by Penny Junor
The honeymoon was hardly an intimate getaway à deux. After three nights at Broadlands, Lord Mountbatten’s former home, where Charles had entertained previous girlfriends, they cruised the Mediterranean on the royal yacht Britannia, along with a crew of 256, a valet, a Private Secretary and an equerry. During the day Charles would sit blissfully immersed in a Laurens van der Post book, while Diana, according to him, dashed about chatting up the crew and the cooks in the galley. They would have seen a happy-go-lucky girl who made them all laugh. But Diana confided to friends that physically the honeymoon was a disaster, and beneath the cheerful exterior the old feelings of rejection were bubbling away. There were fearsome rows and rages and tears, and during the final stage of the honeymoon, spent at Balmoral stalking and fishing with family and friends (not many people’s idea of a honeymoon), Diana had lost so much weight that Charles arranged for her to see a psychiatrist in London. Even her fingers were noticeably thinner; her wedding ring no longer fitted and had to be made smaller.
The medical profession’s understanding of eating disorders is imprecise even today. Thirty years ago, when Diana first displayed symptoms, most people had never heard of anorexia or bulimia.
As Diana said herself, ‘All the analysts and psychiatrists you could ever dream of came plodding in trying to sort me out. Put me on high doses of Valium and everything else. But the Diana that was still very much there had decided it was just time; patience and adapting were all that were needed. It was me telling them what I needed. They were telling me “pills”! That was going to keep them happy – they could go to bed at night and sleep, knowing the Princess of Wales wasn’t going to stab anyone.’
Prince Charles was dumbfounded. He hadn’t the faintest idea what was the matter with the beautiful wife who was wasting away before his very eyes and who was so troubled. At one time she was so thin he thought she was going to die and he thought he must be responsible, that marriage to him was just too awful or that he had destroyed her by bringing her into his bizarre way of life. He spoke to no one about the difficulties they were experiencing, but gradually became increasingly depressed and despondent.
The condition often affects fertility but clearly not in Diana’s case, and she discovered she was pregnant on the second day of their tour of Wales, in October.
On the rain-sodden streets she was a star, a complete natural, her smile and her warmth brightening up the dull day, and the people who had waited hours for a glimpse loved her; but back in the car or the train she collapsed in tears saying she couldn’t face another crowd.
It was ever thus. The public face was so very different from the one that Charles had to support and cajole and encourage in private. She needed constant reassurance, constant attention, constant love; but the mood swings were violent and unnerving. She went from cheerful and funny to brooding and sobbing, or furiously angry and screaming, in the blinking of an eye. Many were the times she cut herself until she bled profusely; and there were other instances of self-harm. She said herself that she had once hurled herself at a glass display cabinet and another time thrown herself down a flight of stairs. These were classic symptoms of the bigger problem, but thirty years ago self-harm was little understood and almost never spoken about.
Charles had no idea how to cope; he did everything she asked: he got rid of loyal staff whom she said she didn’t like, gave away the faithful dog she couldn’t stand, and stopped seeing the friends she neither liked nor trusted. Nothing he did seemed to make Diana happy, and, not knowing what more to try, as often as not he simply walked away, which only exacerbated her feelings of isolation and abandonment.
And while the birth of William initially brought fantastic elation, it didn’t last.
BABY WALES
William’s arrival in the world could not have come at a better moment. Britain was in triumphant mood; the Falklands War, which had brought people together in a way not seen since the Second World War, was over. An end to hostilities was formally declared the day before his birth.
Victory restored national pride, and brought huge relief, not least for the Royal Family, on a personal as well as professional level. Prince Andrew’s life had been on the line along with all the other servicemen and women. He was a Royal Navy helicopter pilot with the aircraft carrier Invincible and, like everyone with a son or brother in the war, they had lived in fear of bad news. His scalp would have been a fantastic propaganda coup for the Argentinians. The Cabinet had wanted him to be moved to a desk job for the duration of the war, but Andrew had insisted on being allowed to do the job he was trained for and the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh supported him.
