Diana: Story of a Princess

by Tim Clayton

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  If 1978 was not a happy year for Diana, 1979 began promisingly. Having married Robert Fellowes, Diana’s sister Jane travelled with the court. In January she invited Diana for a weekend at Sandringham. Prince Charles was occupied with Amanda Knatchbull, to whom he proposed that summer. But Diana, remembering her earlier encounter in the ploughed field, felt herself smitten once again. That month she started to train as a dancing teacher. She wrote to Madame Betty Vacani, who ran a school where children of the Royal Family had learned to dance, and was accepted. She supervised the youngest toddlers and accompanied them on the piano. But in March she went on holiday and never returned to the school.

  Diana joined a chalet party at Val Claret in the French Alps, where she was able to polish the outdoor skills she had picked up at the Institut Alpin. She enjoyed herself so much that she decided to stay for an extra week with another group she had run into, which included Simon Berry from the family of wine merchants. There were twenty in Berry’s party, all strangers to Diana, but she soon became the life and soul of their chalet. One of the skiers told us, ‘She knew nobody, she was the youngest by a good year or more, but that didn’t throw her at all. She had this ability to get on with everybody. She was interested in everybody, it was not a studied craft.’ One of the young men was medical student James Colthurst, who had a brief romance with Diana amid the snowball fights and sledge races. Colthurst’s party piece was a full-volume impersonation of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream . . .’ speech at 7 a.m.

  Diana tore the ligaments in her left leg. Unable to ski, she could have the tea and cake ready for when the rest came back hungry from the slopes. This only added to her popularity. The same leg injury gave her the excuse to stay in the Alps since, with her leg in plaster, she was unable to dance. One member of the group described her to us as ‘fresh and unsuperficial, totally disarming . . . and fascinated in other people . . . she could just sit down and make you laugh’. He also remembers Diana hating having her picture taken, because, she said, her nose was too big.

  Diana at eighteen, happy in the snow. It’s an arresting image of the kind of life that could have been her fate. Colthurst, Berry, one of the other old Etonians in the chalet – young men of promise, the perfect partners for a life of country houses and happy family holidays, the Range Rover bursting with children and nannies, the ski rack on the roof. But although she fitted so easily into the group, she told one of them that she already had a very different sense of her future.

  She was quite clear about her destiny. She said she was going to get married to the Prince of Wales – not ‘I want to’ or ‘I’d like to’, but ‘I’m going to’ – and she’d only met him properly once by then! She was extremely sure of herself. It was fate: she had a strong sense of her own destiny. Then I said, ‘Why would you want to do that? What’s the attraction?’ And she said, ‘He’s the one man on the planet who is not allowed to divorce me.’

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  On 27 August 1979 Lord Louis Mountbatten was killed in an IRA bomb attack. The younger brother of Amanda Knatchbull, Charles’s guest at Sandringham the previous January, had also been killed by the bomb that blew up Mountbatten’s boat on a fishing holiday near his Irish home. Amanda’s mother and father were injured, her grandmother died of her wounds. Diana watched the state funeral on television. Prince Charles was visibly distraught.

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  By then Diana had settled in London and kept in touch with the boisterous group of slightly older friends that she had met while skiing. Life had taken a marked turn for the better. To keep occupied during the day she worked for Sarah and her friend Lucinda Craig-Harvey as a cleaner for one pound an hour. The money was irrelevant. On her eighteenth birthday, on 1 July, Diana had received a bequest from her great-grandmother, the American Frances Work. And, as a coming-of-age present, her parents wanted to buy her a flat. Sarah, then working for Savills estate agents, found Diana a £50,000 mansion flat, no. 60 Coleherne Court, at the junction of the Old Brompton Road and Redcliffe Gardens – the very heartland of the young rich set that congregated around Sloane Square. Diana officially joined the ranks of these ‘Sloane Rangers’ when she moved in, playing landlady to a varying group of girlfriends. Her other sister Jane found her a proper job, three afternoons a week with Kay Seth-Smith at the Young England kindergarten in Pimlico, a private pre-school with a wealthy clientèle.

  Diana succeeded there from the start. Soon parents were remarking how often their children spoke about the pretty new teacher. She was invited to work mornings as well. Diana’s colleagues were impressed with her flair for bringing out the best in the children. Although she had never received so much as an hour of teacher training, Diana’s ‘natural patience, good humour and intuition’ shone through. Kay Seth-Smith was delighted:

  She was very good at getting down to the children’s level both physically and mentally. She was quite happy to sit on the floor, have children climbing all over her, sit on the low chairs beside them, and actually talk to them. That’s very important, to be able to talk to them, at their level. And they responded incredibly well to her. She would then go and help clear up in the kitchen. She was happy to put on the Marigolds as she called them [rubber gloves]. She would prepare lunch and just generally mucked in.

  To occupy the other two days in her week, Diana had signed on with several nannying agencies. In February 1980 one of them, Occasional Nannies, found her a job with an American businesswoman called Mary Robertson, looking after her baby son, Patrick.

