What made it worse was that Prince Charles seemed less concerned about her predicament than that of Camilla Parker Bowles. When he called Diana on the phone he often spoke in sympathetic tones about the rough time Camilla was getting because there were three or four journalists outside her home. Diana bit her lip and said nothing, never mentioning the virtual siege she was living under. She didn’t think that it was her place to do so nor did she want to appear to be a burden to the man she loved.
As the romance gathered momentum, Diana began to harbour doubts about her new friend Camilla Parker Bowles. She seemed to know everything that Diana and Charles had discussed in their rare moments of privacy and was full of advice on how best to handle Prince Charles. It was all very strange. Even Diana, an absolute beginner in the rules of love, was starting to suspect that this was not the way most men conducted their romances. For a start she and Charles were never on their own. At her first visit to Balmoral when she stayed with her sister Jane, the Parker Bowleses were prominent among the house guests. When Charles invited her to dine at Buckingham Palace the Parker Bowleses or his skiing companions, Charles and Patti Palmer-Tomkinson, were always present.
On 24 October 1980 when Diana drove from London to Ludlow to watch Prince Charles race his horse Alibar in the Clun Handicap for amateur riders, they spent the weekend with the Parker Bowleses at Bolehyde Manor in Wiltshire. The following day Charles and Andrew Parker Bowles went out with the Beaufort Hunt while Camilla and Diana spent the morning together. They made a return visit to Bolehyde Manor the following weekend.
During that first weekend Prince Charles showed Diana around Highgrove, the 353-acre Gloucestershire home he had bought in July – the same month he had started to woo her. As he took her on a guided tour of the eight-bedroomed mansion, the Prince asked her to organize the interior decoration. He liked her taste though she felt that it was a ‘most improper’ suggestion as they were not even engaged.
So Diana was deeply distressed when the Sunday Mirror newspaper ran a front-page story claiming that, on 5 November, Diana drove from London for a secret meeting with Prince Charles aboard the royal train in a siding at Holt in Wiltshire. For once Buckingham Palace came to her assistance. The Queen authorized her press secretary to demand a retraction. There was an exchange of letters which the editor, Bob Edwards, published coincidentally on the same day that Prince Charles flew to India and Nepal for an official tour. Diana insisted that she had been in her apartment, exhausted after a late night at the Ritz hotel where she and Prince Charles had attended Princess Margaret’s 50th birthday party. ‘The whole thing has got out of control, I’m not so much bored as miserable,’ confided Diana to a sympathetic neighbour who just happened to be a journalist.
Her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, also took the opportunity to enter the fray on behalf of her youngest daughter. In early December she wrote a letter to The Times complaining about the lies and harassment Diana had endured since the romance became public.
‘May I ask the editors of Fleet Street, whether, in the execution of their jobs, they consider it necessary or fair to harass my daughter daily, from dawn until well after dusk? Is it fair to ask any human being, regardless of circumstances, to be treated in this way?’ While her letter galvanized 60 Members of Parliament to draft a motion ‘deploring the manner in which Lady Diana Spencer is being treated by the media’ and led to a meeting between editors and the Press Council, the siege of Coleherne Court continued.
Sandringham, the royal family’s winter fortress, was also surrounded by the media. The House of Windsor, protected by police, press secretaries and endless private acres, showed less composure than the House of Spencer. The Queen shouted: ‘Why don’t you go away?’ at the crowd of hacks, while Prince Charles heckled: ‘A very happy New Year, and to your editors a particularly nasty one!’ Prince Edward was even said to have fired a shotgun over the head of a Daily Mirror photographer.
Back at Coleherne Court, the beleaguered garrison managed to outwit the enemy when it mattered. On one occasion, when Diana was due to stay with Prince Charles at Broadlands, she stripped the sheets from her bed and used them to lower her suitcase from the kitchen window to the street below, out of sight of the waiting newshounds. On another occasion she climbed over dustbins and went through the fire exit of a Knightsbridge store, and on another occasion she and Carolyn abandoned her car and jumped on a red double-decker bus to evade photographers. When the bus got caught in traffic they dashed off it and ran through a nearby Russell and Bromley shoe store. ‘That was brilliant fun,’ said Carolyn, ‘like being on a drag hunt in the middle of London.’
