Dance gave her a further chance to shine. She loved her ballet and tap-dancing sessions and longed to be a ballet dancer but, at 5ft 10½ inches, was too tall. A favourite ballet was Swan Lake which she saw at least four times when school parties travelled to the Coliseum or Sadler’s Wells theatres in London. As she danced she could lose herself in the movement. Often she crept out of her bed in the dead of night and sneaked into the new school hall to practise. With music from a record player providing the background, Diana practised ballet for hours on end. ‘It always released tremendous tension in my head,’ she said. This extra effort paid dividends when she won the school dancing competition at the end of the spring term in 1976. Little wonder then that during the build-up to her wedding she invited her former teacher Wendy Mitchell and pianist Lily Snipp to Buckingham Palace so that she could have dancing lessons. For Diana it was an hour away from the stresses and strains of her new-found position.
When the family moved to Althorp in 1975 she had the perfect stage. On summer days she would practise her arabesques on the sandstone balustrades of the house and when the visitors had gone she danced in the black-and-white marble entrance hall, known officially as Wootton Hall, beneath portraits of her distinguished ancestors. They were not her only audience. While she refused to dance in public, her brother and staff took turns to look through the keyhole. ‘We were all very impressed,’ he said.
The family moved to Althorp following the death of her grandfather, the 7th Earl Spencer, on 9 June 1975. Although 83 he was still sprightly and his death from pneumonia following a short hospital stay came as a shock. It meant considerable upheaval. The girls all became Ladies, Charles, then aged 11, became Viscount Althorp while their father became the 8th Earl and inherited Althorp. With 13,000 acres of rolling Northamptonshire farmland, more than 100 tied cottages, a valuable collection of paintings, several by Sir Joshua Reynolds, rare books, and 17th-century porcelain, furniture and silver, including the Marlborough Collection, Althorp was more than just a stately home – it was a way of life.
The new Earl also inherited a £2.25 million bill for death duties as well as £80,000-a-year running costs. This did not prevent him paying for the installation of a swimming pool to amuse his children who roamed around their new domain during the holidays. Diana spent her days swimming, walking around the grounds, driving in Charles’s blue beach buggy and, of course, dancing. The staff adored her; they found her friendly and unassuming with something of a passion for chocolates, sweets and the sugary romances of Barbara Cartland.
She eagerly awaited the days when Sarah arrived from London bringing with her a crowd of her sophisticated friends. Witty and sharp, Sarah was seen by her contemporaries as the queen of the season, especially after her father had organized a splendid coming-of-age party in 1973 at Castle Rising, a Norman castle in Norfolk. Guests arrived by horse-drawn carriages and the path to the castle was lit by blazing torches. The lavish party is still talked about today. Her escorts matched her status. Everyone expected her relationship with Gerald Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster and Britain’s wealthiest aristocrat, to end in marriage. She was as surprised as anyone when he looked elsewhere.
Diana was happy to bask in her sister’s glory. Lucinda Craig Harvey, who shared a house in London with Sarah and later employed Diana as a cleaner for £1 an hour, first met her prospective charlady during a cricket match at Althorp. First impressions were not flattering. Diana struck her as ‘a rather large girl who wore terrifying Laura Ashley maternity dresses’. She said: ‘She was very shy, blushed easily and was very much the younger sister. Terribly unsophisticated, she certainly wasn’t anything to look at.’ None the less, Diana joined in the parties, the barbecues and the regular cricket matches with enthusiasm. These sporting contests between the house and the village ended with the arrival of a character who could have been dreamed up by Central Casting.
As a cryptic entry in the visitors’ book noted: ‘Raine stopped play.’ The late Raine Spencer, who went on to assume the title of Comtesse de Chambrun, was not so much a person as a phenomenon. With her bouffant hairdo, elaborate plumage, gushing charm and bright smile she was a caricature of a countess. The daughter of the outspoken romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, she already had a half-page entry in Who’s Who before she met Johnnie Spencer. As Lady Lewisham and later, after 1962, as the Countess of Dartmouth, she was a controversial figure in London politics where she served as a councillor on the London County Council. Her colourful opinions soon gave her a wider platform and she became a familiar face in the gossip columns.
