Diana

by Andrew Morton

  Inevitably, therefore, there was an initial wariness when Countess Spencer, accompanied by de Chambrun, eventually met the Princess for lunch at Kensington Palace. It was towards the end of a ‘very jolly’ lunch that Diana expressed what had been on her mind. ‘Raine,’ she said, ‘thank you for looking after my father. I know you loved him.’ The two women got up and hugged, a touching scene that left the trio gulping back tears. It was Diana’s way of saying sorry for the hurt, distress and misunderstandings of the past. That meeting began an unlikely friendship that lasted until her death.

  ‘I’ve always thought,’ the Countess later said, ‘that one of the reasons she wanted to be friends was because she and I were the only people who could talk about Johnnie together. She very generously and endlessly thanked me for what I had done for John when he was so terribly ill. It was very sweet but basically we had fun, and she wanted and needed that as well.’

  Behind the jovial banter and the generosity she saw a deeply troubled young woman, a woman striving to come to terms with who she was and where she was going. ‘She was incredibly lonely and depressed, and obviously I tried to help as much as I could. I wish I had been able to do more.’

  After that first meeting, Diana and her stepmother regularly met for lunch at Kensington Palace or the Connaught Hotel, or Diana would visit Lady Spencer’s house in Farm Street, Mayfair, near the American Embassy, for afternoon tea. She would sit happily on the sofa, feet curled under her, chatting about everything from the trivial to the confidential. She always brought the ‘most marvellous’ presents, which reminded the Countess that when Diana was at school she was always being praised for her thoughtful behaviour, particularly towards younger children. One ‘present’ Lady Spencer will always treasure was bestowed at a particularly difficult time in her life. When her marriage to Comte de Chambrun collapsed in 1996, she was left adrift and feeling sorry for herself. Recognizing that the Countess needed some sort of work to occupy her time, Diana asked Mohamed Fayed, who had come to one of her lunches with the Countess, if he would be able to give her stepmother a job. Not long after, he offered the Countess a directorship of Harrods International. ‘It changed my life, and Diana really had a great part in it,’ the Countess said.

  For a young woman who lived by the unforgiving creed, ‘once gone, always gone’, Diana’s friendship with her stepmother was a genuine sea change. As she reminded her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, who had commented with some annoyance on her daughter’s meetings with the Countess, she, Diana, had been the one who had disliked Raine the most; if she could forgive and forget, so should the rest of the family. At her brother’s wedding in 1989 Diana had taken a perverse delight in confronting her stepmother and telling her how much pain she had caused her and her family. ‘I’ve never known such anger in me,’ the Princess admitted later, telling friends that she herself had been shocked by the intensity of her feelings especially as, at the time, Lady Spencer had done nothing to provoke her. But at the time Diana was going through her ‘dark days’ and her stepmother seemed to present a valid target for her fury.

  The subsequent death of Lord Spencer and the tumult in Diana’s own life as well as a considered reassessment of her stepmother’s role in her father’s life – perhaps the understanding gained from her own work with the sick and dying had made her realize that her stepmother’s iron resolve in nursing her father when he had his first major stroke in September 1978 had saved and prolonged his life – all combined to bring about this volte-face.

  Admittedly, the timing (the spring of 1993) coincided with Charles Spencer being much out of favour with his sister for having taken back his offer of the Garden House – but there was certainly much more to the reunion between the two women than simply family point-scoring. At the time, Diana, who was beginning regular visits to the psychotherapist Susie Orbach, and to the astrologer Debbie Frank, frequently discussed the connection between her childhood experiences and her adult personality. As a therapist, Orbach would have encouraged her to confront and explore the demons from her past, revisiting the country of her childhood to make sense of her present world. And in that country lived ‘Acid Raine’ – ‘We hated her so much,’ as Diana once said.

  ‘After that first lunch with Raine she came bounding into the room high as a kite because she was aware that she had done something valuable,’ recollected Stephen Twigg. ‘She realized that she now had sufficient self-confidence and self-esteem to go and say “I’m sorry for what I did because I didn’t understand you sufficiently then.”’

  The reunion with Raine Spencer was part of the process of clearing the emotional decks as the Princess began the serious task of understanding who she really was. Far from being a woman who was, as one feminist commentator claimed in a Sunday Times article of 31 August 1997, ‘locked into her old life as morbidly as Miss Havisham’, she was struggling to come to terms with her past in order to build a more satisfying and complete future. It was an exploration yielding imperfect results that lasted the rest of her life.

  The Spencer family, already surprised and not a little alarmed by the renewal of Diana’s relationship with Raine, were further taken aback when she made an appointment to see her maternal grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy at her home in Eaton Square in central London. The meeting, in June 1993, was as awkward as it was symbolic. For it is no exaggeration to say that, but for Lady Fermoy, Diana’s early life would have been quite different. When Diana’s mother, Frances, then Viscountess Althorp, and Johnnie Spencer, Viscount Althorp, separated, it was Lady Fermoy’s decision to testify against her daughter at the custody hearing that proved critical. It altered for ever the way Diana viewed her mother. A constant and compelling refrain in the narrative of Diana’s life was her feelings of abandonment and loss brought about by her mother’s departure from the family home when Diana was just six years old. ‘The biggest disruption was when Mummy decided to leg it. That’s the vivid memory we have – the four of us,’ she remembered.

