She had no paper qualifications, no special skills and only a vague notion that she wanted to work with children. While Diana seemed destined for a life of unskilled, low-paid jobs, she was not that much out of the ordinary for girls of her class and background. Aristocratic families traditionally invested more thought and effort in educating boys than girls. There was a tacit assumption that, after rounding off their formal education with a cookery or arts course, daughters would join their well-bred friends on the marriage market. At the start of the Queen’s reign this feature of the London season was still formalized in the presentation of debutantes at Buckingham Palace which was followed by a series of coming-out balls. Indeed Diana’s parents had met at her mother’s coming-out ball in April 1953, while in her day Raine Spencer was voted ‘Deb of the Year’.
Marriage was very much in Diana’s mind when she returned from Switzerland. Her sister Jane had asked her to be chief bridesmaid at her wedding to Robert Fellowes, the son of the Queen’s land agent at Sandringham and subsequently her private secretary, which was held in the Guards Chapel in April 1978. While there was no pressure from her family to embark on a structured career, there was considerable reluctance about allowing her to live on her own in London. As her Swiss headmistress, Madame Yersin, commented: ‘She was rather young for a sixteen-year-old.’ If she was an innocent abroad, her parents considered that a life cocooned in an all-girls school was hardly adequate preparation for the bright lights of the big city. They told her that she couldn’t have her own flat until she was 18 years old.
Instead she was farmed out to family friends, Major Jeremy Whitaker, a photographer, and his wife, Philippa, who lived in Headley, near Bordon in Hampshire. She stayed with them for three months and as well as looking after their daughter Alexandra she cleaned and cooked. Yet she was itching to move to the metropolis and bombarded her parents with subtle and not so subtle requests. Finally a compromise was reached. Her mother allowed her to stay at her flat in Cadogan Square. As Mrs Shand Kydd spent most of the year in Scotland it was as good as her own place. It was to be her home for a year, sharing it initially with Laura Greig, an old school chum and later one of her ladies-in-waiting, and Sophie Kimball, the daughter of a Conservative Member of Parliament, Marcus Kimball.
In order to earn her keep Diana joined the ranks of what she would later dismissively refer to as the ‘velvet hairband’ brigade, the upper-class ladies who fitted a loose template of values, fashions, breeding and attitudes and who were commonly known as ‘Sloane Rangers’. She signed up for two employment agencies, Solve Your Problems and Knightsbridge Nannies, and worked as a waitress at private parties and as a charlady. In between driving lessons – she passed her test at the second attempt – she was much in demand as a babysitter by her sisters’ married friends while Sarah used her to make up numbers at her frequent dinner parties. Her London life was sedate, almost mundane. She didn’t smoke and never drank, preferring to spend her free time reading, watching television, visiting friends or going out for supper in modest bistros. Noisy nightclubs, wild parties or smoky pubs were never her scene. ‘Disco Di’ has only ever existed in the minds of headline writers with an appreciation for alliteration. In reality Diana was a loner by inclination and habit.
Weekends were spent in the country, at Althorp with her father, at her sister Jane’s cottage on the estate or at a house party organized by one of her growing circle of friends. Her friends from Norfolk and West Heath, Alexandra Loyd, Caroline Harbord-Hammond, the daughter of Lord Suffield, Theresa Mowbray, her mother’s goddaughter, and Mary-Ann Stewart-Richardson, were all now living in London and formed the nucleus of her set.
It was while she was staying with Caroline one weekend in September 1978 at her parents’ Norfolk home that she had a disturbing premonition. When she was politely asked about her father’s health her reply startled the assembled company. She found herself saying that she felt her father was going to ‘drop down’ in some way. ‘If he dies, he will die immediately, otherwise he’ll survive,’ she said. The following day the telephone rang. Diana knew it was about her father. It was. Earl Spencer had collapsed in the courtyard at Althorp suffering from a massive cerebral haemorrhage and had been rushed to Northampton General Hospital. Diana packed her bags and joined her sisters and brother Charles who had been driven from Eton by his brother-in-law, Robert Fellowes.
