by Tim Clayton
Diana’s father, Johnny Spencer, Viscount Althorp, was educated at Eton and Sandhurst. As an officer in the Royal Scots Greys, he fought in Normandy after D-day. After the war he became equerry to King George VI, and after the King’s death in February 1952 he was appointed equerry to his daughter, Queen Elizabeth II. He met the bright and lively Frances Roche on a visit to Sandringham. After her coming-out ball in April 1953 the twenty-nine-year-old Johnny and the seventeen-year-old Frances began an intense love affair.
After their engagement Johnny accompanied the Queen on her coronation tour of Australia while the bride’s family arranged the wedding. With both bride and groom so closely connected to the Windsors, it was natural that there should be a royal presence at the ceremony on 1 June 1954. It took place at Westminster Abbey, a rare privilege. Seventeen hundred people were invited to the service, including Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, the Queen Mother and six other members of the Royal Family. The Daily Mail called it the wedding of the year. Through a tunnel formed by the raised swords of the Scots Greys, the bride and groom left the abbey for a reception at St James’s Palace.
Johnny and Frances’s first daughter Sarah was born within a year. But, like generations of the great county families before them, what the Spencers really wanted was a son and heir. Jane, their second daughter, was born in 1957. The third child was a son, John, but he died within ten hours of his birth on 12 January 1960. The event was shattering for both parents, and rather than bringing them together it did the opposite. Johnny Spencer could not conceal his disappointment. Frances has confirmed that she was sent by her family (in which she included mother-in-law Cynthia Spencer and her mother Ruth) to be seen by specialist obstetricians in the belief that there must be something wrong with her.
When Frances became pregnant again (after a miscarriage that she kept secret) there can be little doubt that both parents were hoping for a boy. At each successive confinement Jack Spencer had built bonfires at Althorp to celebrate the birth of an heir. But the result was Diana. She later told her biographer Andrew Morton that she had felt unwanted from a very early age because her parents so clearly wanted her to be him. Frances says that this was an idea implanted in the adult Diana by therapists. And since an heir, Charles Spencer, was finally born on 20 May 1964, when Diana was still only three, she had little time to develop such an understanding of her parents’ secret feelings of disappointment when she was young.
Charles Spencer’s birth did not cure the tension at Park House. Johnny and his wife had drifted apart. Perhaps, having finally produced a son, Frances felt that she had discharged her responsibilities and could look to her own happiness. Still young and financially independent, she began to spend more time in London.
In 1966 Frances met Peter Shand Kydd over dinner. The heir to a thriving wallpaper business, he was adventurous, Bohemian and bright. The Althorps and the Shand Kydds met frequently, culminating in a joint skiing holiday. But the attraction between Frances and Peter was at the heart of the friendship between the families. Eventually Peter left his wife and met Frances secretly during her visits to London. She told Johnny about the affair in September 1967, and he agreed to a trial separation. She found a flat in Cadogan Place. In October, Diana, Charles and their nanny went to join their mother in London. Sarah and Jane were by now away at boarding school. Frances had found places for Diana at a local school and Charles at a kindergarten. Their father visited at weekends. It’s likely that the children did not know of their parents’ separation. The family was united at Park House in Norfolk for Christmas 1967, but then Johnny refused to allow the children to return to London with their mother and she left alone.
On 10 April 1968 Janet Shand Kydd sued her husband for divorce on the grounds of his adultery with Frances Spencer. In September 1968 Frances went to court with her plea for custody of her children. Lady Fermoy gave evidence against her daughter and she lost. A generous view of Lady Fermoy’s behaviour is that she felt the children would be better off in Norfolk. A less generous view is that she set a high value on the Spencer connection and was appalled that her daughter had run off with a tradesman. On 12 December Frances sued for divorce. Johnny cross-petitioned, citing her already proven adultery. He won his case and received custody of the children.
* * *
Lady Fermoy is one of the minor villains of the Diana story: tough, ambitious, inflexible and steeped in the culture of another era. But since she followed her friend the Queen Mother’s policy of remaining ‘utterly oyster’ and never defended herself on the record, she has made an easy target. The majority of royal writers assume that she exerted a malign influence, and she is damned in most accounts.
It’s easy to create caricatures – Diana modern, classless, open and emotional, the world of her grandmother snobbish, secretive, repressed and sinister; Diana’s childhood ruined by the same deadening forces that she would later confront from inside the heart of the establishment.
Except that it wasn’t. Certainly there was a nasty divorce, which strained relationships between Frances and her mother for many years, but Diana knew nothing about what had been said in court. And she was to see plenty of both parents, who went out of their way to be civilised about access and not to drag her into their private recriminations.
* * *
The divorce was made absolute on 2 May 1969. A month later Frances and Peter Shand Kydd were married. At first they divided their time between Buckinghamshire and Cadogan Place, but soon they bought a house in Itchenor on the West Sussex coast. In practical terms the custody arrangements did not deprive Frances of visits from her children, and she phoned them every day. The elder girls were free to spend their time where they wished. Sarah chose mostly to go to Park House in Norfolk and Jane to be in London with her mother. Some weekends Diana and Charles Spencer shuffled between London and Norfolk, and holidays were divided equally between the two parents.
