Chapter Twenty ‘The Unique, the Complex, the Extraordinary and Irreplaceable…’
Chapter Twenty
‘The unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable…’
Until her mid-teens the love that Diana would always have for our father was so strong and so unquestioning that she would later realize that, in her words, she had viewed him as some sort of ‘a superhero’.
Diana was so disappointed and outraged by my father’s secret marriage that she slapped him across the face – the only time she physically clashed with either parent – while saying, on behalf of Sarah, Jane and me, ‘That’s for the pain you’re causing us all.
’ After that flashpoint, Diana continued in her daughterly love, but she never returned our father to his pedestal, and she would afterwards spend much more time with our mother.
Diana’s relationship with Raine started from a very low base.
The first time she and I met my father’s new love interest was while Raine was still married to the Earl of Dartmouth – who lacked a stately home – and my father introduced us to her during a stilted supper at the Duke’s Head, a hotel in King’s Lynn.
Diana and I repeatedly caught each other’s eye as Raine tried to charm us.
The two of us knew what the other was thinking: This woman is horrid, and not to be trusted.
Raine had an awkward way with children, and even the extremely expensive presents she gave Diana and me from Tiffany’s – a necklace and a miniature penknife respectively – failed to mollify our initial impressions.
Our sisters Sarah and Jane did not take to her at all, either.
When Nigel Dempster, the best-known newspaper gossip columnist in Britain at the time, got wind of my father and Raine’s relationship he called Althorp, hoping for confirmation of its seriousness.
By chance, Sarah picked up the receiver and fielded Dempster’s enquiry with typical feistiness: ‘Yes, I can confirm that Lady Dartmouth has been an all-too-frequent visitor to Althorp recently.’
We were not the first set of children from a family of divorce to despise a step-parent, but we always felt our feelings for Raine were fully justified.
After marrying my father in July 1976, Raine took Althorp by the scruff of the neck, making her mark on the poor old place in many thoughtless ways.
The Patchwork Room, whose curtains, bedspread and fire screens had been stitched by a nineteenth-century Spencer countess and her sisters as a memorial to their brother, who had died in that bedroom, was stripped of its patchwork, and redecorated in a shiny velveteen.
All the windows on the first two floors of the house were sealed by exceptionally ugly double glazing.
Centuries-old oak floorboards disappeared under busy, unsightly, wall-to-wall carpeting. It was all so sad and jarring.
The new chatelaine reluctantly accommodated her husband’s children in her newly acquired domain, allotting the four of us the smallest and plainest attic bedrooms. These, in previous generations, had been occupied by the lowliest members of staff.
Diana, Sarah and I had space for a single bed, a side table and a small chest of drawers in each of our rooms. In a house of ninety rooms – the majority large, and many enormous – this was unnecessary.
It was, though, an eloquent expression of where we fitted in Raine’s world.
Meanwhile, when Raine’s children visited their mother, they had the run of the grander guest rooms. The youngest of her sons, four or so years my junior, had use of the Althorp Suite, a set of rooms traditionally enjoyed by the Spencer heir in previous generations.
My father was too much under his new wife’s thumb to get involved in such matters, even in our first three years at Althorp, when – despite his weight ballooning dramatically – he still had his health.
After our father’s stroke in September 1978, it all looked very bleak indeed. My mother openly discussed how she would move in with me during my school holidays after I inherited Althorp. This eventuality seemed to be extremely imminent.
But my father’s deterioration suddenly halted.
As soon as he started to recover, Raine’s jealousy towards her stepchildren resurfaced dramatically.
She instructed his nursing team to block us from visiting him.
I could not get away from boarding school to see him much anyway, but Sarah lived near to the Fulham hospital where he was being cared for.
The nurses knew it could only do my father good to have his children’s company, and they would wait till Raine left the hospital before calling Sarah to let her know the coast was clear.
She got to see him nearly every day, to the delight of the other three of us.
We never forgave Raine for her carrying on like that at a time when our father had been so vulnerable and had needed us most.
The move to Althorp, after my grandfather’s death in June 1975, had been difficult enough without Raine’s introduction into our lives.
We moved from Park House, our glorious childhood home, where we had all our friends, to that Goliath of a mansion, where we knew nobody at all. As Diana wrote to our last Park House nanny, Mary Clarke, three years after the move: ‘We all miss Norfolk terribly, as that’s where our roots are.’
From when Diana was just fourteen and I eleven, we spent half of our school holidays rattling round ancestral Althorp.
Sarah and Jane, both by then adult, would join us there for a handful of weekends each year, with their London friends.
Raine tended to make herself scarce at these times, and Althorp would come alive, rediscovering its intended role as a place of entertainment.
Those were the best of times, very much enjoyed by my father, and Diana and I looked forward with genuine excitement to that occasional infusion of fun and laughter.
Those frequent guests, a decade or so older than Diana and me, became close to us, and remained friends ever after.
Diana’s first job, as a nanny, would be to the sister of two of this very jolly group.
Otherwise Diana and I were left to entertain ourselves during the Althorp half of our holidays, breakfasting together, and left to our own devices for the rest of the day.
We joined my father and stepmother only for lunch and dinner, both of which were formal – Raine always in a ball dress (Balmain her favourite designer) in the evenings, as liveried staff circled the table with silver serving dishes for us to help ourselves from.
It was all very stilted and awkward, and far removed from the casual normality of life with my mother, when she cooked, and we laid the table and washed up.
Althorp never felt like a home to us. It had been forbidding when we had known it as our grandfather’s house, and it was no better now that it was my father’s.
It proved too much for him, the pressure of making a go of the demanding ancestral pile in his fifties, with his new marriage not going at all well – Raine’s letters to my father at this time could be viciously unkind – seeing him turn to comfort eating.
Obesity and stress would both contribute to his stroke.
Most of the time, the house was more museum than home. It was hard to sleep when the nightwatchmen – old men, then, who with flickering torches and a heavy tread, patrolled the corridors through the night.
One Christmas Eve, when Diana was fifteen and I was twelve, we suddenly realized that the nightwatchman on duty that night had no family and was – we assumed – going to receive no presents the next day.
To counter this horror, we went up to Diana’s bedroom, looked through her extensive collection of miniature porcelain animals, and wrapped some of them up to give to him for Christmas Day.
To our surprise, rather than smile he burst into tears.
We had no friends at Althorp, other than the ones from our boarding schools who occasionally came to stay for a couple of nights.
Having been reluctantly transplanted to that forbidding and isolated setting, Diana and I gravitated towards the daytime house staff for company.
Among these, we found welcome kindness and humour.
Mr and Mrs Pendry, the butler and housekeeper, were the lynchpins. They had looked after our grandparents and now welcomed the arrival of children in a house that had long been inhabited by an elderly, old-fashioned couple.
Mr Pendry had a natural authority. He even stepped in when Raine manufactured a tearful rift with Diana and me.
Raine told my father the untruth that I had held a door tight so she could not open it from the other side.
This, when the door handle had simply jammed and I could not possibly have known who was on the other side of it, trying to force it open.
As Raine screamed at me, and I swore my innocence through heated tears, my father looked tormented by all the emotion on show.
After Raine stomped off, challenging my father to punish me, Mr Pendry coughed.
‘Perhaps, m’lord,’ the butler suggested to my father, in a soothing voice, ‘it’s rather difficult for her ladyship to see quite how much you love your children?
’ The tension lifted from my father’s shoulders as the perceptive butler’s words sank in.
Mr Pendry had the wisdom and discretion of Jeeves.
Mrs Pendry was a Norfolk farmer’s daughter, with long red hair, a belief that you could never wear too much make-up, and the perfect, booming personality to be the housekeeper of such an enormous mansion.
I never saw her looking downhearted, and will always remember with gratitude the glorious, cackling laugh that repeatedly lifted the mood of that most daunting of places.
Another upbeat presence in the house was the cook, Betty, who brought a bustle to the kitchen. Betty tended to shout rather than talk, having long before turned her voice up to the full volume that her hard-of-hearing husband Ted could register at home.