During the 1960s she became notorious as a parody of the ‘pearls and twinset’ Tory councillor with views as rigid as her hairdos. ‘I always know when I visit Conservative houses because they wash their milk bottles before they put them out,’ was one howler which contributed to her being booed off the stage when she addressed students at the London School of Economics.
However, her outspoken opinions masked an iron determination matched by a formidable charm and a sharp turn of phrase. She and Earl Spencer worked on a book for the Greater London Council called What is Our Heritage? and soon found they had much in common. Raine was then 46 years old and had been married to the Earl of Dartmouth for 28 years. They had four children, William, Rupert, Charlotte and Henry. During their schooldays at Eton, Johnnie Spencer and the Earl of Dartmouth had been good friends.
Raine wielded her overwhelming charm on both father and son, effecting something of a reconciliation between Earl Spencer and her lover during the Earl’s final years. The old Earl adored her, especially as for every birthday and Christmas she bought him a walking stick to add to his collection.
The children were less impressed. Like a galleon in full sail, she first hove into view during the early 1970s. Indeed, her presence at Sarah’s 18th-birthday party at Castle Rising was the source of much muttering among the Norfolk gentry. A ‘sticky’ dinner at the Duke’s Head hotel in King’s Lynn was the first real opportunity Charles and Diana had of assessing the new woman in their father’s life. Ostensibly the dinner was organized to celebrate a tax plan which would save the family fortune. In reality it was a chance for Charles and Diana to get to know their prospective stepmother. ‘We didn’t like her one bit,’ said Charles. They told their father that if he did marry her they would wash their hands of them. In 1976 Charles, then 12 years old, spelled out his feelings by sending Raine a ‘vile’ letter while Diana encouraged a schoolfriend to write her prospective stepmother a poison pen letter. The incident which prompted their behaviour was the discovery, shortly before the death of Diana’s grandfather, of a letter which Raine had sent to their father discussing her plans for Althorp. Her private opinions of the incumbent Earl did not match the way Diana and Charles saw her behave in public towards their grandfather.
With the family adamantly opposed to the match, Raine and Johnnie married quietly at Caxton Hall register office on 14 July 1977, shortly after he had been named in divorce proceedings by the Earl of Dartmouth. None of the children were told about the wedding in advance and the first Charles knew of his new stepmother was when the headmaster of his prep school informed him.
Immediately a whirlwind of change ripped through Althorp as the new mistress endeavoured to turn the family home into a paying proposition so that the awesome debts the new Earl had taken on could be paid off. The staff were pared to the bone and in order to open the house to paying visitors the stable block was turned into a tea room and gift shop. Over the years numerous paintings, antiques and other objets d’art were sold and often, claimed the children, at rock bottom prices while they described in disdainful terms the way the house was ‘restored’. Earl Spencer always stoutly defended his wife’s robust management of the estate and said: ‘The cost of restoration has been immense.’
However there was no disguising the sour relations that existed during this period between Raine and his children. She publicly commented on the rift when she spoke to newspaper columnist Jean
Rook: ‘I’m absolutely sick of the “Wicked Stepmother” lark. You’re never going to make me sound like a human being, because people like to think I’m Dracula’s mother but I did have a rotten time at the start and it’s only just getting better. Sarah resented me, even my place at the head of the table, and gave orders to the servants over my head. Jane didn’t speak to me for two years, even if we bumped in a passageway. Diana was sweet, always did her own thing.’
In fact, Diana’s indignation at Raine simmered for years until finally it boiled over in 1989 at the church rehearsal for her brother’s wedding to Victoria Lockwood, a successful model. Raine refused to speak to Diana’s mother in church even though they were seated together in the same pew. Diana vented all the grievances which had been welling up inside her for more than ten years. As Diana challenged her Raine replied: ‘You have no idea how much pain your mother put your father through.’ Diana, who later admitted that she had never felt such fury, rounded on her stepmother. ‘Pain, Raine, that’s one word you don’t even know how to relate to. In my job and in my role I see people suffer like you've never seen, and you call that pain. You’ve got a lot to learn.’ There was much more in the same vein. Afterwards her mother said that was the first time anyone in the family had defended her.
