Chapter Two ‘Transported Back to Our Childhood…’ #2
Diana left her classroom for mine, quietly assessed from the sidelines how I was getting on, then returned to Miss Lowe’s form. ‘He’s doing fine!’ she reported, with a satisfied smile, before turning her attention to the headmistress’s teaching.
After school we would rejoin the school run and be dropped back at Park House.
If we were not in the swimming-pool or (in my case) riding, the nursery remained the centre of our home life.
It was where we repaired to for tea. It was also where we played for hours, in a world long before the lure of electronic distractions.
Schoolfriends would occasionally come over for the afternoon, and we would go from time to time to their homes.
But generally, at Park House, it was just the two of us, an older sister and a younger brother, nearly three years apart, our life revolving round the nursery, with our nanny in charge.
We had a succession of nannies, most of whom were kind. Two proved to be abusive, inflicting physical punishments on Diana and me that our parents knew nothing about, and which it never occurred to us to report. I suppose we just assumed they knew, and therefore somehow approved.
The first of these – a hatchet-faced harridan with sallow skin – liked to wield a wooden spoon with great force, striking our outstretched palms, perhaps so any marks she made on us were hard to see.
The other was much worse. If she decided that Diana or I had been naughty, she would strike our head hard against the white concrete wall outside the nursery loo. The result was dizzying, throbbing pain and bewilderment.
If we were both to be punished, this nanny would stand us next to one another, grab us both by the hair and bang our heads together, with surprising strength. The shock of these strikes was enormous and would leave us both in tears. But we were never broken by the cruelty.
We were both strong-willed children, stubborn when we were convinced that we were correct, especially so in the face of actions we felt sure were wrong. That sort of behaviour was something we rebelled against.
When my mother had lived at Park House, there was more vigilance.
One of our sisters’ nannies had been sacked on the spot after our mother became mystified by how frequently her two eldest children, Sarah and Jane, suffered from stomach upsets.
She eventually worked out that this was not down to natural causes, but to the laxatives that the nanny was secretly administering to them for her own perverse reasons.
The loveliest of Diana’s and my nannies was Sally Percival, who looked after us from 1968, for the final year or two before Diana went away to boarding school.
Sally blended thoughtful care with warmth, kindness and humour.
We felt safe with her, and we loved her for that.
Importantly she dealt with the potentially fraught handovers between our divorced parents with maturity and understanding.
Sally was a great force for good in Diana’s and my young lives.
She wore normal clothes, in contrast to the starched uniforms of our earlier nannies.
When, in early 1971, with Diana, nine, and me seven, we were told that she was going to move on from Park House, we were distraught.
But it was time for us to progress from nursery life, and for Diana to start at boarding school.
Up until this point my father had often eaten alone – even during Diana’s and my school holidays – and he seemed to be doing so unhappily.
Now he tried having us join him in the dining room at lunchtimes when we were all at home and he had no adult guests.
This was an innovation that we all very much enjoyed.
The only person put out by the new way of doing things was Mr Betts, Park House’s comically grand butler.
Mr Betts was sombre – I don’t recall him smiling once during his time with us – and self-important.
He complained that his senior role in the household did not include serving children the very good food that Mrs Betts was preparing in the kitchen (her strawberry meringue was our favourite).
But, in a rare moment of assertiveness over others, my father overruled him.
The compromise he reached with Mr Betts was that we children would serve ourselves from the dining-room hotplate, rather than be waited on by him.
Mr Betts was the only butler that my father engaged at Park House. We had a succession of cooks before Mrs Betts took control of the unpretentious kitchen, with its simple, coal-fed, range cooker.
One of the previous cooks disappeared overnight, after the poor woman succumbed to some sort of breakdown.
Voices in her head persuaded her to chase my father round the kitchen table with a carving knife.
When he proved fast enough to escape her blade, she exited the house, shouting, ‘To the river, to the river!’ even though there was no river nearby.
Such was the shock of this dramatic episode in a very quiet household that Diana and I were sent to stay with family friends that night, while everyone drew breath.
Stalwart presences during our childhood were Mr and Mrs Smith, who lived in the staff flat beyond the covered garage courtyard.
Mr Smith was the gardener – quiet, hardworking, and immensely kind to us children.
He had smart, greased-down white hair, and a thick Norfolk accent that sprang from lungs coarsened by the tar of countless No. 6 cigarettes.
Mrs Smith was the housekeeper. She oversaw the daily help, Mrs Petrie, and the Scandinavian au pairs who occasionally passed through Park House.
Mrs Smith was a small lady, with the rounded silhouette of a well-fed owl, and an energetic bustle.
She had an old-fashioned view of life, which saw her hold my father in high esteem while rejecting my mother for having left the family home where her children remained.
She quietly tried to make up for the lack of maternal warmth in the house.
On the day I had to leave for boarding school, aged eight, awash with tears, it was Mrs Smith who held me tight in her arms for comfort.
My father insisted that we treat all those whom we were lucky enough to have helping us at home with enormous respect. He always embraced a democratic code and had no time for entitlement.
One of the troopers who served under my father in Germany at the end of the war – a Mr K.
Birden – would write to his local paper decades later: ‘Many people interviewed were asked what they liked about Princess Diana,’ he noted.
‘Usually they said she always treated you as an equal. This quality I believe she inherited from her father.’ Birden recalled how, while on patrol in Germany in the depths of winter, my father ordered the men of his armoured intelligence unit to get some hot tea inside them, in their lorry.
‘As we climbed into the back,’ Birden remembered, ‘he climbed in with us. Other officers would have gone up front in the cab and enjoyed the comfort of the warmth of the engine, but [he] chose to sit with us in the cold. He chatted to us as our equal, asking us where we came from [and] about our families…’ This insistence on treating everyone as an equal took root in us children then, and flowered publicly in Diana during adulthood.
My father’s example meant that we became very close to those working for our family, provided they were caring.
The Smiths were important enough to Diana and me to be included by us in our daily prayers, which we said out loud each evening as we knelt beside our beds.
When we called for God’s blessings on all those who were special in our lives, the list of family and friends also included Park House’s kinder staff members.
We had real bonds with them. I am still in touch with Sally Percival.
*
We adored being with our father. His deep love for us constantly pierced through the superficial formality of our childhood set-up.
He was, I see now, hobbled by grief at the loss of his marriage, and he perhaps also possessed a natural melancholy.
But his face always sprang into delighted life on seeing any of his four children.
One of his great paternal joys was chronicling our lives through photography.
His frequent companions were his Hasselblad or Rolleiflex cameras, slung round his neck.
We used to groan in mock distress when asked to pose for him yet again, but we knew that his addiction to capturing us through his lens came from a place of profound love.
He would spend hours in the evenings arranging the resulting prints in sumptuous leather albums. These were embossed with large gold letters, recording the name of the relevant child, and the years contained within.
Occasionally he filmed us with his cumbersome cine camera, placed on a tripod, and we would watch the flickering footage with him once a year, around Christmas time, on a fiddly screen he erected in the dining room.
Christmas was a special time for our father. This was when he enjoyed indulging us in a way that he resisted during the rest of the year: a key part of his fathering philosophy included keeping us on a tight financial rein.
Early each December, Diana and I would be given catalogues from Hamleys, the London toy emporium, in which we were allowed to tick off a wish-list of gifts.
Some of these would magically appear in the large woollen stockings that we left at the end of our beds last thing on Christmas Eve, along with milk for Santa (my father downed a pint of the stuff every breakfast) and carrots for the reindeer.
Diana and I were each allowed to open two of these stocking presents with one another when we woke up in the dark early hours of Christmas Day. The rest we tore open at a more reasonable hour, with my father looking on, till we reached the bag of chocolate money that filled the stocking’s toe.