The medical prognosis was bleak. Earl Spencer was not expected to survive the night. According to his son, Charles, the Countess was matter-of-fact. He remembers her telling his brother-in-law: ‘I’ll be out of Althorp first thing in the morning.’ The reign of Raine seemed to be over. For two days the children camped out in the hospital waiting-room as their father clung on to life. When doctors announced that there was a glimmer of hope, Raine organized a private ambulance to take him to the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Queen Square, Central London, where for several months he lay in a coma. As the family kept vigil, the children saw at close quarters the stubborn determination of their stepmother. She tried to stop the children visiting their critically ill father. Nurses were instructed to prevent them from seeing Earl Spencer as he lay helpless in his private room. As Raine said afterwards: ‘I’m a survivor and people forget that at their peril. There’s pure steel up my backbone. Nobody destroys me, and nobody was going to destroy Johnnie so long as I could sit by his bed – some of his family tried to stop me – and will my life force into him.’
During this critical time the ill feeling between Raine and the children boiled over into a series of vicious exchanges. There was iron too in the Spencer soul and numerous hospital corridors rang to the sound of the redoubtable Countess and the fiery Lady Sarah Spencer hissing at each other like a pair of angry geese.
In November Earl Spencer suffered a relapse and was moved to the Brompton Hospital in South Kensington. Once again his life hung in the balance. When his doctors were at their most pessimistic, Raine’s will-power won through. She had heard of a German drug called Azlocillin which she thought could help and so she pulled every string to find a supply. It was unlicensed in Britain but that didn’t stop her. The wonder drug was duly acquired and miraculously did the trick. One afternoon she was maintaining her usual bedside vigil when, with the strains of Madam Butterfly playing in the background, he opened his eyes ‘and was back’. In January 1979 when he was finally released from hospital he and Raine booked into the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane for an expensive month-long convalescence.
Throughout this episode the strain on the family was intense. Sarah, who lived near to the Brompton Hospital, visited her father regularly although Raine’s hostility complicated an already fraught situation. When she was absent sympathetic nurses allowed Diana and Jane to see him but with Earl Spencer drifting in and out of consciousness he was never aware of the presence of his children. Even when he was awake a feeding tube in his throat meant that he was unable to speak. As Diana recalled: ‘He wasn’t able to ask where his children were. Goodness knows what he was thinking because no one was telling him.’
Understandably Diana found it hard to concentrate on the cookery course she had enrolled in a few days before her father suffered his stroke. For three months she went by Underground to the Wimbledon home of Elizabeth Russell where for many years she schooled the daughters of knights, dukes and earls in the delights of sauces, sponges and soufflés. As far as Diana was concerned it was another set of ‘velvet hairbands’. She had joined the course at her parents’ insistence and while it wasn’t her idea of fun at the time it seemed a better alternative than being behind a typewriter. Often the glutton in Diana got the better of her and she was frequently told off for dipping her fingers into pans filled with gooey sauces. She completed the course a few pounds heavier and clutching a diploma for her efforts.
As her father began his fight back to health, Diana’s mother took a hand in guiding her career. She wrote to Miss Betty Vacani, the legendary dance teacher who taught three generations of royal ch
ildren, and asked if there was a vacancy for a student ballet teacher at grade two level. There was. Diana passed her interview and, in the spring term, began at the Vacani dance studio on the Brompton Road. It neatly combined her love of children with her enjoyment of dance. Again she only lasted three months but for once it wasn’t her fault.
In March, her friend Mary-Ann Stewart-Richardson invited her to join her family on their skiing holiday in the French Alps. Diana fell badly on the ski slopes, tearing all the tendons in her left ankle. For three months she was in and out of plaster as the tendons slowly healed. It marked the end of her aspirations as a dance teacher.
In spite of her misadventure, Diana looked back on that trip to Val Claret as one of the most enjoyable and carefree holidays of her life. It was also where she first met many of the people who later became loyal and supportive friends. When Diana joined the Stewart-Richardsons they were just coming to terms with a family tragedy. She naturally felt out of place in their chalet and accepted the invitation of Simon Berry, the son of a wealthy wine merchant, to join his chalet party instead.