So when the Task Force had set sail from Portsmouth on 5 April, leaving emotional scenes on the quayside, Prince Andrew had been amongst them. The Prince of Wales became preoccupied by what was happening on the other side of the world; partly as heir to the throne, partly because he was Colonel-in-Chief of two of the regiments, and not least of all because he worried about his younger brother. Yet Diana was so deeply turned in on herself by then that she couldn’t share his anxiety and seemed to positively resent his focus being on the Falklands instead of her.
Before the war, few people in Britain had even heard of the Falkland Islands. They were eight thousand miles away in the South Atlantic, barren, windswept, and largely populated by sheep; but they had been British for 150 years, and when Argentina, which had long disputed their ownership, took them by force in April 1982, Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, took the country to war to reclaim them. It was the first time that modern communications and television had brought the shocking reality of war into people’s living rooms.
Throughout the remains of the summer the ships made their way home to Portsmouth, each one returning to a hero’s welcome; and photographs and snippets of news about the new royal baby did nothing but enhance the country’s temporary sense of wellbeing.
A week after the birth, the baby’s names were announced. He was to be William Arthur Philip Louis – with William never to be abbreviated, according to Buckingham Palace, to Will, Willie or Bill. See how long that lasted. The choice of William was, as his father explained, ‘Because it is not a name that now exists in the immediate family.’ The last Prince William, Charles’s cousin, Prince William of Gloucester, a keen pilot, had been killed ten years earlier in a plane crash. He was just thirty.
His namesake was christened on 4 August, the Queen Mother’s eighty-second birthday, in the Music Room at Buckingham Palace, dressed in the lace christening gown that had first been worn by Victoria’s second child, the future Edward VII. Dr Robert Runcie, then Archbishop of Canterbury, conducted the service using the Lily Font – and water from the River Jordan in the Holy Land, which was a custom dating back to the Crusades. The ceremony began at noon, followed by a champagne lunch in the State Dining Room for the family and sixty guests, including George Pinker and the nurses who had attended William’s birth. The cake, again in keeping with tradition, was the top layer from Charles and Diana’s wedding.
The choice of godparents showed a strong bias towards Charles’s side of the family. Only one, Natalia, the twenty-three-year-old Duchess of Westminster, was Diana’s choice and age – they had been childhood friends. The others were Lady Susan Hussey, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, who had known Charles since he was a child; Sir Laurens van der Post, the seventy-five-year-old South African explorer and writer; and three relatives – Constantine, former King of the Hellenes, Lord Romsey, who was Lord Mountbatten’s grandson, and Princess Alexandra, the Queen’s cousin and one of the most popular members of the Royal Family, to whom Charles was especially close.
Despite being swaddled in oceans of antique lace for his baptism, and having such a distinguished roll call of grandparents, godparents, friends and relations, William’s early years were remarkably normal and informal. For all its history and grandeur, Kensington Palace was a comfortable family home. George III had converted it into apartments for the Royal Family and gra
ce and favour apartments for the Royal Household.
Diana’s elder sister, Jane, had married Robert Fellowes, who was then Assistant Private Secretary to the Queen, so they were neighbours. Their first child, Laura, was a year old when Charles and Diana moved in. Princess Margaret was another neighbour, and initially a staunch supporter of Diana. Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, whose children were slightly older than William, had an apartment in the palace, as did the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester with their three children.
Numbers 8 and 9 were entirely refurbished and redecorated before Charles and Diana moved in, and although a uniformed butler would open the door to visitors, inside it was like any smart, privately owned townhouse. It was not large by royal standards; it had three reception rooms (one housing a grand piano), a dining room, three bedrooms, including a master suite, and on the top floor a nursery suite plus rooms for the staff. The décor was the work of Dudley Poplak, a South African designer Diana’s mother had recommended and who had known Diana since she was a child. He ensured that the furnishings were elegant but cosy, a comfortable mixture of antique and modern, with pretty fabrics and wallpapers. The hall and stairway were carpeted in fresh lime green and pink with a Prince of Wales feather design running through it.
