Chapter Three ‘A Family in Grief…’
Chapter Three
‘A family in grief…’
That early morning of Diana’s death, my children came into the kitchen of our Cape Town home as they woke up. The three girls were the first to appear, tumbling in, barefoot in their nighties, one clutching ‘Blanding’, their ever-present comfort blanket.
I wanted to shield my angels from the ghastliness of the night’s events, but I knew straight away that they needed to know about the tragedy that had occurred while they had been sleeping.
‘My darlings, I’m afraid something terrible has happened.’
Three huge pairs of innocent blue eyes looked up at me from below tousled mops. ‘I’m afraid that Aunt Diana has – has died.’ It was the first time I had acknowledged her death out loud, and the cold finality of the words shook me.
The girls looked at me uncomprehendingly. Five-year-old Eliza was the first to speak: ‘But not in real life, Daddy?’ she said, her disbelieving smile prompting me to please unravel the perplexing adult riddle I had just presented to her.
I turned the TV back on, knowing that its images would underline the truth of my words.
At that moment, the mangled wreckage of the black Mercedes was visible at the mouth of the Alma Tunnel, and I pointed to it, gently saying: ‘Yes, I’m afraid it’s true.
Aunt Diana was in that car and – she died, when it crashed. ’ We all looked at the screen blankly.
Soon afterwards my son Louis entered, bleary-eyed, his pyjamas so askance that his tummy was on show.
His favourite stuffed toy, Banana in Pyjamas, dangled from one hand.
When I told him the same cataclysmic news, he looked at me, blinked with incomprehension, and asked if he could please watch something else on TV.
I made the children their breakfast, which they contemplated and picked at in silence, and then, unable to shield the little ones from the shock and grief tearing at my mind, and pounding in my chest, I leant forward, my head in my hands, my elbows on the table, and started heaving with loud sobs.
Having not cried earlier, hours of emotions rolled out in waves.
It was the first time that the dam had been breached.
After a few moments, with my head still bowed, while my eyes and nose streamed uncontrollably, I heard a sharp scraping noise on the kitchen’s tile floor. It was my eldest child, Kitty, aged six, pushing a high-backed chair taller than herself towards the utility-room sink.
Wanting to help me in this moment of paternal meltdown, Kitty had worked out that she needed something tall to stand on so she could tackle the washing-up.
While one family struggled with dull domestic chores inside their suburban Capetonian home, the outside world was trying to make sense of what had so cruelly befallen perhaps its most famous female inhabitant.
Printing presses across the world changed their front pages that morning to the astonished and astonishing headlines that announced Diana’s death, while news programmes interrupted their planned output with bulletins that some viewers thought must be hoaxes.
When members of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s security detail were first phoned with the news of Diana’s death, to pass on to their boss, they hung up, believing it a practical joke.
To me, awake for hours, it was immediately clear that the paparazzi had recklessly endangered, then snuffed out, Diana’s life, claiming the driver Henri Paul and Dodi Fayed as collateral damage.
To many, the death of an icon who had become a backdrop to their lives might have been too bewildering to comprehend that morning, but I had begun to digest this most bitter of truths.
The phone rang constantly. Prince Charles caught me as I crossed the landing upstairs.
Unlike my other callers, who were stunned, barely able to articulate their condolences and offers of help, he sounded giddily elated – like a lottery winner, I remember thinking at the time.
He let me know he had informed William and Harry of their mother’s death, first thing that morning, in their bedrooms at Balmoral.
It all sounded strangely matter-of-fact, given the enormity of the disaster.
Looking back now, I suspect the prince’s first reaction must have been to think more of how this event might free him to marry the woman he loved, rather than appreciating the loss of one he did not.
It can be hard to feel too much sympathy for an ex-spouse, or those who care for them profoundly, after bitter divorce.
A South African radio presenter also phoned and bounced me into a live interview, with other participants, about Diana’s death.
I found myself somehow joining in, before I suddenly stopped, came to my senses, and realized I could no longer continue as some form of objective news commentator when I was a victim of this seismic personal tragedy.
I apologized and broke off, before succumbing to more tears, this time in private.
My South African girlfriend, Josie, also called on hearing the news.
I had tried to contact her throughout the night, hoping that she could come to me in such a desperate time, but she, the exhausted single parent to a one-year-old, had put her mobile on silent.
Josie was keen to drive to me now, but I told her she must stay away from my home rather than run the gauntlet of the journalists I could see gathering at my gate.
South Africa’s first supermodel in her youth, she was still a household name, and I wanted to protect her from the world’s intrusive glare.
But she insisted she drive over to be with me and my children.
