Chapter Thirteen ‘Her Extraordinary Appeal…’
Chapter Thirteen
‘Her extraordinary appeal…’
Her house mistress, M. T. McGuire, commented, ‘An excellent last term’, during which Diana had been ‘a courteous, reliable prefect’, while another teacher noted that Diana ‘has been a charming pupil’.
Her best reports, other than for character, were for ballet, ‘an excellent term’s work.
Diana has learnt the Giselle variation…’ and for tap dancing.
Headmistress Ruth Rudge wrote, as her final school report for a girl in whom she delighted:
A very good term. Amusing, kind, responsive and responsible, she has taken a leading part in school life, and we shall all miss her next term. She leaves with our best wishes and congratulations on being awarded [the annual] prize for Service to the School.
It was decided that Diana would follow our eldest sister, Sarah, and go to finishing school in the Alps. This would prove to be an unfortunate choice.
Diana arrived at the Institut Alpin Videmanette, in Switzerland, to find that its classes were in cooking and dressmaking, with skiing in the afternoons.
She started by being polite but clear, writing to my father soon after arriving:
Darling Daddy,
Thank you so much for ringing up last night.
It was very kind & thoughtful of you & much appreciated.
I am feeling very lost out here and pretty miserable due to so many strangers.
I hope I don’t have to stay here…I hate being away from England for so long.
We have 3 hrs a day of French which is a large struggle & very depressing.
She talked of loving the skiing on offer, but finished her first letter home with a plea to our father: ‘Please write soon as I long to hear from everyone. I hate being in another country away from people at home.’
Her homesickness never went away, and she became increasingly miserable.
Tamara Mellon, a founder of the Jimmy Choo luxury shoe brand, attended Videmanette a few years after Diana and remembers: ‘The assumption [there] was that you were a dunce and that the only hope for you was to attach yourself [through marriage] to what was known as a good provider.’
During lessons it was compulsory to speak French – a language with which Diana never came to terms at all.
Her French mistress at West Heath, J. Cooch, noted in her final report that this language ‘has always been a difficult subject for Diana.’ Unable to communicate in class, and feeling stupid because of her linguistic limitations, Diana became profoundly unhappy.
I would pick up the phone when at home to hear her sobbing hard, saying how much she loathed life at Videmanette, and begging to be allowed to come home.
The skiing and the friends she had made could not make up for the grimness of the rest of her day.
My father’s letters from Diana contained the same message of escalating despair.
He dithered, hoping she would eventually settle in.
Besides, although saddened and troubled by his youngest daughter’s obvious anguish, he was a great worrier about finances, and the school was extremely expensive.
There would be no refund. Also, in his day, children almost never left their schools if unhappy in them: they just got on with it and saw it through.
She countered her homesickness by writing an astonishing average of ten letters or postcards a day to family and friends, then waited eagerly for replies from those she missed most.
But Diana’s misery was so all-consuming that it was clear to me that she needed to be brought back to England. Even though I was only fourteen, I went to see my father in his study.
I reinforced to him how utterly distraught Diana was in Switzerland. ‘You have to let Diana come home,’ I implored. ‘I’ve never heard anyone so miserable. It’s just cruel to keep her out there.’ He relented, and Diana was soon packing her bags and heading back to England.
My parents sent Diana to Videmanette as a release from regular school, but it had the opposite effect.
Besides the longing for home, her daily battles with French chipped away at her confidence.
She finished one letter from there to my father with the despairing line: ‘My French is not improving very fast but then I am a slow learner.’ That was her takeaway from a decade or so of school teachers failing to help her with her classroom struggles.
I find it heartbreaking that her self-esteem was allowed to sink so low. It is the postscript, for me, of her being failed by such an inadequate and amateur education.
It was now that Diana began a dramatic transformation.
Before returning from Switzerland, Diana was certainly vibrant and popular, but not overly so.
I have read all her school reports very carefully, from kindergarten till her final term as a boarder, and while there is an appreciation of a lovely girl, there is no indication that any of her teachers expected her to go on to a life of any great significance.