They had organized a decoy system whereby Carolyn drove Diana’s car to entice her press pursuers away and then Diana would emerge from Coleherne Court and walk off in the other direction. Even her grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, joined in the subterfuge.
Diana, having spent Christmas 1980 at Althorp, returned to London to spend New Year’s Eve with her flatmates. The next day she drove to Sandringham but first left her distinctive Metro at Kensington Palace where her grandmother’s silver VW Golf was waiting. Away she went in the VW, leaving the gentlemen of the press behind.
As the hysterical media juggernaut pushed Charles and Diana along to the altar, she had to try and come to terms with her own feelings and thoughts about the Prince of Wales. It was not easy. She had never had a real boyfriend before and so had no yardstick by which to compare Charles’s behaviour. During their bizarre courtship she was his willing puppy who came to heel when he whistled. It was no more than he expected. As the Prince of Wales, he was used to being the centre of attention and the focus of flattery and praise. He called her Diana, she addressed him as ‘Sir’.
He aroused her mothering instincts. When she came back from a date with the Prince she would be full of sympathy for him, uttering phrases like ‘they work him too hard’ or ‘it’s appalling the way they push him around’. In her eyes he was a sad, lonely man who needed looking after. And she was hopelessly, utterly besotted with him. He was the man she wanted to be with for the rest of her life and she was willing to jump through any hoop and over any hurdle to win him. Diana regularly asked her flatmates for advice on how she should conduct her romance. As Carolyn recalled: ‘It was pretty normal procedure that goes on between girls. Some of it I can’t disclose, some of it would have been on the lines of: “Make sure you do this or that.” It was a bit of a game.’
As she bathed in the warm glow of first love, she was occasionally unsettled by shards of doubt. Surprisingly, it was her grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, who sounded one of the first notes of caution. Far from engineering the union, as has been widely suspected, her grandmother advised her about the difficulties of marrying into the royal family. ‘You must understand that their sense of humour and lifestyle are very different,’ she warned her. ‘I don’t think it will suit you.’
Diana was also troubled by other worries. There was Prince Charles’s clique of sycophantic friends, many of them middle-aged, who were too fawning and deferential. She instinctively felt that that kind of attention wasn’t good for him. Then there was the ever-present Mrs Parker Bowles who seemed to know everything they were doing almost before they had done it. During their courtship Diana had asked Charles about his previous girlfriends. He had told her candidly that they were married women because, in his words, ‘they were safe’; they had their husbands to think about. Yet Diana truly believed he was in love with her because of the devoted way he behaved in her presence. At the same time she couldn’t help but wonder about the fact that in the space of 12 months he had been involved in three relationships, Anna Wallace, Amanda Knatchbull and herself, any one of which could have ended in marriage.
Those doubts disappeared following a telephone call she received while Prince Charles was on a skiing holiday in Klosters, Switzerland. During his call, made from the chalet of his friends Charles and Patti Palmer-Tomkinson, he said that he had so
mething important to ask her when he returned. Instinct told her what that ‘something’ was and that night she talked until the small hours with her flatmates discussing what she should do. She was in love, she thought he was in love with her and yet she was concerned that there might be another woman hovering in the background.
Charles returned to England on 3 February 1981, looking fit and tanned. That Thursday he joined HMS Invincible, the Royal Navy’s latest aircraft carrier, for manoeuvres, and returned to London where he spent the night at Buckingham Palace. He had arranged to see Diana the following day, Friday 6 February, at Windsor Castle. It was here that the Prince of Wales formally asked Lady Diana Spencer to be his bride.
