Junor also reported that Diana was “a teacher’s dream: well-mannered, eager to please, friendly, pleasant, even-tempered and always cooperative.” That assessment doesn’t quite square with Diana’s own recollection: “I was very naughty in the sense of always wanting to laugh and muck about rather than sit tight looking at the four walls of the schoolroom.” At least in part because of her inattention, Diana was only an average student. Riddy’s evaluation at the end of Diana’s third year was typically mixed: “Diana has been outstandingly helpful this term. She has proved herself efficient and a good organizer. If only she would put the same enthusiasm into her work, she could move mountains. There are occasional lapses when she becomes rather quarrelsome, but these are much fewer than in the past.”
After three years at Riddlesworth, Diana was accepted at West Heath, the boarding school for older girls that Sarah and Jane had attended. The only requirement for admission was neat handwriting. Located an hour outside London in Kent, West Heath was an ideal safe harbor for a girl trying to navigate adolescence under difficult circumstances. In some ways, the school was so comforting that it mitigated the mood shifts, turbulent relationships, identity crises, and challenges to authority that make up the normal developmental challenges faced by a teenager.
“It was a very unsophisticated place, and we weren’t encouraged to be sophisticated,” said a woman who went to West Heath with Diana. “We used to get cross about it, and complain that we were cocooned. London schools were allowed to do things we weren’t allowed to do. We never met boys at the end of the drive. Several schools allowed girls to smoke and drink in the sixth form [the final year]. But West Heath was old-fashioned. We didn’t grow up very quickly. It was very small, one hundred twenty [students] total. There were very small classes. Everyone came out confident and happy, and there was very little angst. Maybe Diana was miserable, but I wasn’t aware. It was a relaxed place.”
Diana was twelve when she entered West Heath in the fall of 1973. Her sixteen-year-old sister Jane was a school leader and stellar student, having passed eleven O-level exams. Now called GCSEs, these tests are administered to British students prior to their final two years of high school. Based on the results of these tests, students focus their studies to prepare for the A levels, which are required for admission to college.
Sarah fared less well. She had been successful at West Heath, playing lacrosse, netball, tennis, and cricket, appearing in school plays, winning prizes in diving, and passing six O-level exams. But despite her obvious aptitude, Sarah decided “I wasn’t university material” and opted for rebellion instead. “I used to drink because I was bored,” she recalled. “I would drink anything: whiskey, Cointreau, gin, sherry or, most often, vodka, because the staff couldn’t smell that.” One day in 1971 when she was drunk, she got caught, and was expelled from school.
The following year, Sarah rebounded at finishing school in Switzerland, where she became fluent in French; she then moved on to Vienna to study piano at a music conservatory and earn a diploma for German proficiency. On Sarah’s return to England in the spring of 1973, Johnnie gave her a grand debutante party in Norfolk, and she came out during the London “Season.” By the time Diana settled in at West Heath, Sarah was eighteen and working in London at Vogue as an editorial assistant.
Presiding over West Heath was Ruth Rudge, a longtime Latin teacher turned principal. Flinty, astute, and sensible, Rudge, like Elizabeth Ridsdale, played to the strengths of her students. “The school gave a certain security to girls when they needed it,” said the mother of one of Diana’s schoolmates. “If they wanted to dance, they did. If they wanted to play music, they did.” Ruth Rudge’s initial assessment of Diana showed an awareness of her personality’s undercurrents, as well as the means to soothe them. When Diana came to West Heath, she was “wary of adults, often prickly with her peers,” Rudge later observed. “She was lucky enough to find herself in a group of lively, talented, caring individuals, some of whom she already knew, and soon gained confidence in her new surroundings and found her niche socially.”
Rudge had spotted Diana’s streak of suspicion. “She was wary of people until she trusted them,” Rudge said. “She had a number of knocks, particularly from adults.… Once she trusted you, it was fine.” Diana was tougher on herself in her Morton interviews: Her conduct at first was “ghastly,” she said. She became a “bully” because her sister Jane held a position of power as a prefect. But after some of the girls retaliated against Diana for her bossy behavior, she became “completely calm and sorted out.”
