Chapter Two ‘Transported Back to Our Childhood…’ #4
I am, though, sure that one of our kind nannies, Mary Clarke, was correct when she recorded in a gossipy book about her eighteen months at Park House: ‘Diana had a happy, secure childhood. From the time I met her and worked with the family, I saw that she was helpful, laughing, exuberant, loved by both her parents, and the apple of her father’s eye. ’
I cannot remember it, being so very young, but Diana would later tell me how she would hear me crying in the night, in my bedroom, which, in such a large house, lay at some distance from hers, and how she hated not being able to come to my comfort: she could not overcome her deep fear of the dark corridors that lay between us.
Diana also spoke of how she remembered suffering from troubled sleep in the nights following our mother’s departure, until what she called the ‘deep sadness’ passed.
While I maintain that we were generally very happy as children, maybe Diana was hiding her true feelings all along.
Perhaps she did this so well that the pain was invisible to everyone but herself.
She would tell me years later, when we were both adults, that she always felt the need to behave well as a child, and maybe this was a result of not wanting to rock the boat after our parents’ divorce.
She told others, later in life, that in her early years she had not had all her emotional needs met.
This left her, she felt, with a difficult legacy: she found it hard to make complaints, or to stand up for herself.
‘You see, Carlos,’ she once said to me, ‘even if I buy a dress that doesn’t fit, I don’t feel I can go back to the shop to swap it.
I’d much rather put up with a piece of clothing that I can never wear than face upsetting the shop assistant…
’ She recognized the absurdity of taking such a position but saw it as a legacy of her early years.
*
Before they started at school, my three sisters had a governess, Gertrude Allen, who had also taught my mother and her siblings during their childhood at Park House.
‘Allie’ was a charming, old-fashioned, unmarried lady of high intelligence, whose job was to impart to her young classroom a general curriculum, which they could build on later.
Allie was possessed of an extraordinarily kind and open face: her smile was broader than seemed right or possible.
She was also a lady of steady judgement and firm principles, who refused to take sides after my parents’ animated divorce, insisting on remaining on good terms with them both.
She was a widely respected figure, which makes what would happen to her because of Diana’s subsequent fame all the ghastlier, as we will see.
Other teachers came to Park House, at my mother’s instigation, to give my sisters tennis coaching and piano lessons. Meanwhile, we all became used to other unforgettable figures who would come to stay repeatedly throughout our childhood years – migratory birds, each with their own season.
In the summer, my father employed a martinet of a swimming instructor, Mrs Lansdowne, who would spend a busy fortnight at Park House each year.
Our pool was the only private one I can remember in the immediate area, and in the warmer months it proved to be a magnet to surrounding families.
Friends of my father who lived nearby rushed to have their children join Diana and me in Mrs Lansdowne’s demanding but effective swimming classes.
Mrs Lansdowne had long, straggly, salt-and-pepper hair, pulled back hard from an angular, weatherbeaten face. She was undaunted by the elements and would don a black plastic sou’wester when rain dared to appear, so she could defiantly continue her classes.
I do not know if Park House seemed forbidding to visitors plying their trade, but Mrs Lansdowne was another fixture of our happy years there who seemed never to smile.
She remained stony-faced even when giving out the cotton badges that could be gained for having swum so many hundred yards, or for mastering butterfly or backstroke.
These we would have sewn onto our swimming things, to be displayed with pride.
Mrs Lansdowne only ever seemed to warm to Diana, her star pupil.
She was a complete natural in the pool, with such long limbs and such an enviable sense of rhythm that she could speed through the water effortlessly.
Her costume was ablaze with Mrs Lansdowne’s swimming badges.
Diana also dived with poise, particularly enjoying doing so dangerously, off the top of the slide.
Water was her element and daring her friend.
Our autumn caller at Park House was Madama Pawlikowska. An elderly artist, she would migrate for thirty years from her native Poland to stay with upper-class English families, capturing their children’s soft features in pastel portraits.