The actual proposal took place late that evening in the Windsor nursery. He told her how much he had missed her while he was away skiing and then asked her simply to marry him. At first she treated his request in a lighthearted way and broke into a fit of giggles. The Prince was deadly serious, emphasizing the earnestness of his proposal by reminding her that one day she would be Queen. While a small voice inside her head told her that she would never become Queen but would have a tough life, she found herself accepting his offer and telling him repeatedly how much she loved him. ‘Whatever love means,’ he replied, a phrase he was to use again during their formal engagement interviews with the media.
He left her and went upstairs to telephone the Queen, who was at Sandringham, and inform her of the happy outcome of his proposal. In the meantime Diana pondered her fate. Despite her nervous laughter, Diana had given the prospect much thought. Besides her undoubted love for Prince Charles, her sense of duty and her deep desire to carry out a useful role in life were factors in her fateful decision.
When she returned to her apartment later that night her friends were eager for news. She flopped down on her bed and announced: ‘Guess what?’ They cried out in unison: ‘He asked you.’ Diana replied: ‘He did and I said: “Yes please.”’ After the congratulatory hugs and tears and kisses, they opened a bottle of champagne before they went for a drive round London nursing their secret.
She told her parents the next day. They were naturally thrilled but when she told her brother Charles of her marriage plans at their mother’s London apartment he wisecracked: ‘Who to?’ He recalled: ‘When I got there she looked absolutely blissful and was beaming away. I just remember her as really ecstatic.’ Did he feel then that she was in love with the role or the person? ‘From the baptism of fire she had got from the press she knew that she could handle the role too. She looked as happy as I have ever seen her look. It was genuine because nobody with insincere motives could look that happy. It wasn’t the look of somebody who had won the jackpot but of somebody who looked spiritually fulfilled as well.’
Her sister Sarah, for so long the Spencer girl in the spotlight, now had to make way for Diana. While she was happy for her younger sister, she admitted to being rather envious of Diana’s new-found fame. It took her some time to adjust to her new billing as sister to the future Princess of Wales. Jane took a more practical approach. While she shared in the bride-to-be’s euphoria, as the wife of the Queen’s assistant private secretary, she couldn’t help but be concerned about how Diana would cope with royal life.
This was for the future. Two days later Diana took a well-earned break, her last as a private citizen. She joined her mother and stepfather on a flight for Australia where they travelled to his sheep station at Yass in New South Wales. They stayed at a friend’s beach house and enjoyed ten days of peace and seclusion.
While Diana and her mother started planning guest lists, wardrobe requirements and the other details for the wedding of the year, the media vainly attempted to discover her hiding place. The one man who did know was the Prince of Wales. As the days passed, Diana pined for her Prince and yet he never telephoned. She excused his silence as due to the pressure of his royal duties. Finally she called him, only to find that he was not in his apartment at Buckingham Palace. It was only after she called him that he telephoned her. Soothed by that solitary telephone call, Diana’s ruffled pride was momentarily mollified when she returned to Coleherne Court. There was a knock on the door and a member of the Prince’s staff appeared with a large bouquet of flowers. However, there was no note from her future husband and she concluded sadly that it was simply a tactful gesture by his office.
These concerns were forgotten a few days later when Diana rose at dawn and travelled to the Lambourn home of Nick Gaselee, Charles’s trainer, to watch him ride his horse, Alibar. As she and his detective observed the Prince put the horse through its paces on the gallops Diana was seized by another premonition of disaster. She said that Alibar was going to have a heart attack and die. Within seconds of her uttering those words, 11-year-old Alibar reared its head back and collapsed to the ground with a massive coronary. Diana leapt out of the Land Rover and raced to Charles’s side. There was nothing anyone could do. The couple stayed with the horse until a vet officially certified its death and then, to avoid waiting photographers, Diana left the Gaselees in the back of the Land Rover with a coat over her head.
It was a miserable moment but there was little time to reflect on the tragedy. The inexorable demands of royal duty took Prince Charles on to Wales, leaving Diana to sympathize with his loss by telephone. Soon they would be together forever, the subterfuge and deceit ended. It was nearly time to let the world into their secret.