  The agency read her references and they described her as ‘sweet tempered, wonderful with children and willing to do whatever she’s asked’. When she came to the apartment I was expecting a nanny but I wasn’t expecting this vision of perfect English beauty standing on my doorstep.

  During the interview, what I liked most was that she focused totally on Patrick, she looked up at me and answered my questions about hours and duties and pay, just the ordinary things. But she was ruffling his hair or handing him toys or giving him a little squeeze or a pat, just absolutely an instant connection between the two of them. I never even checked her references: I hired her on the spot.

  The only thing about Diana that seemed less than perfect was her lack of academic qualifications. Robertson, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, was amazed to hear that this well-mannered English girl had, by American standards, not even graduated from high school. It was something Diana often complained about, blaming herself for a lack of talent at exams. It was nerves, she said.

  Diana and Patrick soon established a routine. Building blocks on the floor, long walks in the London parks, she spooning jars of baby food, he splashing in his bath with the shiny yellow duck she bought him, she reading ‘Where’s the bunny?’ over and over again. When Robertson returned from work, she would find her washing up done, her flat tidied, her child clean and contented and snuggling up to his nanny.

  It was a huge step to hand over Patrick to a stranger in a strange city where we had no neighbours, we really didn’t know anybody. But Diana just struck me as so sensible and grounded and committed to Patrick. I really had no concerns about her being flighty or irresponsible.

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  Mary Robertson’s words directly contradict those who insinuate that Diana was an emotional mess long before she met her future husband.

  In fact, during these few months before she started dating Prince Charles, Diana was happier, more successful and more confident than at any time since she had first failed her O-levels three years before. She’d put Switzerland behind her and she was getting on with a pleasant life as a young Sloane about town, holding down two jobs that might not have needed great academic skill, but certainly required concentration, tact and a good feel for personal relations.

  Mary, a businesswoman with a sharp mind, says that her baby son was the most precious thing in her life and she would not have trusted him with anyone she even suspected of being ‘not quite right in the head’. None
of this means that Diana at eighteen was cool and stable all the time. But in the months before her sudden fame, Mary Robertson had a powerful reason to examine her very closely, and so had an unusually good view of Diana then and, because they kept in touch, of the way she quickly changed.

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  When not tending to babies and toddlers, Diana mixed with other people who lived in this most exclusive part of west-central London. So recognisable was its resident class of affluent young people that a book called the Sloane Ranger’s Handbook was published, describing how they dressed, where they shopped and ate, their upper-class English accent and the peculiar way that they signified agreement with ‘OK, yah’. Sloanes tended to dress in country clothes in town – Barbour jackets, headscarves and green wellies – and sometimes tore around SW3 in country four-wheel drives. The Volkswagen Golf GTi was the preferred smaller car. They shopped at Harvey Nics and the General Trading Company. Around Sloane Square and the King’s Road in Chelsea, they were as conspicuous as the punks who posed on street corners for the American tourists.

  Their routine was dinner dates, charity balls and weekends in the country. It was a lifestyle little changed from that of the young rich of the 1950s, or even the 1930s. Parties often involved high spirits and heavy drinking, caught on the pages of society magazines like the Tatler. Diana’s boyfriends came from this same set – young bankers, stockbrokers and soldiers from the smarter regiments. Adam Russell, reading languages at Oxford, dated Diana briefly, as did Rory Scott, a Scots Guardsman. Scott later said that his relationship with Diana was ‘not platonic in my eyes but unfortunately it remained so’. Whatever it was in hers, she thought enough of him to iron his shirts every weekend. She also had a relationship with James Gilbey, of the London gin dynasty, that several of her friends believed was the most serious of her life so far.

  Just what these relationships amounted to did not really matter when Diana was being vetted as a possible royal bride. What mattered was not having any untrustworthy ex-boyfriends who would run to the papers with embarrassing stories at the wrong moment. On these grounds Diana was safe. In fact, when the press began to dig the most damaging stories that emerged about her teenage love life concerned not sex but bad temper. She may have been an angel with Mary Robertson and her baby, but when James Gilbey stood her up one evening Diana made her displeasure very visible. She mixed a paste of flour and egg and poured it over his shiny Alfa Romeo.

  There was a lot of talk of men and marriage inside Colherne Court. Diana told her friends that she was waiting for Mr Right and believed there was a good chance he would also be Mr Royal. Andrew seemed most likely, but it was Charles she really wanted.

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  The musicians are tuning up in the Regent’s Gallery. As the evening light thins, elegant young men admire the dreamy view down the sloping lawns, past the fountain and out over the misty Vale of Belvoir. Down the grand staircase come the young ladies in their ballgowns; they glide through the Elizabeth Salon, between the silks, tapestries and porcelain. A buffet dinner is laid out under the chandeliers, to be eaten on laps between the Italian sculptures, underneath the Gainsboroughs, Reynoldses and Holbeins. Drinks are carefully placed on fine eighteenth-century French furniture, and then the dancing begins.