  Debbie Frank was also to observe that ‘The enduring trauma of her life was her sense of abandonment.’

  Far from ‘bolting’ from her children, however, Frances Shand Kydd in fact fought two unsuccessful and bitter battles with her estranged husband to gain custody of her children. Lady Fermoy’s intervention in the court hearing bore considerable weight, especially as she was siding against her own daughter. Diana’s mother had fully anticipated bringing up her children and she never truly recovered her equilibrium after the case went against her. ‘You can imagine how much it hurt,’ she said years later.

  Diana must certainly have seen her mother’s grief in the bitter tears she shed each time she had to say goodbye to her children after their all too brief reunions, but the picture held in young Diana’s mind’s eye was of her mother leaving Park House, the family home, in 1967. For Diana that incident served as a convenient image to distil the years of insecurity, pain, anxiety and anger surrounding her unhappy home life. With her elder sisters, Jane and Sarah, away at boarding school and her brother Charles only a three-year-old toddler, it was Diana, then a highly intuitive and sensitive six-year-old, who felt most deeply the tensions, tears and tantrums. A former member of the Spencer staff later talked about violent rows between Johnnie and Frances, fights that clearly horrified their watching daughter. ‘I remember seeing my father slap my mother across the face, and I was hiding behind the door and she was crying,’ Diana told James Colthurst.

  Such was the distress she experienced, not only from witnessing that painful incident but also the emotional turmoil surrounding her parents’ break-up that Diana later admitted that for a time she was literally struck dumb. At a critical time in a child’s development, when she was learning to read and write, Diana became an elective mute. According to her own account she could not remember exactly how long or with whom she deliberately decided to remain silent. Her own memory placed the period as lasting between three and eighteen months – a remarkably long time by any standards, all the more so
for a child at an age when an hour can feel like an eternity.

  It is a curious story, especially as it is uncommon for a child as old as six to withdraw from speech; at this age they generally find it difficult to refrain from talking. Children who suffer from this behavioural difficulty, which is commonly linked to a traumatic shock at school or in the home, are very strong-willed and determined characters – usually of the type that will also be prone to eating disorders, like Diana was in later life. According to child psychologist Lyn Fry, an expert on elective mutes, there are no long-term effects on either speech or mental health, and in fact more often than not such children choose to remain silent only in certain situations. ‘Even elective mutes usually talk to someone. At home they may ignore their parents and speak to their siblings, at school they will chat to their classmates whilst remaining silent with the teacher.’ It was likely that Diana followed this pattern, for example refusing to speak when she was around her family but not at school. A classmate from Diana’s first school of Silfield in Norfolk, now a television producer, Delissa Needham, remembered a little girl who was painfully shy and quiet, but very watchful: ‘Certainly she was insecure, but she was always quite sparky.’

  That a young child should withdraw into silence, even if only for a few months and not all of the time, was testimony to her deep unhappiness. ‘She never felt good enough as a child, blaming herself for her mother’s leaving and subsequently living with a stark sense that those she loved would abandon her,’ declared Debbie Frank.

  ‘I hated myself so much I didn’t think I was good enough . . . I mean, doubts as long as your leg,’ the Princess said. As mentioned earlier, in her speech of spring 1993 at a conference on eating disorders, she told her audience how from childhood she had suffered from feelings of ‘guilt, self-revulsion and low personal esteem’. She saw her natural needs, for love, attention and comfort, as greedy, creating the complex dynamic that is at the heart of bulimia nervosa.

  With such turbulence in her life, Diana sought to make order out of chaos; as a child this was expressed in the tidy zoo of stuffed animals lined up on her bed, as an adult it was in the systematic way she arranged her wardrobe and her shoes. ‘If Diana was in a safe and secure environment, she was fine,’ as her former headmistress, Ruth Rudge, observed.

  Remembering, and now beginning to understand, how decisive was her grandmother’s intervention on her father’s behalf – and its consequence on her own childhood – Diana was very concerned to voice her disappointment at the way Lady Fermoy had behaved during her separation from Prince Charles. Just as the old lady had taken the part of the Norfolk aristocracy rather than her own flesh and blood during her daughter’s separation, so she had shown the same loyalty to the Crown, siding with Prince Charles rather than with her granddaughter. Diana could not, perhaps, have expected anything else. Ruth, Lady Fermoy – a close friend of and lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother – was a courtier down to the very ends of her elegant fingertips, personifying, in the words of Diana’s private secretary, ‘an attitude which was anathema to the Princess’. As Diana recalled, ‘My mother and grandmother never got on. They clashed violently. My grandmother tries to lacerate me in any way she can. She feeds the royal family with hideous comment about my mother running and leaving the children. Whenever I mention Mother’s name in the royal family, which I rarely do, they come down on me like a ton of bricks.’ Indeed, Prince Charles refused even to speak to Diana’s mother. ‘They are convinced she behaved badly and poor Johnnie had a very rough time,’ the Princess told James Colthurst. ‘I now know it takes two to get into that situation. Mummy’s come across very badly because Grandmother has done a real hatchet job.’