Berry and three other old Etonians, James Bolton, Alex Lyle and Christian de Lotbiniere, were the brains behind ‘Ski Bob’ travel. This was a company, named after their Eton housemaster Bob Baird, which had been formed when they discovered that they were too young legally to book holidays themselves. So these young entrepreneurs started their own company and within the 20-strong group, which mainly comprised old Etonians, the greatest accolade was to be called ‘Bob’.
Diana was soon Bob, Bob, Bobbing along. ‘You’re skating on thin ice,’ she yelled in her Miss Piggy voice as she skied dangerously close behind members of the group. She joined in the pillow fights, charades and satirical singsongs. Diana was teased mercilessly about a framed photograph of Prince Charles, taken at his Investiture in 1969, which hung in her school dormitory. ‘Not guilty’, she said. It was a gift to the school. When she stayed in the Berry chalet she slept on the living-room sofa. Not that she got much sleep. Medical student James Colthurst liked to regale the slumbering throng with unwelcome early-morning renditions of Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I had a dream’ speech or his equally unamusing Mussolini impersonation.
Adam Russell, the great-grandson of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and now a deer farmer in Dorset, was not overly impressed by Diana when she first walked in. He recalled: ‘When she arrived she made a rude comment followed by a giggle. I thought, “Oh God, a giggler, help.” Once you got behind that she was very much more composed. But she was lacking in self-confidence when she should have had lots. Very bubbly and giggly but not in a vacuous way.’ When he too was injured, they kept each other company and during their conversations he saw the reflective, rather sad side to her character. He said: ‘She seemed a happy person on the surface but underneath she had been deeply affected by her parents’ divorce.’
Her sister Sarah, then working for Savills, a leading estate agent, found what was to become, for a time, the most famous address in Britain. A three-bedroomed apartment in a mansion block at 60, Coleherne Court was Diana’s coming-of-age present from her parents. In July 1979 she moved into the £50,000 apartment and immediately set to work furnishing the rooms in a warm but simple Habitat style that was popular at the time. The white walls were repainted in pastel shades, the sitting room became pale primrose yellow while the bathroom was bright with red cherries. Diana had always promised her schoolfriend Carolyn Bartholomew a room when she got her own apartment. She was as good as her word. Sophie Kimball and Philippa Coaker stayed for a while but in August Diana and Carolyn were joined by Anne Bolton, who also worked for Savills, and Virginia Pitman, the oldest member of the quartet. It was these three who stayed with her throughout her romance with Prince Charles.
Diana later looked back on those days at Coleherne Court as the happiest time of her life. It was juvenile, innocent, uncomplicated and above all fun. ‘I laughed my head off there,’ she said and the only black cloud was when the apartment was burgled and she had most of her jewellery stolen. As landlady, she charged the others £18 a week and organized the cleaning rotas. Naturally she had the largest room, complete with double bed. So that no one would forget her status, the words ‘Chief Chick’ were emblazoned on her bedroom door. ‘She always had the rubber gloves on as she clucked about the place,’ recalled Carolyn. ‘But it was her house and when it is your own you are incredibly proud of it.’
At least she never had to worry about washing piles of dirty dishes and cups. The girls rarely cooked in spite of the fact that Virginia and Diana had completed expensive cordon bleu courses. Diana’s two specialities were chocolate roulades and Russian borscht soup which friends asked her to make and then deliver to their apartments. Usually the girls devoured the roulade before it left Coleherne Court. Otherwise they lived on Harvest Crunch cereal and chocolate. ‘We stayed remarkably plump,’ observed Carolyn.
The houseproud teenager was also tidying up her career. Shortly after moving into her apartment she found a job where she was truly in her element. For several afternoons a week she went to work at the Young England kindergarten run by Victoria Wilson and Kay Seth-Smith in St Saviour’s church hall in Pimlico. She taught the children painting, drawing and dancing and joined in the games they devised. Victoria and Kay were so impressed with her rapport with the children that they asked her to work in the morning as well. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she looked after Patrick Robinson, the son of an American oil executive, work which she ‘adored’.
