Chapter Two ‘Transported Back to Our Childhood…’ #3
My father also enjoyed letting us celebrate our birthdays noisily with schoolfriends. On 1 July 1968 he truly excelled himself in this regard. That summer day he secretly arranged the most spectacular surprise for Diana’s seventh birthday.
We had noticed Frank, the odd-job man, working on the top of the run where the springer spaniels were kennelled at night.
A mysterious wooden ramp appeared, then a platform began to sprout out of the structure’s top, with encircling handrails.
Nobody would tell us why these alterations were happening.
All became clear at Diana’s birthday party. A large trailer arrived at Park House from a wildlife park near Peterborough. Out of it emerged Bert, a decidedly nonchalant camel.
We children spent the afternoon spellbound, sitting on Bert in pairs while he was led round our garden by a pair of serious, peak-capped zookeepers. My father’s brilliantly original coup was the talk of the area for weeks.
Such fun and happiness doubtless formed quite a contrast to what my father had known as a child.
His mother, Cynthia, was a delightful, gentle and popular figure, who always adored him.
But the dominant force at Althorp was our paternal grandfather, Jack, a man of many qualities, mainly cerebral, with public duty his priority.
Having lost his mother in childbirth when he was only twelve, Grandfather found warmth a hard commodity to source or give.
He could be a formidable parent, particularly in the face of my father’s natural mischief.
While never physically abusive, Grandfather could freeze a room when his mood turned sour.
My father told me of one occasion when, as a naughty boy frequently in trouble, he had hidden from his forbidding father in a recess above Althorp’s nursery bathroom, while hugging his pet terrier.
He recounted an equally sad instance when, on reaching London on the end-of-term train from his far-away prep school, he decided to hide on board for as long as he could. Alone among his classmates, he put off the moment when he would be reunited with his parents on the platform.
While my father set up a structure for our early years that drew on his formal experiences from the 1920s and 1930s, he firmly eschewed the harsher tone of his own childhood.
We were encouraged to express and enjoy ourselves.
We were allowed to have our bedrooms exactly as we wanted them, provided we kept them tidy.
Diana was traditionally feminine in her tastes. She prized warmth and order, and tended her extensive menagerie of stuffed toys lovingly. Two or three dozen were perched on and round her bed, her favourite a patchwork frog that she had made at school.
On her bedside table sat a small porcelain pot that I had given her one birthday, bought with my pocket money.
I can see it now, delicately painted with sprays of her favourite flower, the forget-me-not, a species that grew in the wood beyond Park House’s tennis court.
While Diana would love many flowers – cutting armfuls of daffodils each spring, which she loved arranging in vases around the house – forget-me-nots would always remain special to her.
I feel sure this was because of their association with our much-loved childhood home.
As children, we respected each other’s space.
The only occasion on which I remember spending continuous time in Diana’s bedroom was when confined there by my father for several days: my sister had contracted mumps.
He explained that he wanted me to catch the disease as a young boy, rather than risk reproductive complications if I caught it after adolescence.
Such considerations mattered to him, being left with just the one son to pass on the family name.
I was, equally, typically boyish in my tastes, particularly enjoying playing with toy soldiers. I had these drawn up across my bedroom floor, in every sort of combat unit, from ancient Romans through to the myriad armies of the Second World War.
There was little in the nursery to unite sister and brother.
We both enjoyed the record player, despite a limited selection of discs.
A frequently played favourite was ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, a cover of the Beatles’ hit performed by Marmalade.
Sister Sarah’s room was where we retreated, when she was there, to listen to her favourites, with David Bowie to the fore.
We were allowed to watch a little children’s television after school.
Diana’s favourite series was Follyfoot, about a fictional stable for homeless horses.
And, after bathtime, she enjoyed the low-budget soap opera Crossroads, after which we were sent to brush our teeth, say our prayers and go to bed.
In the evenings at Park House, when she was a very small girl, Diana used to close the curtains on all the main windows, making sure they hung with neat correctness.
This was part of her ritual of preparing the house for nighttime.
It was always a precise operation, which Diana, from the age of five or six, took extremely seriously.
Perhaps this was down to feeling that, in our mother’s absence, it was up to her to step in.
Diana always felt an affinity for younger children.
I treasure the black-and-white photographs that my father took of the two of us in the mid-sixties, when I was a baby and she was looking after me, with obvious tenderness.
I was the first to benefit from the warm, maternal seam that ran through her life, particularly after our mother left Park House.
My father would read to us at the very end of our day, if he was at home – fairy tales for Diana, adventure stories for me. We both had a real fear of the dark, so my father would let us have small candles alight on our bedside tables, as a comfort in the night.
One evening, we were allowed to stay up later than normal to say goodnight to my father once he returned from a charity function. He unthinkingly mentioned to our nanny, in front of Diana and me, that a murderer had escaped prison and was loose in the wider neighbourhood.
That was that as far as our sleep was concerned. Diana and I were wide-eyed with fear for most of the night, and my father kicked himself for having fuelled our night terrors.
A butler, nannies, corporal punishment…There were elements to our existence that were clearly better suited to the nineteenth century than the sixties and early seventies.
But we were far from the miserable children that Diana’s biographers have tended to claim.
To be fair to them, I concede that Diana tended to present our childhood as less happy than I believe it truly was.
Certainly, it lacked a mother figure for much of it.
And it is not for me to judge how Diana felt deep down as a child, but she rarely seemed unhappy when I look back.
She always found it easy to make strong friendships.
At Silfield she was popular, and classmates from her boarding schools frequently came to stay at Park House, and later at Althorp.
In Andrew Morton’s secretly authorized biography, Diana: Her True Story, Diana seems to have believed strongly that she was born a disappointment because our parents were desperate for a son after having two daughters.
In the old ways of the British aristocracy, primogeniture ruled – the system by which estates were passed down the generations via the eldest son, even when he had older sisters.
The family’s lordly title and the ancestral home would go to him, while the daughters were expected to marry ‘well’ – that is, to wed somebody eligible – and the younger sons were to make their own way, perhaps serving in the military, or as functionaries of the British Empire.
But our father loved recalling 1 July 1961, the day that Diana was born.
She entered this world in Park House, the third baby in the family to do so, after my mother and my brother John, on an exceptionally hot day.
My father played for the local cricket team, Sandringham, whose pitch lay the other side of the wire fence at the bottom of Park House’s garden.
While my mother was in the agonies of labour, Arthur Barratt, the Sandringham wicketkeeper-batsman – a former policeman, whose career had ended after his hip was shattered by a criminal hit-and-run – scored a century.
It was all a glorious memory to my father, the birth of his adored third daughter happening on a classically English summer’s day.
My maternal grandmother was on hand at the time of Diana’s birth.
She would write to a friend soon afterwards: ‘Frances was as keen as Johnnie that they should have a son…I know that she was apprehensive about having another daughter, but at [Diana’s] birth, when I was staying at Park House [there were] no signs of resentment, and on the contrary [both parents] seemed delighted with the new addition to the family. ’
Diana’s safe arrival was even greeted by the Queen.
She sent a telegram to my father, little realizing that the newborn in Park House would one day be her daughter-in-law.
‘Philip joins me in sending you and Frances our congratulations. So grateful that both are well, and we are thinking of you all.’
I have the cine footage of Diana’s christening, at Sandringham church. She was an exquisite little blonde poppet – my father would later boast that she would have won any ‘beautiful baby’ competition – and you can see the total love for her in both my parents’ eyes.
But Diana clearly believed that she experienced insufficient love in her earliest years. I have seven children and have had six stepchildren, so I know that a child’s memory of much the same early experience can vary wildly from individual to individual.