There are strong indications that Diana began bingeing as a teenager in response to stressful situations. Diana may have been able to effectively cover up her bouts of purging, but the evidence of overeating was obvious. Both Ruth Rudge and Violet Allen at West Heath observed that Diana ate with gusto. “She was often seen lurking near the pantry, whether for leftovers to bolster her healthy appetite, as I suspected, or because she actually enjoyed domesticity, as she assured me,” noted Ruth Rudge. Rudge also remembered Diana’s “midnight feasts, bringing food back illegally into the school.” Diana “loved food,” wrote Penny Junor in her 1982 biography, “particularly baked beans, and she’d help herself to anything up to four bowls of All-Bran every morning.” Diana herself recalled, “I ate and ate and ate. It was always a great joke—let’s get Diana to have three kippers at breakfast and six pieces of bread, and I did all that.”
The administrators at West Heath were attuned to anorexia, but not bulimia, which had yet to be identified by the psychiatric community. Although Diana had a tendency to put on weight quickly, she didn’t balloon in a way that conformed to her eating habits. As one of Diana’s relatives observed, “She used to eat a lot. She probably had to get rid of it somehow.” The need to purge requires elaborate secrecy. “It is so easy to hide,” said a woman close to the royal family who suffered from bulimia. “You get clever about running taps, putting on the radio. The deception with bulimia is huge.” Diana had the capacity for secret behavior, as was evident in one of her descriptions of West Heath days: She recalled sneaking downstairs after lights-out, turning on her music, and dancing ballet routines for “hours on end” without being discovered.
Bulimic symptoms can be motivated by any number of impulses, but one is the need to impose some control—over the body as well as the mind—in uneasy circumstances. Such a situation occurred when Diana had to leave her childhood home in 1976. As the movers were packing up the family’s belongings, Diana found the scene unbearable. She called Alex Loyd, one of her neighbors, and together the two girls gathered all the peaches in the Park House larder. They then went to the beach and devoured the entire cache. But no one took much notice of Diana’s overeating in those days, and her symptoms seemed to be intermittent as well, limited by the protective environment of West Heath.
In addition to bingeing and purging, Diana kept things together in other ways that verged on obsessive behavior. From a very early age, she had been unusually neat. Even as a six-year-old, she had kept an immaculate bedroom, with her clothing and her toys perfectly arranged. Diana’s cousin Robert Spencer noticed that she “was always washing or tidying or ironing. That was a nervous streak in her.”
Diana’s preoccupation carried over to school, where she seemed to find relief in cleaning up after the other girls. “I would go in sometimes and she would be there with a dustpan and brush,” said matron Violet Allen. “I think perhaps some of the other girls thought she was excessively tidy. It could be, I suppose, her wanting to control her situation.” In light of Diana’s later loss of control in her private life, her behavior seems significant. “Diana had strong character traits that held her glued together,” said Dr. Kent Ravenscroft, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. “She was a good girl cleaning up her bad feelings when she cleaned up around her. She had the urge to do untidy things, to be messy, but she used her character and upbringing and strength to hold on. Her tidiness was a way of managing.”
In class, she wrote copious essays, recalling that the words “just came out of the pen, on and on and on”—not unlike her burst of compulsive chattering following her parents’ breakup. Diana’s late-night dancing for hours on end, she said, “always released tremendous tension in my head.” She used exercise throughout her life as a way of dealing with stress or depression.
Diana’s friendships at school weren’t nearly as intense as they would be in adulthood, largely due to Ruth Rudge’s West Heath policy that forbade “best friends,” which helped avoid some of the tensions of teen friendship. Explained Rudge, “I didn’t allow best friends because they break up and cause terrible traumas. Diana had no trouble making friends. There were about twenty-five of them in that particular group.” Diana found safety in the group activities encouraged by Rudge, so the West Heath policy suited her emotional needs and prevented her relationships from getting out of hand.