Robert Spencer – Johnny’s cousin and close friend – maintains that the atmosphere was not particularly unhappy:
Well, of course, any divorce is bound to affect children. But I don’t think it affected Johnny and Frances Althorp’s children any more or any less than any others. After all, they were not particularly short of cash and they had two loving parents . . . They were fortunate in that they had two happy homes, and despite the parents being divorced as far as I can remember they were as happy as could be expected.
Against this it might be argued that the children were materially spoiled and, though not starved of parental affection, were perhaps given it in unpredictable doses. Diana always tended to have a dramatic side which may have been nurtured by many tearful partings and the sympathy she felt for each parent as she left to be with the other.
* * *
July 1971. Mary Clarke turned right off the Diss road and into the tree-lined avenue that led to Riddlesworth Hall. The twenty-one-year-old nanny had started at Park House in February, looking after Charles Spencer. Her other charge, nine-year-old Diana, was in her second term boarding at Riddlesworth, a prep school about an hour’s drive from Sandringham, and Mary had still not met her. Now the Easter holidays had started, and Viscount Althorp had sent Mary off alone to collect Diana and bring her home. She was distinctly nervous because other staff had already told her some alarming stories about the way the children could behave:
Childish escapades such as going into the nanny or au pair’s room and throwing all her clothes out of the window on to the roof, because the house is built in such a way that there’s different levels of roof. And then poor old Smith would have to get up and get them down. Or else locking one of them in the toilets.
Mary didn’t think she would enjoy this sort of treatment. But perhaps the older staff were just trying to tease her. She had had a wonderful time so far looking after Charles, so she had set off for Riddlesworth Hall with an open mind, hoping for the best.
I arrived at Riddlesworth and it was a typical end-of-term scenario really – little girls standi
ng round in their uniforms, surrounded by trunks and all their bits and pieces and in Diana’s case her guinea-pig in its cage as well. And I walked towards her, because obviously I’d seen pictures of her so I knew who to look out for. And I saw this little girl walking towards me, a real English rose with her eyes downcast, and blushing furiously. And she was very polite and shook my hand and then we were able to lose ourselves in all the fuss of loading up the car.
On the way home Mary asked Diana about her school. She said what she liked best was swimming. By the time Mary got back to Park House she was reassured, and felt she had struck up some kind of understanding. She had already spent six weeks alone with Charles and was worried that Diana might feel like an outsider, something she did everything possible to avoid. Diana’s room was all ready for her. As they got nearer to Park House, Diana was getting more and more excited to be home again. She asked Mary, ‘How are the Smiths? And how is Mrs Petrie?’ They arrived in a jumble of trunks, cages, hockey sticks and tennis rackets, and Diana went dashing off to reacquaint herself with her brother and father and all the staff at the house, as well as all the animals.
* * *
Park House is a ten-bedroom yellow-brick Victorian pile, surrounded by wide lawns and trees and close to the church that divides it from Sandringham House. It’s a holiday home for old people now. To reach it you drive through the royal estate up an avenue lined with trees, then branch off on to a gravel drive with lawns on one side and the house facing you.
There, Viscount Althorp led the life of a country gentleman, with gun dogs curled up by the fire and piles of Country Life and the Field on the coffee table. Diana grew up surrounded by cats and dogs, and the precious guinea-pigs that she used to show in late July in the local flower show’s ‘fur and feathers’ tent. She had a fierce ginger cat called Marmalade, and her bed was covered with a variety of furry toy animals. She grew nervous of horses after a fall from a pony, but she went riding with Mary Clarke in order to be with Sarah. She admired her vivacious elder sister very much. She was a healthy child who loved her food and hated wearing dresses. She liked to be outside in muddy jeans climbing trees and making dens and going for long walks with the dogs. Even as a child she had a practical side and helped Mary Clarke with housework in the nursery, which it was the nanny’s responsibility to keep tidy. Housework was not Mary Clarke’s strong point so when, as he did now and again, Johnny Spencer came to run a finger along a picture frame, Diana always ensured she was there before him, dusting down the pictures and tidying things up.
When the weather looked good, Mary Clarke would plan an excursion to nearby Brancaster beach, where the Spencers had an old wooden beach hut. They would get the cook to pack up a big picnic basket and they would fill the Land Rover with dogs and children – Diana, Charles and their friends. Other local families had huts there, and sometimes the excursions would involve several nannies and all their children. It was a thrill for everyone. The first excursion to Brancaster in the spring was always a big event. Since the previous autumn the winter winds would have reshaped the sand dunes and blown them all over the huts. All the way there, the children would be guessing how many steps to the hut would have been covered and how much digging would have to be done to excavate them.