Neither Rudge nor Violet Allen, the matron who supervised dormitory life and ran the infirmary, actually witnessed Diana’s bullying, although one school report admonished that “she must try to be less emotional in her dealings with others.” Rudge was well aware of Diana’s feistiness: “She was a very strong character. She went about getting what she wanted. She could verbally defend herself quite well.”
Diana also bragged to Morton about nearly being expelled from West Heath after sneaking out one night on a dare. She described the episode vividly, complete with police cars, the arrival of both her parents, and her mother’s tart expression of pride—“I didn’t think you had it in you”—instead of a rebuke. Yet Ruth Rudge had no recollection of any such incident: “I would have been involved,” said Rudge. “It doesn’t ring any bell at all.”
Diana’s schoolmate Carolyn Bartholomew recalled her friend as “buoyant and noisy … full of life, a bubbly character,” while other students remembered her as more private and controlled, with her emotions well-hidden. In fact, depending on circumstances and her own level of confidence, Diana could be either. When Diana assessed her schoolgirl behavior for Andrew Morton, she was so contradictory that she seemed to be speaking in riddles. “I was always looking for trouble,” she said, and in the next breath, “I always knew how to behave. There was a time to be quiet and a time to be noisy. I could always tune in to which it should be.” Ruth Rudge understood these complexities, as she noted in a tribute written after Diana’s death: “The compassion and caring, the stresses and harassments, her ease and friendliness as well as the swift retaliation for wrongs she felt done to her, all marked and recorded in her later life, were evident in her school days.”
Diana’s temper may have flared when schoolmates crossed her, but for the most part she maintained her agreeable facade and aimed to please. The school encouraged her to focus on what she did well, and rewarded her achievements. She found fulfillment in helping younger students as well as needy people in the community: the mentally handicapped at a local asylum, and an elderly woman she visited each week. Diana enjoyed learning to play the piano—her favorite piece was Dvorák’s Slavonic Dance in G Minor—but her technique, though energetic, didn’t match that of Jane or Sarah, much less her grandmother Ruth Fermoy, who had played professionally. Diana’s forte was dance, and she took lessons in ballet, tap, and ballroom. She practiced diligently, and in 1976, she won the school dance competition. She was equally proficient in swimming and diving, winning awards in each sport four years straight.
In her last year, Diana was named a prefect, as her sister Jane had been, and she carried out her leadership role so responsibly that she was awarded a special prize for service—an award “for anyone who has done things that otherwise might have gone unsung,” said Ruth Rudge. “She was dependable in her own doings, reliable, and went out of her way to help people. She was generous with her time.” Once after Diana had been discharged from the infirmary during an epidemic, she came back to help Violet Allen serve meals to the other ailing girls. “She had a very caring heart,” said Allen.
More than five years had passed since her parents’ split, but Diana was still troubled by it. “Mostly it was a traumatic time for her,” said Allen. “We had quite a few girls from divorced families, and she came and talked to me quite a lot. Of course she missed her mother and father. The others who had divorces felt the same way. Some accepted it, and som
e had more difficulty with it. No doubt about it, Diana found it difficult to accept. She was vulnerable in some things. I can’t put a finger on it, but it probably all had to do with the insecurity and breakup of [her parents’] marriage.”
Yet Diana held her sadness in check, as she had at Silfield and Riddlesworth. “Most of the girls from a divorced family would come in and have a little weep,” said Allen. “I never saw her cry. She probably kept a lot to herself.” Allen’s observation was strikingly similar to the Riddlesworth staff’s, who noticed that Diana “was always very controlled, never likely, as they put it, to have ‘boo-hooed’ under any circumstances.”
No school could protect Diana from further dislocations in the family, however. She was hit hard by the death of her favorite grandmother, Lady Cynthia Spencer, in 1972. A bigger blow came when her grandfather Jack, the 7th Earl Spencer, died on June 9, 1975, causing the family to leave Norfolk and move to Althorp, where Johnnie would take over as the 8th Earl Spencer. “A terrible, terrible wrench,” Diana called her departure from Park House at fourteen. Her brother Charles considered it “a difficult phase in all our lives: uprooted from our childhood haunts and friends, and marooned in the middle of a park the size of Monaco.” The 121-room house reminded Charles of “a chilling time warp, complete with the permeating smell of Trumper’s hair oil and the ubiquitous tocking of Grandfather’s clocks.” According to Junor, Diana “never grew to be fond” of Althorp.
Shortly after the move, the Spencer children were shocked to learn that Johnnie, then fifty-two, had married Raine, the forty-six-year-old Countess of Dartmouth, in a quiet ceremony on July 14, 1976—without notifying any of them in advance. Raine was a handsome woman with a meticulous bouffant hairstyle and a controversial image. Her family, the McCorquodales, had been minor gentry who made money in the printing business. Her mother was the flamboyant romance novelist Barbara Cartland, and one of her cousins, Neil McCorquodale, would later marry Diana’s sister Sarah. Raine was known for her involvement in London government, where she earned a reputation for outspokenness. She had a keen intelligence, enormous energy, and big ambitions.
Johnnie and Raine fell in love in the early seventies when they worked together on a book about historic buildings for the Greater London Council. Raine had been married for twenty-eight years to the Earl of Dartmouth and had four children. “When I met Johnnie he was a very lonely and unhappy man who’d been divorced for years,” Raine once said. By the time Johnnie brought Raine to his daughter Sarah’s debutante party in 1973, the affair was already the stuff of gossip; Raine left her husband in 1974. Like Johnnie, Gerald Dartmouth won custody of the children when he divorced Raine in 1976 after naming Johnnie—his former friend from Eton days—as the corespondent.
Johnnie was besotted with Raine, and friends and relatives could see that he was in high spirits once again. “When Raine came into his life, he was vulnerable to her gushing flattery and settled for her,” said a Spencer relative. She even charmed Johnnie’s famously grumpy father, and other relatives as well. “In the beginning I was very much for Raine,” said Robert Spencer. “I thought she would be good for Johnnie, and that she would be a good chatelaine for Althorp. Everyone was for her, really. Everyone except the children.”
Diana and her siblings took an instant dislike to Raine, primarily because they didn’t want to share their father with someone they barely knew. Diana recalled that Raine “used to … pour us with presents, and we all hated her so much because we thought she was going to take Daddy away from us.” Raine’s overbearing and tactless manner made matters worse, prompting the Spencer children to call her “Acid Raine.” “She dominated him and wouldn’t let them get close to him,” said a friend of the Spencer sisters. “They were hurt that their father would drop everything and rush to this woman who had him under wraps. She wouldn’t let them come home without giving her a date three months before. She ruled his life and spent his money.”
In one revealing episode, Diana enlisted a friend to write a nasty anonymous note to Raine after coming across a letter her future stepmother had sent to Johnnie about plans for redoing the decor at Althorp. (Diana’s habits of reading other people’s mail and eavesdropping were aspects of her suspicious nature that would cause problems in her marriage.) Diana’s mistrust of Raine hardened as the new Countess Spencer orchestrated the sale of Althorp treasures to pay inheritance taxes and finance elaborate renovations. “They minded terribly what she did to Althorp,” said another Spencer cousin. “It was so overpolished and overgilded and overshiny. There was a gap with the children. If they could make it awkward for her, they did it. She was tough enough to take it, but they kept their distance.”
Although Diana spoke bitterly in later years about her hatred of her stepmother, Raine clung to a more benign view of her youngest stepdaughter. In a 1981 interview, Raine recalled that Sarah “resented” her and Jane ignored her for two years, but Diana “was sweet, always did her own thing.”
Raine joined the Spencer family at an especially difficult time for Sarah. After securing the job at Vogue, Sarah began what she described as an “intense love affair” with Gerald Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, who had been one of the escorts at her debutante party. Early in 1975, Sarah went to Australia, where her mother and stepfather owned a farm in New South Wales. On her return to London three months later, her relationship with Gerald Grosvenor ended, setting off Sarah’s two-year ordeal with eating disorders.