The biggest source of anxiety for Diana, even at low-key West Heath, was the classroom. On one hand, she recalled liking all her courses, but she was easily distracted and rarely spoke in class. She failed to develop either intellectual rigor or curiosity; her sole passion was escaping into the romantic fiction of her stepgrandmother Barbara Cartland. Diana “wrote a lot,” said Ruth Rudge. “But if you are writing for exams, you have to be concise and shape things up. She had suffered a lot. Her mind wasn’t on her lessons, and the groundwork wasn’t there. It was ‘bitty and piecey.’ She had a lot of catching up to do. As with anyone with other things on her mind, she would go off in daydreams.”
Rudge attributed Diana’s middling academic performance directly to the divorce. “Any child from a broken home is under more pressure than not,” said Rudge. “Children cope with death better than with a broken home. Death is absolutely traumatic, but one copes. The other, a broken home, one doesn’t really cope with at all.”
Diana suffered no stigma at West Heath for her academic record. Indeed, even in the late seventies, many upper-class girls were not expected to pursue a university degree, and none of Diana’s friends did. “She wouldn’t have been made to feel inferior by the girls at school,” said the mother of one of Diana’s classmates. “The emphasis there was on sport and music and giggling. They learned what was necessary.”
Despite the school’s positive reinforcement of her talents, Diana’s academic difficulties bothered her. “At the age of fourteen, I just remember thinking that I wasn’t very good at anything, that I was hopeless,” Diana recalled. At the time, Diana gave no indication of such feelings, according to Ruth Rudge and Violet Allen. But Diana’s difficulties in the classroom foreshadowed some of the problems she would have in adulthood: poor concentration, lack of intellectual discipline, and inability to focus on anything for long.
At fifteen, Diana faced her O-level exams. Even for students with no plans for college, “If you wanted to get a job you had to get the O levels,” said a woman who attended West Heath with Diana. “They were important. It was the first hurdle.” When Diana took her O levels in June 1977 she failed them all: English literature, English language, history, art, and geography. The following autumn she took them again, and failed each one yet again. The explanation, according to Andrew Morton, was that she “froze.” Penny Junor offered a similar reason, that “exams made her panic.… She forgot everything she ever knew,” but added that Diana’s friends also blamed her “sheer laziness and the fact that she was never pushed.”
Still, it was highly unusual to fail every O level. After all, Diana’s sister Sarah had passed six, and Jane eleven. Principal Ruth Rudge said she did not detect exam apprehension in Diana. “I never remember walking around with her and feeding her aspirins the night before, which I have done a number of times with other girls,” said Rudge. “I didn’t see any signs of panic when she took exams.”
In hindsight, the magnitude of Diana’s failure looks like a warning signal. Her intelligence was perfectly adequate, so there was no logical reason for her to perform so badly. It could have been a willful act, a sign of acute but hidden anxiety, or distraction due to trouble at home. Whatever the reason, it was the one moment in her youth when she was subjected to the kind of stressful demands she would encounter as Princess of Wales.
In later years, Diana openly bemoaned her early lack of self-esteem, and complained that no one took the time to listen to her. Paradoxically, she also talked about her dream as a young girl of doing “something special” and following a “winding road … going somewhere different, but I had no idea where.”
Diana expressed no urge to achieve on her own; rather, she spoke of wanting to marry a prominent man, which was a touchingly limited yearning to advance slightly beyond marriage to a garden-variety aristocrat. Nevertheless, Diana’s tabloid chroniclers inflated this claim into a noteworthy aspiration. Richard Kay of the Daily Mail wrote that “it was well known in the family that Diana believed, even when she was very little, that she would grow up to marry someone important.” Her astrologer Penny Thornton wrote that “according to Diana, her father would also tell her when she was little that he knew she was destined for great things.”
But as so often happened, Diana’s recollections differed markedly from the way others saw her. “She didn’t talk that way as a child,” said one of her relatives. “None of us had any great hopes for Diana. She was just another child.” A Woman’s Own interview with Johnnie Spencer seven years after Diana’s marriage seconded that judgment, noting that he “never had her marked down to be a princess.… He hadn’t really addressed himself to her future.” Said Johnnie, “I always thought she’d do something involved with children, like child care.” Once again, Diana’s interpretation of her childhood showed a disparity between her “ordinary girl” exterior and the thoughts she said were churning in her mind.