I was too restless to sit for Madama Pawlikowska when I was young – my mother’s nickname for me was Buzz, as I liked to be busy as a bee – so she tended to draw me while I slept.
When I was old enough to pose for her conventionally, I found her brittle English accent off-putting and worried how it was that her breath smelt sour – like our breakfast porridge.
But Madama Pawlikowska must have had a kinder side than I appreciated back then, as Diana was able to persuade her to draw her adored but bad-tempered cat, Marmalade.
She also sketched my budgie, Joey, shortly before he managed to make a successful swoop for freedom through an open window in the nursery, when the nanny and I were carelessly cleaning his cage.
This was a blow not only because I loved Joey but because he was a winner.
Diana and I entered some of our many smaller pets in the ‘Fur and Feather’ section of the annual Sandringham Flower Show.
This was a major local event held each summer, which Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, always attended.
Joey had won first prize for me the previous year.
Diana’s guinea pig, Peanut, also competed well at the Flower Show.
A chunky specimen, Peanut was to garner much wider fame when Diana became engaged in 1981, and Buckingham Palace asked my parents to release childhood shots of her to the world’s media.
My father shared a photograph he had taken in 1972 of a long-haired Diana, aged ten or eleven, in a gingham dress, proudly cradling Peanut next to her smiling face, Peanut bursting with rude rodent health.
In the many photograph albums that my father kept for us all, there are images of the various other pets that Diana had – another, friendlier, cat, called Sophie; and a menagerie of hamsters, rabbits and finches that somehow evaded feline claws.
Dogs were an important feature of Diana’s and my Park House childhood.
The most revered was Jack, a stately black-and-white springer spaniel, who was my father’s gundog and our gentle companion.
His successor, Jill, proved to be untrainable, and was allowed to become a wild but welcome presence around the garden.
In a creeping progression of spaniel eccentricity, there was then Linnet, who found motherhood a tricky concept.
She jumped over the half-door of the stables where she delivered a litter of puppies, after which we had to lock her in to ensure that her young were fed.
After Linnet, like many a countryman exhausted by spaniels, my father turned to Labradors, the first of which was Bray, a solid citizen.
There were always keeshonds, Dutch barge dogs, which my family had favoured for a long time.
There is a portrait at Althorp by George Stubbs of Mouton, a Spencer keeshond from the eighteenth century.
This kind and playful breed formed the comforting heartbeat of Park House.
The first photographs there of my mother (aged twenty or twenty-one) and my eldest sister, Sarah, as a toddler, show a keeshond lying contentedly nearby, very much a part of the young family.
The breed’s easy-going nature fitted with the tone of our home. Even Allie, the governess, had one.
The paddocks formed the scrubby backdrop to Park House. Sarah was obsessed with horses, her tack room adorned with the dozens of rosettes she had won on her ponies, Romany and Peppermint.
Diana and I also rode when young. I started off on Bimbo, a Shetland pony named innocently after one of my favourite early childhood comics.
Diana was never keen enough on riding to have a pony of her own, and there was a moment in 1971 that ended her wish to ride at all, until a boyfriend persuaded her to try again in her thirties.
I was heading down the dark corridor next to Park House’s kitchen, towards the backyard, when the external door in front of me opened, admitting screams of agony.
Diana came inside, leaning lopsidedly, her arm hanging at a startling angle.
She was sobbing so hard that she could not catch her breath, and it was impossible to understand what she was trying to say.
It turned out that she had broken her collarbone in a fall from one of Sarah’s ponies after it tripped in a rabbit hole.
Diana wore a sling for weeks after that, and this painful fall in Sandringham’s parkland ended the sport for her for more than two decades.
*
There was so much fun to be had at Park House that we spent most of our free time there.
Diana and I had our own individual hideaways in the garden.
Mine was a wooden tree house resting on a large cedar’s sturdy lower bough, while Diana had her ‘den’, where she played with her friends and hosted imaginary tea parties.
We never encroached on each other’s sanctuary.