  Behind Belvoir Castle’s battlements and turrets, the Duke of Rutland is holding his annual summer ball. As the tempo of the music increases, and some of the older guests prepare to leave, Robert Spencer looks across the ballroom and catches sight of his favourite young cousin.

  The time I remember her best was the big ball at Belvoir Castle. Quite lovely. She looked magnificent whenever I saw her that summer in fact, and she seemed to have a great number of admirers. I lived rather farther to the south near Market Harborough and I had a large house party for this dance. I remember even some of the young men who were staying with me who knew Diana remarking on how absolutely lovely she looked. She certainly was great to me that night because she wanted to talk to me and we had delightful little chats. Prince Andrew was at that dance and he danced with Diana a lot.

  Prince Charles was on the same circuit. Since November 1979 he had been romantically attached to Anna Wallace, the very pretty twenty-five-year-old daughter of a wealthy Scottish landowner. She was nicknamed ‘whiplash Wallace’ for her fearsome enthusiasm on horseback and her ready wit. It was rumoured that he had proposed and she had turned him down. Then in early summer 1980 the couple had a furious argument at a party at Stowell Park. The story ran that she borrowed her hostess’s car to leave in a rage after he had paid rather too much attention to a married woman named Camilla Parker Bowles.

  A few weeks later, in July, Diana met Charles again during a weekend party at the country home of Commander Robert de Pass near Petworth. His son Philip invited Diana to come along at the last minute. They went to Cowdray Park to watch the Prince playing polo for Les Diables Bleus, one of his teams.

  Polo matches were good places at which to get a shot of Prince Charles with a girl, and for this reason polo grounds were haunted by teams of journalists on Charles-watching duty. Thirty-eight-year-old Harry Arnold had been on the royal beat with the Sun for five years. With tinted glasses shading his eyes against the sun, he was scouring the crowd at Cowdray Park for potential love interest that day with his cameraman, Arthur Edwards:

  Every weekend in the summer we would go along to the polo matches where he would always take his current girlfriend. But of course you didn’t always know which one it was. Sometimes the girl would be very close to him, on his arm, talking to him between ‘chukkas’ and that kind of thing. But this particular weekend came where there didn’t appear to be a current girlfriend and we went to this particular match and Arthur spotted this girl sitting in the crowd with a ‘D’ round her neck and had a vague recollection he’d seen her somewhere before. We talked about it and thought: Well, perhaps she’s the latest one. So Arthur took just one frame of her, just one snap. And that was the very beginning of it.

  After the match, and safely away from Edwards’s camera, Diana sat next to Charles on a bale of hay during a barbecue back at Petworth. Both later recalled that she led the conversation. Dispensing with small talk, she raised one of the most sensitive subjects imaginable, telling Charles that she had really felt for him during the televised funeral of Lord Mountbatten, and asking him how he had coped with his evident unhappiness. It was an arresting moment for Charles, who was not used to being dealt with so directly. Always suspicious of flatterers, and uneasy with the insincerities of royal life, he found this woman surprisingly down to earth and very easy to confide in.

  As the evening wore on, their conversation became very intense very quickly, as conversations with Diana often did. She told Charles how she sensed his loneliness and his need for someone to care for him. Charles found it hard to break away from this beguiling and rather beautiful young woman who seemed to understand so much about him. And, as he later recalled, he was moved by her patient and tender sympathy, her ability to go straight to the heart of things without fuss or embarrassment. Here was somebody he wanted to see again.

  3

  Eminently Suitable

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  I’m sure that one of the things that appealed to Prince Charles about Lady Diana was just how unsophisticated she was. There was a naivety about her . . . she was just so young and beautiful, and great fun to be with – in that sense, I imagine, very different from most of the other young women that he’s developed some sort of friendship with.

  Ronald Allison, former Buckingham Palace press secretary

  Diana’s sympathy over the murder of his great-uncle hit a soft spot in Charles. The World War II commander and former Viceroy of India had been like a father to the Prince. Although some regarded Mountbatten as vain and domineering, he was the most charismatic figure in the Windsor family, and Charles came to respect his advice. As Charles grew older this advice included tips about how to treat women and how to arrange his routine to accommodate a lit
tle discreet sexual experience. When Charles first began dating, Mountbatten offered his own country estate at Broadlands, safely away from the eyes of the press and the Palace.

  In a series of letters, the older man gave the younger the benefit of his wisdom: enjoy your bachelor years, play the field, sow your wild oats and then, at about thirty, settle down with a nice aristocratic girl about ten years your junior, a girl who knows the royal scene and for whom you will be her first love. The advice may have been well meant, but it came as no surprise to Mountbatten’s more cynical friends that his own granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull, was a precise fit for the kind of bride Mountbatten recommended. He had spent years trying to get the Royal Family named Mountbatten-Windsor, and he was not one to give up easily.