At the beginning of the track to the beach huts Diana would shout, ‘Let the dogs out! Let the dogs out!’ And they would all rush along, having a race to see who had arrived at the beach hut first. As soon as we got there Diana would rush out to get water for the dogs to drink. We’d be trying to scrape away at the steps of the beach hut, seeing which of us had won the competition to see how many steps would be covered by the winter winds. And when we got to the hut and unloaded the Jeep, Diana would be rushing around setting everything up, getting the water on so that we could all have a drink, and rushing off to the sea. Diana was always trying to do about a hundred things all together, just to get everyone settled in and organised. She did like everything to be totally organised. And then they would rush down – the beach huts were built in the dunes – so you ran down from the dunes on to the beach and they would have competitions to see who could take off from the top, and jump the farthest down on to the beach. Some of them used to roll the whole way down on to the beach.
They were really happy, carefree times down at the beach because you were free to roam anywhere. The sea was safe when the tide was in. And if the tide was out it would leave pools of water to swim in and huge expanses of sand. They would wander round collecting shells too.
I would tell them stories. We’d find the conch-type shells and hold them to our ears and see who could hear the sea the loudest. Diana, of course, always heard the sea the loudest. And I would tell them stories of different places, of different seas. Diana loved to live in an imaginary world where everything was happy. She always wanted everything to be happy. And we were very happy down at Brancaster.
But the children did not need to go to the seaside to play. The house was big and full of toys and the wrought-iron banisters were perfect for sliding down. There was a grand piano in the music room at the back of the house from which the windows looked out over the climbing frame to the lawn, and beyond that the fenced hard tennis court. Behind the tennis court, up against the park fence, was a swimming pool with two diving boards and a slide. On baking summer days, Park House was very popular with the children who lived near by on the Sandringham estate, girls like Alexandra Lloyd, daughter of the Queen’s land agent, and Penelope Ashton, the vicar’s daughter, and even with the Royal Family. Although Diana and Charles only visited Sandringham House by invitation, Princes Andrew and Edward frequently dropped by unannounced at Park House. Mary Clarke used to watch Diana play with them.
Diana knew she was a very good swimmer and she used to take every opportunity to show off. She used to love nothing more than when we had crowds of people round the pool. Much against her father’s wishes – and she knew she wasn’t really allowed to do this – she’d run to the top of the slide and stand there poised – and she was beautiful and slim – and shout to everyone, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ knowing that her father wouldn’t reprimand her in front of everyone else, and execute this beautiful dive into the pool.
* * *
They took it out of context! This is the most common complaint about journalists. An incident, a memory, one portion of a half-remembered conversation lifted out of the jumble and contradiction of real experience and used to make a telling point in a television programme or a book. ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ – who hasn’t shouted that at the top of a diving board? But childhood stories like this have been used to build up a picture of the young Diana as an attention-seeker, a prima donna in the making.
Diana was thirty when she told Andrew Morton that she had a very unhappy childhood. By then she was fluent in the language of psychotherapy, and the rooting of later troubles in childhood trauma. She herself is the sole source of the received impression that her early life was lonely and sad. But Diana didn’t tell the story straight. She took herself out of context, exaggerating for effect when constructing a story of her early life that made her out to be more unusual and disturbed than she actually was.
There were, no doubt, unhappy moments as the children were shuffled between parents, but most remember Diana as a cheerful, tree-climbing tomboy: a bit overindulged, a bit lackadaisical at schoolwork, but otherwise unremarkable. A nice upper-class little English girl with good manners, neat handwriting and a deep affection for guinea-pigs; a girl who got excited about picnics on the beach and standing on a diving board. Like thousands of others, destined to move smoothly from boarding school to finishing school, a secretarial course, maybe some cooking and a stint in a ski chalet, and then marriage to a well-bred young man from a good county family.
* * *
Diana loved to read romantic novels and Barbara Cartland was her favourite author. Nanny Mary Clarke thought she had a very simple vision of the future:
What Diana really wanted to do whe
n she grew up was very simple, it was a dream shared by many little girls, to marry someone who really loved her and who she really loved and to have lots of children. Diana had in mind anything from four to six children and just to have a normal happy life. It was immaterial to her who the person that she married was, the important factor was that he should really love her and she love him because otherwise the marriage would end in divorce.
She wanted to be a ballet dancer, but at twelve years old Diana was already five foot nine and far too tall. Lady Fermoy had been a concert pianist and her sister Sarah was also a talented musician, but though she played a lot at home, Diana was not as good.
In 1973 Diana changed schools, following her sisters to West Heath, a small private boarding school for about 120 girls in Sevenoaks in Kent, surrounded by charming countryside and set in its own beautiful grounds. Its fees were very high, its facilities were magnificent, and its goals were not primarily academic.
During her first term at West Heath, Diana was, by her own admission, something of a bully. At least one of her smaller contemporaries claims to have suffered at her hands. In her second term she was treated to some of her own medicine, being picked on by some older girls, and then she settled down into boisterous popularity as the leader of a small gang in her class of about fifteen.
Diana was daring – she mounted nocturnal raids on the school kitchens and enjoyed midnight swims. The headmistress almost expelled her for wandering about the school after lights-out. Her teachers soon discovered that she had difficulty concentrating for any length of time. Penny Walker, Diana’s music teacher, felt that this was due to a number of factors, one being troubles at home: