standard procedure was for their mother to burst into tears. ‘What’s the matter, Mummy?’ they would chorus, to which she invariably answered: ‘I don’t want you to go tomorrow.’ It was a ritual which resulted in the children feeling guilty and confused. Holidays, split between parents, were just as grim.
In 1969 life became more relaxed and carefree when Peter Shand Kydd was officially introduced into their lives. They first met him on the platform at Liverpool Street station during one of their regular Friday shuttles between Norfolk and London. Handsome, smiling and smartly suited, he was an immediate hit, all the more so when their mother told them that they had been married that morning.
Peter, who had made his fortune in the family wallpaper business, was a generous, demonstrative and easy-going stepfather. After a brief time in Buckinghamshire, the newly-weds moved into an unassuming suburban house called Appleshore in Itchenor on the West Sussex coast, where Peter, a Royal Navy veteran, took the children sailing. He allowed Charles to wear an admiral’s hat and so his nickname ‘The Admiral’ was born. Diana he dubbed ‘The Duchess’, a nickname her friends still use. As Charles observed: ‘If you want an insight into why Diana was not just some sort of spoiled toff it is because we had very contrasting lifestyles. It wasn’t all stately homes and butlers. My mother’s home was an ordinary set-up and every holiday we spent half the holiday with our mother so we were in an environment of relative normality for much of our time.’
Three years later in 1972 the Shand Kydds bought a 1,000-acre farm on the Isle of Seil, south of Oban in Argyllshire, where Mrs Shand Kydd lived until her death in June 2004. When the children came for summer holidays they enjoyed a ‘Swallows and Amazons’ idyll, spending their days mackerel fishing, lobster potting and sailing and, on fine days, having barbecues on the beach. Diana even had her own Shetland pony called Soufflé.
It was on horseback that she suffered a broken arm which made her anxious about riding afterwards. She was galloping on her pony, Romilly, in the grounds of Sandringham Park when the horse stumbled and she fell off. Although she was in pain, there was no evidence that the arm was broken and so two days later she went skiing to Switzerland. During the holiday her arm felt so lifeless that she went to a local hospital for an X-ray. She was diagnosed as suffering from a ‘greenstick’ fracture, a condition in which children’s bones are so flexible they bend, rather than break. A doctor strapped the arm but when she later tried to go riding again she lost her nerve and dismounted. She continued to ride in adult life but preferred to exercise by swimming or playing tennis, sports which were better suited to life in central London.
Swimming and dancing were also activities at which she excelled. They stood her in good stead when her father enrolled her at her next school, Riddlesworth Hall, two hours’ drive from Park House. She learned to love the school, which tried to be a home away from home to the 120 girls. However, her first feelings when she was sent there were of betrayal and resentment. Diana was nine and felt the wrench from her father keenly. In her motherly, concerned way, she was cosseting him as he tried to pick up the pieces of his life. His decision to send her away from her home and brother into an alien world was interpreted as rejection. She made threats such as: ‘If you love me, you won’t leave me here’ as her father gently explained the benefits of attending a school which offered ballet, swimming, riding and a place to keep her beloved Peanuts, her guinea pig. She had won the Fur and Feather Section with him at the Sandringham Show – ‘Maybe that was because he was the only entry,’ she observed drily – and later won the Palmer Cup for Pets’ Corner at her new school.
Her father also told her that she would be among friends. Alexandra Loyd, her cousin Diana Wake-Walker and Claire Pratt, the daughter of her godmother Sarah Pratt, were also at the all-girls boarding school near Diss in Norfolk. None the less, as he left her behind with her trunk labelled ‘D. Spencer’ and clutching her favourite green hippo – girls were only allowed one cuddly toy in bed – and Peanuts, he felt a deep sense of loss. ‘That was a dreadful day,’ he said, ‘dreadful losing her.’
An excellent amateur cameraman, he took a photograph of Diana before she left home. It shows a sweet-faced girl, shy, yet with a sunny, open disposition, dressed in the school uniform which consisted of a dark red jacket and grey pleate
d skirt. He saved too the note she sent requesting ‘Big choc. cake, ginger biscuits, Twiglets’, just as he kept the clipping she sent him from the Daily Telegraph about academic failures who become gifted and successful later in life.
Although quiet and demure in her first term she was no goody-goody. She preferred laughter and high jinks to solid endeavour, but while she could be noisy she shied away from being the centre of attention. Diana would never shout out answers in class or volunteer to read the lessons at assembly. Far from it. In one of her first school plays where she played a Dutch doll, she only agreed to take the part if she could remain silent.