  During her marriage Diana had come to see Clarence House, then the home of the Queen Mother, as the source of all negative comment about herself, much of it emanating from her grandmother. Before the marriage Lady Fermoy had warned Diana about the dangers of marrying into the royal family – although Diana now realized that the real reason was because her grandmother did not feel that she was the appropriate match for Prince Charles. When the marriage turned sour it was her implacable opinion that her granddaughter should stay with Prince Charles in order to spare the royal family the embarrassment of a marital scandal. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie commented, ‘Ruth was very distressed with Diana’s behaviour. She was totally and wholly a Charles person, because she’d seen him grow up, loved him like all the women at court do and regarded Diana as an actress, a schemer.’

  A fairly recent encounter, the year before, between the Princess and her grandmother showed Lady Fermoy in typical light. As the Princess of Wales was leaving Buckingham Palace after a tricky meeting with the Queen concerning her charity work, she met her grandmother, who upbraided her for daring to wear trousers to an interview with the Sovereign. Even though her trousers were well cut and very expensive, in the eyes of Ruth, Lady Fermoy she was little more than a ‘strumpet’.

  So when Diana finally plucked up the courage to confront her eighty-five-year-old grandmother, whose physical frailty did nothing to blunt her sharp tongue, it was a defining moment – the errant granddaughter taking on the powerful matriarch. While Diana had much to be angry about, given that her grandmother had refused to stand either by her own child or, later, her grandchild, she spoke more in sorrow than anger, telling her how disappointed she was that her own kith and kin had failed to support her during the marriage breakdown. It was a mature and considered approach and her formidable grandmother was embarrassed and shaken, not just by Diana’s courageous decision to raise such personal issues in the first place, but also because her behaviour was both even-handed and politely conciliatory.

  At least, when, in July 1993, just a few weeks after their meeting, Ruth, Lady Fermoy died, Diana could feel some satisfaction in having reached an understanding, if not made peace, with a woman who had so affected her life.

  It is significant that the Princess’s meetings with Raine Spencer and Ruth, Lady Fermoy both took place during 1993, the first year of her life on her own. It was a time when she was inevitably undertaking considerable spring cleaning, not just in her relations with her own family, the royal family and her circle of friends, but also in her endeavours, through intensive counselling, to reconcile and reinterpret her past through the eyes of an adult rather than the impulses of a child. Even so, while she gradually came to appreciate her mother’s sorrowful life – particularly the unresolved grief Frances felt following the death of her baby son John, an event which precipitated the breakdown of her marriage – Diana’s relationship with her mother remained uneven, complex and, ultimately, also unresolved.

  Both sharp-witted, strikingly attractive and capricious; both displaying a superficial sociable cheeriness beneath which lay a deep-seated sadness, usually well-hidden – as Diana told us in one of the interviews, ‘However bloody you are feeling you can put on the most amazing show of happiness. My mother is an expert at that and I’ve picked it up. It kept the wolves from the door.’ Both taking solace in eating when troubled, the Princess and her mother were more similar than Diana would ever have cared to admit. So too was the trajectory of their lives. ‘Two peas in a pod,’ declared her friend Vivienne Parry, who knows all the Spencer family. For all their disagreements, there was no denying the bond between them – ‘loving and trusting’ as Frances described it, even though it was not always visible – or the daughter’s admiration – sometimes grudging though it was – for her mother. When Diana reflected on how the Duchess of York’s father, Major Ronald Ferguson, had, according to Frances, asked her to marry him, it reminded her that her mother was one of the celebrated beauties of her era. ‘Mummy was quite special to look at when she was young,’ she commented. ‘She’s dynamite, not unlike Princess Grace in a funny kind of way.’ (It is worth noting that Diana formed an instant rapport with the former American actress when she met her, soon after her engagement to Prince Charles; and insisted that
she should represent the royal family at Princess Grace’s funeral in Monaco in 1982.)

  Times of closeness – such as when Diana, her mother, her sister Sarah and their children went to Necker Island in the Caribbean in 1989; when her mother visited her at Kensington Palace; or when she, William and Harry spent week-long holidays with ‘Granny Frances’ at her cottage home on the remote island of Seil off the north-west coast of Scotland – were, however, matched by long periods of distance and silence, a pattern that continued until Diana’s death. As her New Age healer friend, Simone Simmons, remarked of the mother-and-daughter sporadic get-togethers, ‘Diana wanted to be pleased to see her, not least because she was keen to talk through the unfinished business of her childhood. But these were troubled and uneasy encounters.’

  An emotional ebb-and-flow is part of the Spencer family’s character: sharp, witty, and intuitive but with a reckless willingness to say or do the unsayable, a quality that is as careless of the consequences as it is of the feelings of those involved, whether family, friends or complete strangers. ‘They were a very volatile family,’ Vivienne Parry observed, ‘in that you could never be sure which one had fallen out with which other one. Yet they were close despite the fact that they constantly had rows and if an outsider criticized one of them it would be seen as an attack on them all.’