After the first few weeks, Anne Wallace, whose speciality was newborn babies, was replaced by Barbara Barnes. Aged forty-two, she had spent the previous fifteen years working for Princess Margaret’s friends, the Hon. Colin and Lady Anne Tennant. She was not a formally trained nanny, didn’t wear a uniform, liked the children she looked after to call her by her first name and had a good sense of humour. Her style was exactly what Diana wanted and reinforced the sense of normality that she insisted would be the hallmark of William’s childhood. She didn’t want him to be seen and not heard, or banished to the nursery, and she certainly didn’t want anyone thinking they might take her place as his mother.
But Diana didn’t know how to be a mother. She adored William, and Harry when he came along two years later – there is no doubting her all-consuming passion for them both and the love she showered on them – but she had never been successfully mothered herself and therefore had a skewed view of motherhood.
She continued to suffer bouts of depression – compounded by postnatal depression – and self-loathing from which the only release was to cut herself, to the alarm of all those around. At times, Barbara Barnes must have wondered who needed more looking after, mother or baby. As Diana said herself of that time, ‘Boy, was I troubled. If he didn’t come home when he said he was coming home I thought something dreadful had happened to him. Tears, panic, all the rest of it.’ Always in the back of her mind were the feelings of loss and abandonment she had experienced as a six-year-old and the fear that it would happen again.
Her mind became a cauldron of jealousy. She imagined Charles with Camilla Parker Bowles, whom she knew he had loved and was afraid he still did love. He was crass in his handling of the situation. Unable to put himself inside the head of an insecure twenty-year-old, he kept a photograph of Camilla in his diary, which, inevitably, fell out in front of Diana; and he wore gold cufflinks on his honeymoon that had been a gift from Camilla. ‘Got it in one,’ she said. ‘Knew exactly. “Camilla gave you those, didn’t she?” He said: “Yes, so what’s wrong? They’re a present from a friend.” And, boy did we have a row. Jealousy, total jealousy …’
The rows were tumultuous and terrifying but they were only half the story. There were good times too, which were precious. When she was feeling happy and confident, Diana was pure delight. She was funny, carefree and impish and there were days when the house resounded with laughter. Friends remember going to lunches when she and Charles would giggle and joke throughout. Others remember arriving to go to the theatre with them one evening and Diana saying to Charles, ‘Come on, let’s go and say goodnight to the children – I’ll race you to the top of the stairs!’ The pair of them then ran up the stairs and collapsed at the top in a heap of laughter.
KP, as Kensington Palace was known, was not the grandest house that the heir to the throne might have lived in, but the idea was that it would be a London bolt hole. The master plan was that they would base themselves at Highgrove, the country house Charles had bought near the Cotswold town of Tetbury in Gloucestershire in 1980. He was never happier than in the country, and although the house had one or two security drawbacks – like a public footpath running through the garden – and was neither very large nor architecturally imposing, Charles fell in love with it and it has remained one of the greatest pleasures in his life. And while he set about creating a garden, he gave Diana a free rein to do up the inside of the house, for which she once again turned to Dudley Poplak.
Although not palatial, Highgrove did have four good reception rooms, nine bedrooms, six bathrooms, a nursery wing and staff accommodation. While outside there was a big stable block with room for ten horses, a lodge, a farm manager’s house, a couple of farm cottages, farm buildings and a dairy.
But what he really fell in love with were the trees and the parkland surrounding the house, which he felt had ‘a particularly English feel’ and he developed an instant passion for a 200-year-old cedar tree, just feet from the west side of the house.