However, in the early days of her tenure at Althorp, the children simply treated Raine as a joke. They played upon her penchant for pigeonholing house guests into their appropriate social categories. When Charles arrived from Eton, where he was then at school, he had primed his friends beforehand to give false names. So one boy said that he was ‘James Rothschild’, implying that he was a member of the famous banking family. Raine brightened. ‘Oh, are you Hannah’s son?’ she asked. Charles’s schoolfriend said that he didn’t know before compounding his folly by spelling the surname incorrectly in the visitors’ book.
At a weekend barbecue one of Sarah’s friends wagered £100 that Charles couldn’t throw his stepmother into the swimming pool. Raine, who appeared at this shorts and T-shirts party in a ballgown, agreed to Charles’s request for a dance by the pool. As he tensed for a judo throw, she realized what was going on and slipped away. Christmas at Althorp with Raine Spencer in charge was a bizarre comedy, a sharp contrast to the extravagances of Park House. She presided over the present-opening like an officious timekeeper. The children were only allowed to open the present she indicated and only after she had looked at her watch to give the go-ahead to tear the paper off. ‘It was completely mad,’ said Charles.
The only bright spot was when Diana decided to give one of her presents away to a rather irascible night-watchman. While he had a fearsome reputation, Diana instinctively felt that he was just lonely. She and her brother went to see him and he was so touched by her gesture that he burst into tears. It was an early example of her sensitivity to the needs of others, a quality noticed by her headmistress, Miss Rudge, who awarded her the Miss Clark Lawrence Award for service to the school in her last term in 1977.
Diana was now growing in self-confidence, a quality recognized by her elevation to school prefect. When she left West Heath, Diana followed in sister Sarah’s footsteps by enrolling at the Institut Alpin Videmanette, an expensive finishing school near Gstaad in Switzerland, where Diana took classes in domestic science, dressmaking and cookery. She was supposed to speak nothing but French all day. In fact she and her friend Sophie Kimball spoke English all the time and the only thing she cultivated was her skiing. Unhappy and stifled by school routine, Diana was desperate to escape. She wrote scores of letters pleading with her parents to bring her home. Finally they relented when she argued that they were simply wasting their money.
With her schooldays behind her, Diana felt as if some great weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She visibly blossomed, becoming jollier, livelier and prettier. Diana was now more mature and relaxed and her sisters’ friends looked at her with new eyes. Still shy and overweight, she was nevertheless developing into a popular character. ‘She was great fun, charming and kind,’ said a friend.
However, the blooming of Diana was viewed with jealous misgivings by Sarah. London was her kingdom and she didn’t want her sister taking the spotlight away from her. The crunch came on one of the last of the old-style weekends at Althorp. Diana asked her sister for a lift to London. Sarah refused saying that it would cost too much in petrol to have an extra person in the car. Her friends ridiculed her, seeing for the first time how the balance in their relationship had shifted in favour of adorable Diana.
Diana had been the Cinderella of her family for long enough. She had felt her spirit suppressed by school routine and her character cramped by her minor position in the family. Diana was eager to spread her wings and start her own life in London. The thrill of independence beckoned. As her brother Charles said: ‘Suddenly the insignificant ugly duckling was obviously going to be a swan.’
2
‘Just Call Me “Sir”’
By any standards it was an unusual romance. It was not until Lady Diana Spencer was formally engaged to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales that she was given permission to call him ‘Charles’. Until then she had demurely addressed him as ‘Sir’. He called her Diana. In Prince Charles’s circle this was considered the norm. When Diana’s sister Sarah enjoyed a nine-month-long relationship with the Prince of Wales she had been as formal. ‘It just seemed natural,’ she recalls. ‘It was obviously right to do so because I was never corrected.’