“Sarah was very attractive and there were always little dramas in her love life,” said a friend. “Her eating disorder had more to do with being rejected by a man than anything else.” Sarah herself attributed her condition to the ruptured love affair, plus what she described as “domestic upheavals concerning my family,” which created a situation she considered “catastrophic.” Within a month of her return from Australia, recalled Sarah, “I just stopped eating. I would toy with a couple of pieces of lettuce, and if I forced a meal down I would just bring it up again.”
Sarah’s diminished appetite and weight loss were so alarming that her mother put her in a hospital in May 1975. “I sought a lot of medical help,” Frances said. Instead of improving, Sarah dropped seven pounds in two weeks. On leaving the hospital, she was no better, and she continued to struggle for the next year. Sarah’s weight plummeted from 112 pounds to 77 pounds, which on her five-foot-seven frame made her look “like something out of a concentration camp,” said Sarah. “I couldn’t find any normal clothes to fit me and did my shopping in the children’s department.” She didn’t seek treatment because, as she said, “one behaves like an alcoholic. You will just not admit there is a problem. You end up believing you are beautiful, looking so thin.”
Around the time of Johnnie’s wedding to Raine in July 1976, Sarah escaped to Africa, where she spent several months traveling through Kenya, Rhodesia, and South Africa with two friends. On returning to England at the end of the year, she got a job working for a London real estate company, but, she said, “I was really in a physical mess, although of course I wouldn’t admit it.”
Sarah later acknowledged that she suffered from anorexia nervosa, the eating disorder dating from the mid–nineteenth century that is characterized by self-imposed starvation diets, but she also engaged in the binge eating and self-induced vomiting that define bulimia nervosa. (“Bulimia” comes from the Greek word limos, meaning “hunger,” coupled with bous, meaning “bull” or “ox”; the term can mean either “hunger as great as that of an ox,” or “hungry enough to consume an entire ox.”) Although bulimia nervosa was not identified as a specific disorder until 1979, its symptoms had been seen in cases of anorexia such as Sarah’s. “Sarah was sick after meals,” recalled a friend from those years. “She was tiny. The only thing that kept her alive was Coca-Cola.”
During this tense period, Diana visited Sarah at her apartment in Eaton Mews South on weekends away from West Heath. While bulimics and anorexics typically try to disguise the patterns of their fa
sting, overeating, and “inappropriate compensatory behaviors” such as vomiting, Sarah’s friends and family saw through her subterfuges. Diana worried about her sister along with everyone else, but “she didn’t try to play a role” in helping Sarah, said one of Sarah’s friends.
It wasn’t until several months before her death that Diana revealed how much she had been affected by watching Sarah’s illness. Previously, Diana had always said her own eating disorder had been provoked by Charles’s unfeeling treatment of her during her engagement. To psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, such a sudden emergence at that age seemed implausible without some history of eating problems. Finally, in May 1997, Diana told patients at Roehampton Priory, a private clinic outside London, that she first had symptoms of bulimia nervosa in the mid-seventies. “It started because Sarah was anorexic and I idolized her so much that I wanted to be like her,” Diana said. “I never really understood why two sisters would develop such similar diseases, but we did, and I can only put it down to me wanting to emulate everything she did.”
Diana’s analysis made sense up to a point, as she did worship Sarah and was impressionable, but she failed to take into account other factors that seemed to govern her personality and behavior. One element might have been the influence of her mother, who admitted to her own difficulties with eating. Shortly after Diana’s visit to Roehampton Priory, an interviewer asked Frances about stories that she had problems with alcohol. “I don’t think I have,” replied Frances, but added, somewhat elliptically, “I have a problem with eating, when I get fussed.… I don’t think there is anything wrong with my eating.… It’s only when I’m under pressure.… My problem has simply been not noticing if I haven’t eaten.”
Diana in Search of Herself Page 7