The garden swiftly became Charles’s passion. He sought the help of a family friend, Lady Salisbury, known as Mollie to her friends (mother of the 7th Marquess), who designed, amongst others, her own garden at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. She was a legendary plant expert and garden wizard, and was much amused some years later that, having gardened without the use of chemicals since 1948 and been written off as a crank, she was suddenly fashionable. She taught the Prince almost all he knows about landscaping and horticulture and as they dug, plotted, measured and planted side by side, many of her ideas rubbed off on her eager student.
But there was another influence on Charles in his conversion to organics, Miriam Rothschild, a scion of the famous banking family, whose passion for bugs, butterflies and wild flowers was second to none. The influence on the Prince of both women was profound.
The sadness was that while Charles became ever more immersed in his creation, of which in the early days Diana kept a photographic record, Highgrove soon lost its charm for her and she increasingly chose to stay away, preferring to be in London.
DOWN UNDER
Early in 1983, when William was nine months old, Charles and Diana set off for their first foreign tour together – six weeks in Australia and New Zealand. In another break with tradition, they took William with them, prompting stories in the press that they had done so against the Queen’s wishes, which was not true. But they did defy the custom that no two heirs to the throne should travel in the same plane together. And so with William, Nanny Barnes, an entourage of twenty staff and a mountain of luggage, the royal party arrived to a rapturous reception.
William, with his own little entourage of Personal Protection Officer, nanny and chef, spent the first four weeks of the trip safely installed on a sheep station called Woomargama in New South Wales, while the rest of the country went into a frenzy that verged on hysteria over ‘Lady Di’, and wanted to know every last detail about her infant son. They turned out in their thousands to see her, and as she and Charles zigzagged their way across the Continent, she was treated more like an A-list celebrity than a member of the British Royal Family. Waving flags and clutching gifts, they were desperate to catch her eye, shake her hand, touch her coat, engage her in conversation or in some way feel they had claimed a bit of her; and they were much more vocal and demanding than the Welsh had been when she and Charles toured the Principality the year before.
Once again, it was obvious that Charles was no longer the star. He had never particularly sought the limelight, but like all members of the Family he was used to it, and to find himself eclipsed after thirty-four years was painful. Proud though he was that so many people seemed to love Diana, he had never expected to play second fiddle to anyone other than the Queen. In Wale
s, the murmurs of disappointment when the people on one side of the street realised they were getting Charles and not Diana were faint; Down Under, they were unmistakable.
Returning to Woomargama every so often between engagements to see William was a blessed release. As Charles, always a prolific letter-writer, wrote to friends, ‘I still can’t get over our luck in finding such an ideal place. We were extremely happy there whenever we were allowed to escape. The great joy was that we were totally alone together.’
To Lady Susan Hussey he wrote, ‘I must tell you that your godson couldn’t be in better form. He looks horribly well and is expanding visibly and with frightening rapidity. Today he actually crawled for the first time. We laughed and laughed with sheer, hysterical pleasure and now we can’t stop him crawling about everywhere. They pick up the idea very quickly, don’t they, when they’ve managed the first move.’
In New Zealand they all stayed together at Government House in Wellington, where William experienced his first photo call. In the garden, dressed in an embroidered romper suit, with bare legs and feet, he swiftly demonstrated his newfound skill and set off across the carpet that had been laid out for the trio to sit on, stopping only when his father grabbed him. As Charles proudly wrote to his friends the van Cutsems, ‘William now crawls over it [Government House] at high speed knocking everything off the tables and causing unbelievable destruction. He will be walking before long and is the greatest possible fun. You may have seen some photographs of him recently when he performed like a true professional in front of the cameras and did everything that could be expected of him. It really is encouraging to be able to provide people with some nice jolly news for a change!’
After a polo match the next day, Charles was presented with a miniature polo stick for William. ‘I suspect the first thing he will do with it is to chew it,’ he said, ‘the second thing will be to hit me sharply on the nose but I hope in twenty years’ time he will be galloping up this field, with me in a Bath chair on the sideline.’