It was during her sister’s romance that Diana first came into the path of the man considered then to be the world’s most eligible bachelor. That historic meeting in November 1977 was hardly auspicious. Diana, on weekend leave from West Heath School, was introduced to the Prince in the middle of a ploughed field near Nobottle Wood on the Althorp estate during a day’s shooting. The Prince, who brought along his faithful labrador, Sandringham Harvey, is considered to be one of the finest shots in the country so he was more intent on sport than small talk on that bleak afternoon. Diana cut a nondescript figure in her checked shirt, her sister’s anorak, cords and wellington boots. She kept in the background, realizing that she had only been brought along to make up numbers. It was very much her sister’s show and Sarah was perhaps being rather mischievous when she said later that she ‘played Cupid’ between her kid sister and the Prince.
If Charles’s first memories of Diana on that fateful weekend are of ‘a very jolly and amusing and attractive 16-year-old – full of fun’, then it was certainly no thanks to her elder sister. As far as Sarah was concerned Charles was her domain at that time and trespassers were not welcomed by the sparky redhead who applied her competitive instincts to the men in her life. In any case Diana was not overly impressed by Sarah’s royal boyfriend. ‘What a sad man,’ she remembered thinking. The Spencers held a dance that weekend in his honour and it was noticeable that Sarah was enthusiastic in her attentions. Diana later told friends: ‘I kept out of the way. I remember being a fat, podgy, no make-up, unsmart lady but I made a lot of noise and he liked that.’
When dinner was over he liked Diana enough to ask her to show him the 115-foot-long picture gallery which then housed one of the finest private collections of art in Europe. Sarah wanted to be the guide to the family’s ‘etchings’. Diana took the hint and left them to it.
While Sarah’s behaviour was hardly that of a would-be Cupid, Charles’s interest in her younger sister left Diana with much food for thought. He was, after all, her sister’s boyfriend. Charles and Sarah had met at Ascot in June 1977 when Sarah was licking her wounds after her romance with the Duke of Westminster had ended. At that time she was suffering from anorexia nervosa, which friends believe was triggered by the collapse of her love affair. As one friend noted: ‘Sarah always had to be the best at everything. The best car, the wittiest put-down, and the best dress. Dieting was part of her competitive nature, to be thinner than everybody else.’
Sarah has kept a picture of herself in her underwear when she was literally skin an
d bone. At that time, during the mid-1970s, she thought she was fat. Now she realizes how unwell she was. Her family, worried about her health, used every method possible to encourage her to eat. For example she would be allowed to speak to Prince Charles on the telephone if she put on 2lbs in weight. In 1977 she elected to go to a nursing home in Regent’s Park in central London where she was treated by Dr Maurice Lipsedge, a psychiatrist who, by pure coincidence, cared for Diana a decade later when she resolved to fight her bulimia.
As she tried to overcome her condition, Sarah frequently saw Prince Charles. During the summer of 1977 she watched him play polo at Smith’s Lawn, Windsor, and when, in February 1978, he invited her to join him on a skiing party in Klosters, Switzerland, there was much speculation that she might be the future queen of England. However, Sarah’s enjoyment of publicity overcame the circumspection a royal girlfriend is expected to display. She gave a magazine interview which considerably dented Prince Charles’s image as a charming Casanova. ‘Our relationship is totally platonic,’ she stated. ‘I think of him as the big brother I never had.’ For good measure she added: ‘I wouldn’t marry a man I didn’t love, whether it was a dustman or the King of England. If he asked me I would turn him down.’
While their romance cooled off, Charles still asked Sarah to attend his 30th birthday party at Buckingham Palace in November 1978. Much to Sarah’s surprise, Diana was also invited. Cinderella was going to the ball.
Diana enjoyed herself enormously at the birthday party not least because it brought her sister down a peg or two. Yet it never entered her head for a moment to think that Prince Charles was remotely interested in romance. Certainly she never considered herself competition to the actress Susan George, who was his escort that evening. In any case, life was much too enjoyable to think about steady boyfriends. She had returned from her ill-starred excursion to the Swiss finishing school desperate to begin an independent life in London. Her parents were not as enthusiastic.
Diana: Her True Story - In Her Own Words: 25th Anniversary Edition Page 13