The night before the engagement announcement, which took place on 24 February 1981, she packed a bag, hugged her loyal friends and left Coleherne Court forever. She had an armed Scotland Yard bodyguard for company, Chief Inspector Paul Officer, a philosophical policeman who was fascinated by runes, mysticism and the after-world. As she prepared to say goodbye to her private life, he told her: ‘I just want you to know that this is the last night of freedom ever in the rest of your life, so make the most of it.’
Those words stopped her in her tracks. ‘It was like a sword went in my heart.’
3
‘Such Hope in My Heart’
The quest of the handsome prince was complete. He had found his fair maiden and the world had its fairytale. In her ivory tower, Cinderella was unhappy, locked away from her friends, her family and the outside world. As the public celebrated the Prince’s fortune, the shades of the prison house closed inexorably around Diana.
For all her aristocratic breeding, this innocent young kindergarten teacher felt totally at sea in the deferential hierarchy of Buckingham Palace. There were many tears in those three months and many more to come after that. Weight simply dropped off, her waist shrinking from 29 inches when the engagement was announced down to 23½ inches on her wedding day. It was during this turbulent time that her bulimia, which would take nearly a decade to overcome, began. The note Diana left her friends at Coleherne Court saying: ‘For God’s sake, ring me up – I’m going to need you’, proved painfully accurate.
As her friend Carolyn Bartholomew, who watched her waste away during her engagement, recalled: ‘She went to live at Buckingham Palace and then the tears started. This little thing got so thin. I was so worried about her. She wasn’t happy, she was suddenly plunged into all this pressure and it was a nightmare for her. She was dizzy with it, bombarded from all sides. It was a whirlwind and she was ashen, she was grey.’
Her first night at Clarence House, then the Queen Mother’s London residence, was the calm before the coming storm. She was left to her own devices when she arrived, no one from the royal family, least of all her future husband, thinking it necessary to welcome her to her new world. The popular myth paints a homely picture of the Queen Mother clucking around Diana as she schooled her in the subtle arts of royal protocol while the Queen’s senior lady-in-waiting, Lady Susan Hussey, took the young woman aside for tuition in regal history. In reality, Diana was given less training in her new job than the average supermarket checkout operator.
Diana was shown to her first-floor bedroom by a servant. There was a letter lying on her b
ed. It was from Camilla Parker Bowles and had been written several days before the engagement was officially announced. The friendly note invited her to lunch. It was during that meeting, arranged to coincide with Prince Charles’s trip to Australia and New Zealand, that Diana became suspicious. Camilla kept asking if Diana was going to hunt when she moved to Highgrove. Nonplussed by such an odd question, Diana replied in the negative. The relief on Camilla’s face was clear. Diana later realized that Camilla saw Charles’s love of hunting as a conduit to maintaining her own relationship with him.
It wasn’t clear at the time. Then again, nothing was. Diana soon moved into rooms at Buckingham Palace where she, her mother and a small team had to organize her wedding and her wardrobe. She quickly appreciated that the only thing the royal family like to change is their clothes. With the year divided into three official seasons and often involving four formal changes of clothes a day, her wardrobe of one long dress, one silk shirt and a smart pair of shoes was wholly inadequate. During her romance she had regularly raided her friends’ wardrobes so that she would have a presentable outfit to go out in. While her mother helped her choose the famous blue engagement suit which she bought from Harrods, she asked her sisters’ friend Anna Harvey, then the fashion editor of Vogue magazine, for advice on building up her formal wardrobe.
She began to understand that her working clothes had not just to be fashionable but also to cope with the vagaries of walkabouts, the intrusion of photographers and her ever-present enemy, the wind. Slowly she discovered tricks of the trade such as weighting her hems so that they didn’t blow up in a breeze and she gradually acquired a coterie of designers, including Catherine Walker, David Sassoon and Victor Edelstein.
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