There were still loose ends in her working week so her sister Sarah took it upon herself to tie them up. She employed her as a cleaner at her house in Elm Park Lane, Chelsea. Sarah’s flatmate Lucinda Craig Harvey recalled: ‘Diana hero-worshipped her but Sarah treated her like a doormat. She told me not to be embarrassed about asking Diana to do the washing up and so on.’ Diana, who did the vacuuming, dusting, ironing and washing, was paid £1 an hour and took a quiet satisfaction in her labours. When she became engaged to Prince Charles Diana referred to her cleaning job in her reply to Lucinda’s letter of congratulation. ‘Gone are the days of Jif and dusters. Oh dear, will I ever see them again?’
She escaped her sister’s gimlet gaze when she returned to the privacy of her own apartment. Perhaps this was just as well since the jolly but rather juvenile japes her sister embarked upon might not have pleased her. Diana and Carolyn would regularly while away a quiet evening ringing people with silly names who appeared in the telephone directory. Another favourite pastime was planning raids on the various apartments and cars owned by their friends. Carolyn recalled: ‘We used to do midnight runs, we were always skimming around London on undercover operations in Diana’s Metro.’
Those who offended the girls in some way were paid back with interest. Doorbells were rung in the dead of night, early-morning alarm calls were made, friends’ cars had their locks covered in sticky tape. On one occasion James Gilbey, then working for a car rental company in Victoria, woke to find his prize Alfa Romeo car covered in eggs and flour which had set like concrete. For some reason he had let down Diana on a date so she and Carolyn had taken their revenge.
It wasn’t all one-way traffic. One evening James Colthurst and Adam Russell secretly tied two huge ‘L’ plates to the front and rear of Diana’s Honda Civic car. She managed to pull them off but as she drove down the street she was followed by a cacophony of tin cans tied to the bumper. Once again eggs and flour were used by Diana and Carolyn in high-spirited retaliation.
Indeed this innocent, totally unsophisticated fun continued throughout her romance with Prince Charles. ‘We were the giggling lavatorial girls we’ve always been portrayed as, but somewhere there was a spark of maturity,’ said Carolyn. Certainly the constant parade of young men calling round for a chat and tea, if there was any, or to take the girls out for the evening were friends who happened to be boys. For the most part Diana’s escorts were old Etonians whom she had met while skiing or elsewhere. Harry Herbert, now the 8
th Earl of Carnarvon and son of the Queen’s former racing manager, James Boughey, a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, farmer’s son George Plumptre, who asked her to the ballet the day she got engaged, the artist Marcus May and Rory Scott, a dashing lieutenant in the Royal Scots Guards, often came to call, along with Simon Berry, Adam Russell and James Colthurst. ‘We were all just friends together,’ Simon Berry remembered.
The men in her life were clean-cut, well-bred, reliable, unpretentious and good company. ‘Diana is an Uptown girl who has never gone in for downtown men,’ observed Rory Scott. If they wore a uniform or had been cast aside by Sarah, so much the better. She felt rather sorry for Sarah’s rejects and often tried, unsuccessfully, to be asked out by them.
So she did washing for William van Straubenzee, one of Sarah’s old boyfriends, and ironed the shirts of Rory Scott, who had then starred in a television documentary about Trooping the Colour, and Diana regularly stayed for weekends at his parents’ farm near Petworth, West Sussex. She continued caring for his wardrobe during her royal romance, on one occasion delivering a pile of freshly laundered shirts to the back entrance of St James’s Palace, where Rory was on duty, in order to avoid the press. James Boughey was another military man who took her out to restaurants and the theatre and Diana visited Simon Berry and Adam Russell at their rented house on the Blenheim estate when they were undergraduates at Oxford.
Diana: Her True Story - In Her Own Words: 25th Anniversary Edition Page 14