Chapter Sixteen ‘The Most Bizarre Life Imaginable after Her Childhood…’
Chapter Sixteen
‘The most bizarre life imaginable after her childhood…’
Diana had, I found out later, hated being kept at Clarence House in the lead-up to her big day.
She would, she said, have much preferred to be surrounded by her sisters and girlfriends, all excited together, as a young bride might well want, rather than feeling like some sort of virgin sacrifice, being forced to stay safe behind a royal wall before her presentation to the people.
The Queen Mother was eighty, her household composed of elderly courtiers imbued with an old-fashioned concept of decorum while entranced by the minutiae of royal tradition.
Such people had no idea, and little interest in, how differently a young woman born in the early sixties saw life.
It had been a suffocating time for Diana, and she dreaded what else was to come.
She had been, she would tell me much later, in the throes of her eating disorder for five months on the day of her wedding. She had recoiled from her engagement-day photographs feeling that, at ten and a half stone, her 5-foot-10-inch frame looked heavier than she wanted it to.
Her insecurity was increased a few days after the engagement announcement when Prince Charles had squeezed her waist and said, ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?
’ This was a comment that she found devastating.
It fostered Diana’s insecurities about her appearance.
She would later share with me that her waist shrank from 29 to 23⒈／⒉ inches between her engagement and her marriage.
Meanwhile, the royal machine swung into action to claim her life.
A letter was sent to our long-term family GP, Mike Bloomer, a close friend of my mother and stepfather (Diana and I saw him and his family up at Ardencaple for a week every summer), informing him that he was no longer to tend to Diana: the royal doctors would be taking over her care now.
They thanked him for his service, expecting that would be an end of the matter, other than a speedy handing over of Diana’s medical records.
But Dr Bloomer, offended by the Palace’s highhandedness, wrote back, objecting. He said he had known Diana for most of her life, and this would surely make him useful to her still.
He was quickly slapped down, instructed that what he was proposing could not be, and was dismissed without Diana’s approval. She was handed over to Dr John Batten, a fifty-eight-year-old who had been the Queen’s physician since 1974, a man she did not know at all.
This was, I believe, a monumental blunder.
Mike Bloomer had successfully helped people we knew well with similar dependency battles to the one Diana was now facing.
He could hardly have done worse than the medical team my sister was reluctantly committed to.
I am sure that he would most likely have done better. [*]
It was not just the support personnel in Diana’s life that marriage changed: it was also the rhythm of her calendar year.
Up until that point, for instance, we four children had spent every Christmas together alternating between our parents’ homes each year.
But now it was ordered that Diana would have to spend every single Christmas with her royal in-laws whatever she, her parents or siblings wanted.
Diana and I would not see each other for Christmas for twelve years, when she would come to my home with her marriage over, tearful and missing her boys dreadfully.
*
Even I, a teenaged boy, had a good appreciation of the excitement that the Royal Wedding had engendered – the build-up was extraordinary, the news bulletins and papers focusing on it for months.
It provided a fairytale counterweight to coverage of the gritty civil unrest that rippled through parts of London and other English cities that summer, against a backdrop of dire unemployment.
But when I got back to my mother’s Pimlico flat late that afternoon, I assumed that would pretty much be it: that the excitement of the heir to the throne getting married had surely been spent, and now we would all just revert to life as it had previously been.
I had taken off my tailcoat and was in my shirtsleeves and unbuttoned waistcoat when Diana called. My mother left the sitting room to speak to her in the privacy of her bedroom. She rejoined us some time later, announcing with a beaming smile: ‘I’ve just spoken to the princess!’
That sounded a bit odd to me – technically correct, but unnecessary.
Then she added: ‘As her mother, I don’t need to curtsy to Duch, by the way. But you will all need to bow or curtsy to her in public from now on.’
‘Well, that’s never going to happen,’ I said, with a genuinely amused chuckle.
As the only boy, and the youngest child in the family, I had come to tolerate any nonsense that came with my big sisters. I adored them all. But bow to one of them? It was a preposterous proposition.
To do so would be to break the Little Brother Code.
*
Immediately after the Royal Wedding I went with four fellow seventeen-year-olds from Eton to explore Europe by train. We had no plan, just an open rail ticket for the month ahead of us and very little money.
My travel companions showed no interest in wedding talk, but I do remember Diana’s new global standing once catching up with us.
Having a minimal budget, we generally camped where we could.
At one point we slept in a graveyard in the hills above the Spanish port of Portbou.
One evening we had each been downing beer by the litro, and this led to an altercation with some local youths in Portbou’s fairground.
Heavily outnumbered, we were saved from a certain pummelling by some strapping Australian tuna fishermen who appeared out of the bar where we had been drinking.
When these muscular giants lined up beside us, the locals melted away.
But I recall with embarrassment now that, at the start of the stand-off with the locals, I caught sight of Lord Lichfield’s royal group photograph.
It was the centre spread in a colour Spanish gossip magazine that one of the fairground attendants had open on the counter in their kiosk.
My face was visible, looking shiny, at top right.
I pointed at this image and – before the Australians arrived – tried to explain to one of the Spaniards that he would be messing with us at his peril, as I had family contacts I could call on.
I like to think it was the beer talking that night, but it was a deeply unedifying performance that I remain ashamed of today.
Back home in England, my life returned to normal. To my relief, nobody attending Eton – a place that has, in its six hundred years, schooled many a prince – seemed overly interested in my new connection by marriage, which was a relief.
I was lucky in having as my housemaster Anthony Ray.
Unusually for Eton’s senior ranks he was a progressive soul, to whom snobbery was a foreign land.
The only time I remember his bringing Diana up was one evening, when I was his house captain, and he came to my room crying after hearing misogynistic comments from a couple of his pupils about one of his pretty teenaged daughters: ‘I know you will understand, Charles, because your family has to put up with so much nastiness about Diana.’ In the casual slander of a female family member, we found a common bond.
Mr Ray would also interrupt my A-level revision quite spectacularly on the June evening in 1982 on which my nephew, William, was born.
On hearing the news Ray sprinted from his quarters into my room, carrying a bottle of champagne and two glasses.
The bottle’s contents had been so severely shaken en route that when he popped the cork, they gushed out in a torrent, swamping my English revision notes.
The press only physically intruded occasionally on my Eton schooldays.
Once, a short freelance photographer in a leather jacket, sporting a mullet haircut, walked into my boarding house and somehow found my room.
He entered it and ushered forward his companion, a bored-looking female Goth in her early twenties.
‘Why don’t you pose with this young lady,’ he asked, ‘and pretend she’s your girlfriend?
’ When I refused, and insisted he leave, he snatched a quick photograph of me before rushing off, leaving me utterly bemused.
His stolen image appeared a few weeks later in a German gossip magazine, alongside the fabricated story that I was consumed with worry at my stepmother’s brave battle: Raine, the article claimed, was fighting skin cancer. In fact, she was in peak health.
Another time, when I failed to be elected to Pop, Eton’s prefect body, in the first election of my year, somebody sold the story to Nigel Dempster’s gossip column in the Daily Mail. I reckon that was probably the first time a British tabloid properly registered that Diana even had a brother.
After that, I was on their radar. My other sisters were married, and their settled lives made them hard to write about. But here was a fiery lad who clearly had some column inches in him. I was a useful footnote to the endless fascination with Diana.
It started pretty harmlessly. I succeeded Boris Johnson as an editor of the Chronicle, the school magazine.
In one of my editions, the Chronicle’s printers mixed up two images – one of a painting in Eton’s art school, the other of a new machine in the school laundry – and I was ridiculed in the Evening Standard, a London paper, for my incompetence.