Ruth Rudge, her headmistress at West Heath, recalled to a small audience of old girls soon after Diana’s death how ‘She was the staff’s preferred baby-sitter and child-minder, totally reliable, with an instinctive knowledge of what to do, and how and when to do it, with both a fractious and smiling charge – children whom she remembered and asked about, long after she had left school.
Stylish and shining as she was, she cheerfully coped with the snuffles, and worse, of little children, and with mundane domestic chores. ’
Miss Rudge listed Diana’s many charming and likeable qualities as a schoolgirl, before conceding, with a bit of head-scratching: ‘This does not seem to be the stuff from which in so short a time a life would burgeon, as it did, that would profoundly influence so many, and be of worldwide interest, speculation, acclaim and adulation.’
I date the very beginning of Diana’s remarkable metamorphosis to her leaving Videmanette. It was then that her quiet intensity fell away, and she began to blossom into someone exceptional.
There was a weekend at Althorp, in late 1977 or early 1978, when our elder sisters’ regular troupe of friends came to stay.
I noticed how they all looked at and listened to Diana quite differently from how they had previously done so.
To them ‘Duch’ was no longer a younger sibling of the house, who had to be humoured and tolerated, but a highly intriguing personality in her own right.
She had a fresh confidence, allied to a terrific sense of humour – offbeat, quick, and very, very, funny.
Diana now demanded to be noticed through force of personality.
It was as if, free from the regular chiding of teachers for the academic shortcomings that were never her fault, she suddenly – for the first time – found herself.
Yes, she had always been a pretty adolescent, and there were clear hints of the beauty she was to become.
But it was her character that came alight now, a sense of enormous fun, from someone who did not seem to take herself too seriously, and who had a gift for repeatedly opening a joyous lens to the playful and absurd.
She could be moody when younger, and subjected to classroom humiliation, but she was now enormous fun to be with.
It was at this time that Diana met Prince Charles properly for the first time since childhood.
He came to stay for the weekend at Althorp at the end of November 1977, as a guest of my sister Sarah.
They had been seeing one another since the summer.
My father hosted the grandest of dinner parties at Althorp on the Sunday night, to mark the visit not just of the prince, but also of Queen Margrethe of Denmark and her husband Prince Henrik.
Prince Charles sat between our stepmother, Raine, and Sarah. Diana was on the opposite side of the table. Other guests included Robin Leigh-Pemberton, who would later be governor of the Bank of England, and Peter Carrington, who would serve as Margaret Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary.
My father was a trencherman, as the four-course menu that evening reflected: vol-au-vent with haddock and prawns, followed by crispy chicken with cheese sauce, then chocolate mousse, after which a traditional English savoury was served – devils on horseback.[*1]
Out of Althorp’s cellars rolled the big guns – Chateau Latour ’64, Chateau d’Yquem ’55, Taylor’s Port from ’24 – my father’s birth year – and Hine brandy from ’14.
Diana had been present as Sarah’s kid sister, but she did not remain in the shadows. Her newfound confidence saw her noticed by Prince Charles, who seems to have found her charming and fun.
Diana greatly enjoyed the unusually grand Althorp weekend, revealing in her next letter to my father that ‘I liked Prince Charles’, while pointing out: ‘He is clearly someone in need of a wife.’ Perhaps she thought Sarah would fulfil that role.
Or perhaps – despite being only sixteen – she wistfully meant something else.
Within three years, the two of them would be dating.
*
The British press’s cat-and-mouse relationship with Diana’s privacy – and her life – had been an issue since the moment she came onto their radar.
In November 1980, during the early days of her courtship by Prince Charles, Diana had driven down from London to take me out from my boarding house at Eton College, as she often did.
We had, as usual, booked a table for Sunday lunch that day at the Hind’s Head, a restaurant my father had introduced us to in nearby Bray.
It was one that he had gone to with his parents, when at the same school forty years earlier.
The appeal of the Hind’s Head had always been, for generations of Etonians, the generosity of its servings and the decadence of its puddings – perfect fare for Diana and me, teenagers both.