Having twice failed her O levels, Diana had to leave West Heath at sixteen. Early in 1978, she enrolled in the Institute Alpin Videmanette near Gstaad in Switzerland, only the second time she had traveled outside England. The institute was a classic “finishing school,” offering classes in shorthand and typing as well as “domestic science” courses in cooking and dressmaking that were designed to prepare girls for marriage. All classes were in French, and Diana was expected to learn the language, as Sarah had done.
Diana later said she felt completely unnerved by the school. She was one of only nine English-speaking girls out of sixty, she arrived five months after the school year had begun, and her French was so inferior that she would speak only English. “Diana felt totally left out,” said the mother of one of her West Heath friends. “She was at a boarding school where, if you were English, it was not easy. Most of the girls were Spanish or Italian. It was too clannish.”
Diana did make friends with the English girls, and joined them for skiing lessons, but she was deeply homesick. In her frantic effort to escape, she behaved in an obsessive fashion. She recalled writing “something like one hundred twenty letters” to her parents during the first month—roughly four a day. “I just wrote and wrote,” Diana said. “I felt out of place there…. It was just too claustrophobic for me.” After six weeks, her parents relented, and she was back in England by March. Rather poignantly, she made frequent visits to West Heath to see her old friends, and Violet Allen couldn’t help observing that during her short time abroad, Diana had lost a noticeable amount of weight.
In retrospect, Diana’s failure at finishing school showed how she could react when she felt exposed and insecure. After a chaotic early home life, she had spent seven years in boarding school’s institutional setting. In many respects, Riddlesworth and West Heath had benefited Diana. Surrounded by jolly girls from similar backgrounds, her days were so packed with activities that she had little opportunity for loneliness. She had to live within the rules, which imposed a useful structure on a girl accustomed to having her own way. She found mother substitutes in the matrons who oversaw dormitory life. Above all, Riddlesworth and West Heath had given Diana an atmosphere of stability and reassurance that reined in her anxieties. As Ruth Rudge observed, “If Diana was in a safe and secure environment, she was fine.”
Chapter 5
Because of her incomplete education and her age—still four months shy of her seventeenth birthday—Diana presented a dilemma for her mother and father when she returned to England in March 1978. Both her sisters had landed in London at eighteen with sufficient credentials to secure respectable jobs at Vogue magazine. Sarah had certificates from schools in Switzerland and Austria, topped off by a course in speed-writing. After graduating with distinction from West Heath, Jane had studied art for six months in Italy, and completed a secretarial course before joining Vogue. Sarah and Jane had each been launched into “society,” although Jane’s debut was less elaborate than Sarah’s, but Diana had no debutante party, and she didn’t navigate the social hurdles of the London Season. The reason, according to her friends and relatives, was that “coming out” had grown unfashionable, and Diana had no interest in any party presided over by her stepmother.
At first, Diana occupied herself helping Jane prepare for her marriage in April 1978 to Robert Fellowes, a former neighbor from Norfolk who worked as the Queen’s assistant private secretary. Following the wedding, Diana’s parents got her a job in the country as a nanny for some family friends. Diana said she couldn’t wait to go to London, although her parents had told her she couldn’t settle there until she was eighteen. Three months later, Diana managed to get her way and moved into her mother’s house, at 69 Cadogan Place in Chelsea. “By the late seventies, Diana was definitely on good terms with her mother,” Robert Spencer said. “It happened after Raine came on the scene.”
Although Frances was living in Scotland, Diana wasn’t left entirely on her own. She had two roommates—Laura Grieg, a friend from West Heath, and Sophie Kimball, whom Diana knew from her Swiss finishing school. Diana enjoyed her family’s financial support, and two years later, at eighteen, she would come into an inheritance from her American great-grandmother Fanny Work that would allow her to buy her own London apartment, but Diana lacked the training to find a promising job. Prodded by her parents, she tried her hand at a three-month cooking course, which led to only a few jobs providing canapés for cocktail parties. She then signed on for a three-year training course to teach ballet, again at her mother’s suggestion.
