Chapter Eight ‘A Very Insecure Person at Heart…’
Chapter Eight
‘A very insecure person at heart…’
A lot of the analysis of Diana’s character that I have come across has looked at the effect of our parents’ acrimonious divorce on her.
Much of this speculation has taken place against a backdrop that has been presented simplistically and often inaccurately.
I want to look, here, at what actually happened.
My family’s oral tradition says that my mother had been prescribed a medicine similar to thalidomide to combat severe morning sickness during this, her third pregnancy, by James Ansell, the Royal Family’s Sandringham doctor. Perhaps this medication was responsible for John’s many afflictions.
Dr Ansell and my father decided it was best that my mother be spared the trauma of witnessing the distressing state of her newborn. John was removed to one of the spare bedrooms in Park House for further medical attention until the inevitable happened.
John survived only a few wretched hours.
My father would become tearful when recalling the extraordinary noises his tiny son made when crying, saying that the poor boy sounded more animal than human.
When John stopped emitting those scarring noises, my mother had neither seen him up close nor held him.
To us, now, this was clearly a terrible error, however well-meant.
Things could have been done differently, but they were not.
In her final years my mother wrote defiantly about ‘Never being able to forget that I am the mother of five children’, even though she was denied any time with the child who was born and died on the same day.
When she composed a new email address, in the late 1990s, she included John’s initial in it, alongside my three sisters’ and mine.
The family tragedy festered in my parents’ marriage, while the age gap between them – she was eighteen and he thirty, when they wed – opened up. When they entertained friends at Park House my father would tire and look distracted while the party remained, for my mother, in full swing.
Another point of difference was my father always being a keen traveller.
Once, when the marriage was still good, my mother had approved his going on a trip to Turkey without her because I was unwell and she wanted to stay at home to look after me.
My father chose not to shave during his time away, and when he returned to Park House with a reddish beard and moustache, Diana pointed at the facial hair and snapped: ‘Take that thing off!’
My mother preferred to be at home. Her friends joked that it was a newsworthy event if she was spotted beyond King’s Lynn, the nearest town to Park House.
The only time she liked to be away for more than a weekly night in London was for two quiet weeks per year, with her mother in her villa in the South of France.
There were other tensions. My mother had more money than my father, thanks to her inheritance from her own father, Maurice Fermoy.
At the same time, she seems to have found it increasingly hard to respect my father’s lack of drive.
He appeared, she would later complain, just to be waiting for his father to die, so he could inherit Althorp.
My mother had an energy, as well as a business sense, that he lacked.
She also had a questioning and original mind. She knew the time would come when she would have to help him to run Althorp, a place and a proposal that she never warmed to. Her plan was to maintain the historic mansion with suitable respect and care, but to keep it more as a museum than a home.
Meanwhile she would erect a modern, more modest house in Althorp’s parkland – another Park House, as it were, in scale and feel, which could be properly enjoyed by us all.
She thought a happy family existence would be impossible in the gigantic sprawl of Althorp, which had been built for a different age, when an army of domestic staff was available, and frequent entertainment gave the place bustle and purpose.
She knew those days were gone for ever, and it was better to accept that fact with realism.
‘So many people make the mistake,’ she would say about other stately-home owners, struggling to keep places going, out of duty, but without the wherewithal, ‘of becoming slaves to bricks and mortar.’ She was never going to join them in such servitude.
My mother viewed her plan for Althorp as a positive solution, rather than as an abdication of responsibility, once telling me what fun it would have been to learn about and appreciate Althorp’s imposing art collection.
Once a year, she said, she would have brought fresh paintings from Althorp to hang in the key points of the new house in the Park.
She saw this as a way of transforming the Spencer family inheritance into a thing of endless joy, rather than having chattels remain hanging where they had always been, for the ease of the curators and their dry, itemized lists.
But she would never get to create her Park House Mark Two.
There were further incompatibilities in the marriage.
My father had inherited his mother Cynthia’s sweetness of nature.
This quality had made my grandmother adored in the community around Althorp – the local town’s hospice is called ‘Cynthia Spencer’ in memory of her goodness, even five decades after her death.
However, in my father, such a gentle demeanour was less of an asset.
It loaded more responsibilities onto my mother’s shoulders than she thought right.
If, say, a member of staff needed to be disciplined or fired, my father would ask my mother to perform the awkward task so he could shirk it.
She would reluctantly do so, but resentments built up.
Equally, my gruff paternal grandfather identified what he considered to be weakness in his heir.
Even as a very old man he refused to hand over Althorp to him, perhaps fearing what might happen to the place and its contents if he did.
My father’s quiet, patient wait for his inheritance continued.
If he had come into it sooner, I suspect both my parents would have been busy enough keeping Althorp afloat, in particularly challenging times for the landowning aristocracy, for the marriage to have had a fair chance of surviving. But that was not to be.
When I was about thirty, a female contemporary of my mother’s turned to me at a dinner party and, with the boldness of the inebriated, said: ‘I could tell your mother had had enough of your father. She was looking for a way out of the marriage – I was certain of that, back then, and I wasn’t at all surprised when it happened. ’
The flashpoint occurred in 1966, on a skiing holiday with two other couples. My mother and one of the other husbands in the party, Peter Shand Kydd, fell in love.
Peter seems initially to have viewed the relationship as merely a fling, but my mother persisted.
She told Peter she could not imagine life without him.
Meanwhile my mother’s well-meaning brother misjudged the man and the moment.
He went to see Peter, got out his chequebook, and asked, ‘How much will it take for you to leave Frances alone?’ Peter – anti-establishment and proud – later told friends that he thought about throttling my uncle for the insult.
I suspect that the miscalculation made him pursue my mother with fresh vigour.
The affair progressed to the point where both adults left their marriages and set up life together – to start with, for the sake of the seven children involved, and at the behest of my father’s lawyers, their homes were in adjoining London addresses.
My father tried to win my mother back, but her heart was elsewhere.
Much has been written by Diana’s biographers about how great a public scandal the separation was, but that was not the case.
My parents were not public figures, being quite well known only in the counties of Norfolk and Northamptonshire, and there were few mentions of their marital rupture in the press.
Since Diana’s rise to prominence, much more has been invented about the causes of their divorce.
Never, in what was a charged case, did my mother allege any form of physical abuse by my father.
Yet this is the line that has been pushed by cruel and unthinking journalists, on no evidence, since my father died in 1992.
It is an appalling lie that has gained some acceptance over the decades, and I find it upsetting when strangers term him ‘abusive’ while commenting on photographs of him that I post on social media.
Recently, one of my children – agonizingly for me – asked me if there was any truth in the rumour that their grandfather, who had died before they were born, had abused their grandmother.
I assured him that their grandfather was the gentlest of men, and their grandmother had told me that he never did anything of the sort.
The false accusation stems, in part, from a perhaps wilful misinterpretation of my mother’s reasons for wanting to end her marriage.
In the England of the mid-1960s petitioners had limited options when filing for divorce.
They could opt for adultery, desertion, physical assault or mental cruelty.
The first three categories were demonstrably untrue in my parents’ case, while the fourth was pretty much open to interpretation: what an individual said they found mentally cruel was what they, personally, found intolerable in the marriage.
It might be something that another might deem trivial, but it could still satisfy a judge.
I have sympathy for both parents.
My mother, who had lost a child, was only thirty when she fell in love with Peter, and she was determined to be with him come what may. When infatuated to that degree, thought and fairness can come a distant second to passion.