My neighbour Mr Lindsay came to tell me that the dozens of journalists thronging the entrance gate to our parallel drives were insisting that they would not go away till I had come out to give them my reaction to my sister’s death.
I nodded and asked him to please go back to them with one request from me in return: if I did as they insisted, there must, please, be no follow-up questions after I had spoken.
I knew I was in no state to answer anything.
The morning’s impromptu radio interview had taught me that.
As Mr Lindsay went to broker the deal, I felt I must do my best for Diana by writing what she would have wanted me to say on her behalf. I retreated to my study to scribble down a distillation of my devastated thoughts. It was a short piece, which I wrote in biro on a page of A4.
It was with profound shock that I learnt of my sister’s serious injury, and subsequent death, in Paris, early this morning.
All those who have come into contact with Diana, particularly over the past seventeen years, will share my family’s grief: she was unique; she understood the most precious needs of human beings, particularly those that suffered; and her vibrancy and sparkle, combined with a very real sense of duty, are now gone for ever.
It is heartbreaking to lose such a human being, especially when she was only thirty-six.
My heart goes out to the families of the others killed in this incident. Above all, my thoughts are with William and Harry, and with my mother and two sisters, who are showing tremendous bravery in the face of senseless tragedy.
I would ask you all, please, at this time, to respect the fact that Diana was part of a family; and, amongst the general mourning at her death, realize that we too need space to pay our final respects to our own flesh and blood. For that, we will need privacy.
Finally, the one consolation is that Diana is now in a place where no human being can ever touch her again.
I pray that she may rest in peace.
When I read it through, I realized that a key piece was missing. I placed an asterisk after ‘only thirty-six’, and added:
This is not a time for recriminations, but for sadness.
However, I would say that I always believed the press would kill her in the end.
But not even I could imagine that they would take such a direct hand in her death, as seems to be the case.
It would appear that every proprietor and editor, of every publication that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her, encouraging greedy and ruthless individuals to risk everything in pursuit of Diana’s image, has blood on their hands today.
This impromptu public statement was, I see now, in many ways a foretaste of what was to come in my eulogy: a salute to Diana and her unique qualities, laced with anger that she had been killed – taken from those who knew and loved her, and the many millions who admired her – by the press.
When I wrote, and then spoke, the words ‘Every proprietor and editor, of every publication that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her…has blood on their hands today’, I thought particularly of those who had, between them, recently paid millions for a single paparazzo image of Diana with Dodi Fayed.
That steep escalation from the customary price for such images of my sister had stoked the appetite of ‘greedy and ruthless individuals to risk everything’ to such a point that lives had not only been risked but had been lost.
When I finished delivering my press statement, I felt giddy, then sick, and started swaying on my feet.
As I started to turn away and head for my front door, one of the local freelance reporters – who had stalked my young children for years, with such ruthlessness that I had had to get a restraining order protecting them from him – shouted: ‘How are you feeling, then, at the death of your sister?’
I looked at him with disdain for his crassness, as well as disbelief at his breaking of the arrangement brokered by my kind neighbour, before I turned away and resumed my path to my front door without a word.
All was silent, apart from the explosion of camera shutters behind me.
Once back inside, I faxed my mother the short speech I had just delivered. On the back I wrote:
Mum,
Please call when you have a moment. It’s ghastly – the press murdered her. I arrive back in England early tomorrow.
Much love,
C.
I arranged for my four children to go to stay with their mother for as long as I would have to be away for my sister’s funeral.
*
That evening at Cape Town airport, check-in staff from British Airways led me to the VIP lounge for privacy. The only time I had been in that space previously had been a few months earlier when seeing Diana off after she had spent a few days with me in South Africa.
Over the following days and weeks so many of our ‘final times’ together came back to me, in varying hues of happiness, recognition and regret.
This intense reflection is, of course, the common companion to grief when a loved one dies.
Somehow, given the sheer scale of Diana’s life, my failures felt magnified.
I sank into my airline seat for the eleven-hour night-flight and, in the dark, alone, began to sob again at the enormity of the loss of the girl I had grown up with.
My parents had had five children, at regular intervals, between 1955 and 1964. Sarah and Jane, then our brother John. Diana had been born eighteen months later, with me bringing up the rear nearly three years after that.
While I adored my two much older sisters, they had been packed off, in that mindless and often destructive British tradition of the well-to-do, to distant boarding schools by the time I was a toddler.
It was ‘Diana and Charles’ that the nannies frequently referred to, around the house, as we grew up together.
I realized that I would never again see the one person who had shared my childhood.
Such is the brutal, irrevocable power of death.