As an apprentice teacher at the ballet studio run by Betty Vacani in Kensington, Diana was responsible for working with more than a dozen two-year-olds. In theory, this seemed an ideal situation, combining her love of dance with her enjoyment of small children. But Diana felt overwhelmed, not only by the number of pupils but by the pressure of providing instruction while gimlet-eyed mothers and nannies observed the classes. Much as she had at finishing school, Diana felt unsettled when she was away from her comfortable group of friends. After three months, Diana quit without explanation. By Morton’s account, Diana couldn’t continue because she had torn “all the tendons in her left ankle” in a skiing accident. Another version had her injuring her leg “slightly.” When someone from the Vacani studio finally called to inquire about her absence, Diana said that she had hurt her foot and could no longer continue.
By this time, Diana’s difficulty with making long-term commitments was more apparent than ever, although she was not the sort to lead an indolent life. “She did not hang about,” said Robert Spencer. “Doing something useful was always in her character.” Diana needed to keep herself occupied, but she drifted through temporary work—low-stress, undemanding jobs such as housecleaning and child care that drew on her agreeable demeanor. Describing her experience later, she derided her employers as “velvet hairbands” and expressed resentment that “nobody thanked me” for the work she did as a cleaner.
In the fall of 1979, Diana secured her first permanent employment as a part-time assistant at the Young England Kindergarten, which was run by Kay King, an older graduate of West Heath. “When it came to children, [Diana] had this incredible ability to get down to their level,” said King. “They responded so well to her, she was completely at ease with them. They weren’t a threat in any way.” Six months later, Diana found a second job as a baby-sitter for an American family living in elegant Belgrave Square. These positions offered Diana reassuring routines that bolstered her confidence and made her feel needed: playing for hours on the floor with her American charge and taking him for long walks in his stroller, organizing artwork for the kindergarten pupils, and tidying up at the end of the day.
Diana may have been surr
ounded by the bustle and temptations of a big city, but her life was a remarkably cloistered extension of her West Heath days. Her roommates and other friends were from boarding school or her childhood in Norfolk. They ran together as a group and shared the same taste in books, movies, and clothing—tweed skirts and cardigans, Laura Ashley shirts set off by pearls, sturdy shoes. Diana and her friends fit the definition of Sloane Rangers, young women (their male counterparts were known as “Hooray Henrys”) whose lives revolved around the shops and restaurants of London’s Sloane Square. “Diana was pure state-of-the-art Sloane,” said Peter York, the anthropologist who originated the term in the seventies.
Diana’s crowd led an utterly “square” existence, lacking even the social pressures of drinking, smoking, and drugs, all of which they avoided: “There were still pockets of innocence then,” explained a man who befriended Diana in 1980. Their socializing consisted of small dinner parties, evenings at the movies or a favorite restaurant, excursions to the ballet, and house parties in the country. This was “the new school of born-again old-fashioned girls who play it safe and breed early,” wrote Tina Brown in Vanity Fair, “postfeminist, postverbal,” with a “femininity … modeled on a fifties concept of passive power” and “total absence of intellectual curiosity.”
Although Andrew Morton characterized Diana as a “loner by inclination and habit” during these years, she actually seemed to shrink from seclusion. As at West Heath, Diana found security in the swarm of her friends, where she functioned largely on the surface and found fun in giggles and practical jokes. “I kept myself to myself,” she recalled. Observed Rory Scott, an admirer who was a lieutenant in the Royal Scots Guards, “You always felt that there was a lot you would never know about her.” Anything outside Diana’s element threatened her equilibrium, however. “Diana didn’t enjoy parties much,” wrote Penny Junor. “She went if she knew she was going to meet friends there … but she didn’t go just for the sake of a party, and she had no interest in meeting new people. She hated nightclubs too … possibly because they were full of the sort of flamboyant, sophisticated people with whom she felt at her most insecure.”
Diana in Search of Herself Page 8