Noisy with her friends in the dormitory, she was quiet in class. She was a popular pupil but somehow she always felt that she was set apart. Diana no longer felt so different because of her parents’ divorce but because a voice inside her told her that she would be separate from the herd. That intuition told her that her life was, as she said, ‘going to be a winding road. I always felt very detached from everyone else. I knew I was going somewhere different, that I was in the wrong shell.’
However, she joined in the school’s activities with gusto. She represented her house, Nightingale, at swimming and netball and developed her lifelong passion for dance. When the annual nativity play came around she enjoyed the thrill of putting on make-up and dressing up. ‘I was one of [those people] who came and paid homage to Jesus,’ she recalled with amusement. At home she loved donning her sisters’ clothes. An early picture shows her in a wide-brimmed black hat and white dress owned by Sarah.
While she respected Jane, the sensible member of the foursome, she hero-worshipped her eldest sister. When Sarah returned home from West Heath School, Diana was a willing servant, unpacking her suitcases, running her bath and tidying her room. Her loving domesticity was noticed not only by Viscount Althorp’s butler, Albert Betts, who recalled how she ironed her own jeans and performed other household duties, but also by her headmistress at Riddlesworth, Elizabeth Ridsdale – Riddy to pupils – who awarded her the Legatt Cup for helpfulness.
That achievement was greeted with satisfaction by her grandmother, Countess Spencer, who had kept an affectionate eye on Diana since the divorce. The feeling was mutual and when, in the autumn of 1972, the Countess died of a brain tumour, Diana was heartbroken. She attended her memorial service along with the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret at the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace. Countess Spencer held a very special place in Diana’s heart and she sincerely believed that her grandmother looked after her in the spirit world.
These otherworldly concerns gave way to more earthly considerations when Diana took the Common Entrance exam to enable her to follow in the footsteps of her sisters, Sarah and Jane, at West Heath boarding school, set in 32 acres of parkland and woods outside Sevenoaks in Kent. The school, which closed in 1997, was founded in 1865 on religious lines, and emphasized the value of ‘character and confidence’ as much as academic ability. Her sister Sarah had, however, shown a touch too much character for the liking of the headmistress, Ruth Rudge.
A competitor par excellence, Sarah passed six O-levels, rode for the school team at Hickstead, starred in amateur dramatic productions and swam for the school team. Her strong competitive streak also meant that she had to be the most outrageous, the most rebellious and the most undisciplined girl in school. ‘She had to be the best at everything,’ recalled a contemporary. While her grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, forgave her when the exuberant redhead rode her horse into Park House when she was visiting, Miss Rudge could not excuse other instances of her colourful behaviour. Sarah complained that she was ‘bored’ and so Miss Rudge told her to pack her bags and leave for a term.
Jane, who captained the school lacrosse team, was a complete contrast to Sarah. Highly intelligent, she gained a hatful of O- and A-levels and, eminently sensible and dependable, she was a prefect in the sixth form when Diana arrived.
Doubtless there was discussion in the teachers’ common room about which sister the latest Spencer recruit to Poplar class would emulate, Sarah or Jane. It was a close-run thing. Diana was in awe of her eldest sister but it wasn’t until later in life that she forged a close relationship with Jane. During their youth Jane was more likely to put her weight and invective behind brother Charles than her kid sister. Diana’s inevitable inclination was to imitate Sarah. During her first weeks she was noisy and disruptive in class. In an attempt to copy her sister Sarah’s exploits she accepted a challenge which nearly got her expelled.
One evening her friends, reviewing the dwindling stocks of sweets in their tuck boxes, asked Diana to rendezvous with another girl at the end of the school drive and collect more supplies from her. It was a dare she accepted. As she walked down the tree-lined road in the pitch black she managed to suppress her fear of the dark. When she reached the school gate she discovered that there was no one there. She waited. And she waited. When two police cars raced in through the school gates, presumably called by teachers worried as to her whereabouts, she hid behind a wall.
Then she noticed the lights going on all over the school but thought no more about it. Finally she returned to her dormitory, terrified not so much at the prospect of getting caught but because she had come back empty-handed. As luck would have it a fellow pupil in Diana’s dormitory complained that she had appendicitis. As she was being examined, Diana’s teacher noticed the empty bed. The game was up. It was not just Diana who had to face the music but her parents as well. They were summoned to see Miss Rudge, who took a dim view of the episode. Secretly Diana’s parents were amused that their dutiful but docile daughter had displayed such spirit. ‘I didn’t think you had it in you,’ said her mother afterwards.
While the incident curbed her wilder high jinks, Diana was always game for a dare. Food was a favourite challenge. ‘It was always a great joke: let’s get Diana to eat three kippers and six slices of bread for breakfast,’ Diana recalled. ‘And she did.’ Her reputation as a glutton meant that while she often visited the matron with digestive problems, these escapades did little harm to her popularity. On one birthday her friends clubbed together to buy her a necklace decorated with a ‘D’ for Diana. Carolyn Pride, now Carolyn Bartholomew, who had the next bed in Diana’s dormitory and later shared her London flat, remembers her as a ‘strong character, buoyant and noisy’.
She added: ‘Jane was very popular, nice, unassuming but uncontroversial. Diana, by contrast, was much more full of life, a bubbly character.’ Carolyn and Diana were drawn to each other from the start because they were among the only pupils whose parents were divorced. ‘It wasn’t a great trial to us and we didn’t sit sobbing in a corner about it,’ she says, although other pupils remember Diana as a ‘private and controlled’ teenager who did not wear her emotions on her sleeve. It was noticeable that the two pictures which took pride of place on Diana’s bedside dressing table were not of her family but of her favourite hamsters, Little Black Muff and Little Black Puff.
However, she did fret constantly about her average academic abilities. Her sisters proved to be a hard act to follow while her brother, then at Maidwell Hall in Northamptonshire, was displaying the scholastic skills which later won him a place at Oxford University. The gawky teenager, who tended to stoop to disguise her height, longed to be as good as her brother in the classroom. She was jealous and saw herself as a failure. ‘I wasn’t any good at anything. I felt hopeless, a dropout,’ she said.
While she muddled through at maths and science she was more at home with subjects involving people. History, particularly the Tudors and Stuarts, fascinated her while in English she loved books like Pride and Prejudice and Far from the Madding Crowd. That didn’t stop her from reading slushy romantic fiction by Barbara Cartland, soon to be her step-grandmother. In essays she wrote endlessly, her distinctive, well-rounded hand covering the pages. ‘It just came out of the pen, on and on and on,’ she said. Yet when it came to the silence of the examination hall, Diana froze. The five O-levels she took in Engl
ish literature and language, history, geography and art resulted in ‘D’ grades which were classed as fails.
The success which eluded her in the classroom did arrive, but from an unexpected quarter. West Heath encouraged ‘good citizenship’ in the girls, these ideas expressed in visits to the old, the sick and those with special needs. Every week Diana and another girl saw an old lady in Sevenoaks. They chatted to her over tea and biscuits, tidied her house and did the odd spot of shopping. At the same time the local Voluntary Service Unit organized trips to Darenth Park, a large psychiatric hospital that was situated near Dartford. Dozens of teenage volunteers were bussed in on Tuesday evening for a dance with the patients.
Other youngsters helped with hyperactive teenagers who were so severely disturbed that to encourage a patient to smile was a major success story. ‘That’s where she learned to go down on her hands and knees to meet people because most of the interaction was crawling with the patients,’ says Muriel Stevens, who helped organize the visits. Many new school volunteers were apprehensive about visiting the hospital, anxieties fed by their fear of the unknown. However, Diana discovered that she had a natural aptitude for this work. She formed an instinctive rapport with many patients, her efforts giving her a real sense of achievement. It worked wonders for her sense of self-esteem.
At the same time she was a good all-round athlete. She won swimming and diving cups four years running. Her ‘Spencer Special’, where she dived into the pool leaving barely a ripple, always attracted an audience. She was netball captain and played a creditable game of tennis. But she lived in the shadow of her sporty sisters and her mother, who was ‘captain of everything’ when she was at school and would have played at Junior Wimbledon but for an attack of appendicitis.
When Diana started to learn piano, any progress she made was always dwarfed by the achievements of her grandmother, Lady Fermoy, who had performed at the Royal Albert Hall in front of the Queen Mother, and her sister Sarah, who studied piano at a conservatoire in Vienna following her abrupt departure from West Heath. By contrast her community work was something she had achieved on her own without looking over her shoulder at the rest of her family. It was a satisfying first.
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