Chapter Twenty-Six ‘Our Chance to Say Thank You for the Way You Brightened Our Lives…’
Chapter Twenty-six
‘Our chance to say thank you for the way you brightened our lives…’
On the day of the funeral I woke early, after a fitful sleep, and everyone was in their own world that morning as they prepared themselves for the day ahead.
I found that my suit was too big for me – I had not worn it for some time, and I had lost weight during a week when grief had stolen my appetite – but I reckoned my trousers were just about tight enough for me to be sure they would not fall down.
I added a pair of beautiful gold cufflinks, flecked with precious stones, to my shirt cuffs. Diana had given them to me as a wedding present eight years earlier. I always wear them during challenging times, as a reminder of sisterly support. The bond of the nursery can never be broken.
After a light breakfast, I noticed how especially quiet my mother was, and was told that her doctor had sensibly prescribed her tranquillizers to help her navigate the day.
My sisters wished me luck and said they were thinking of me as I prepared myself to speak on their behalf for Duch.
‘Can I hear what you’re going to say?’ asked Sarah, out of nowhere. Seeing me hesitate, she immediately added: ‘Actually, no – I want to hear it for the first time in the service, where it belongs.’
The only person who had heard me read my speech out loud by this stage was my girlfriend, Josie. When I reached its conclusion, I looked up anxiously to see her reaction.
‘It sounds fine,’ she said. That was all I had to go on other than the ethereal reaction I had sensed in the Chapel Royal.
I kissed my sisters goodbye and headed outside, registering that there were just three of us siblings left now, and we were going to the funeral of the first of our animated quartet to fall.
That was when it dawned on me that this was going to be the first major family event of my life when Diana would not be present.
Then I caught myself, as I understood that she would of course be present, but not while alive.
That thought nearly broke me, as I got into the car that took me slowly on the short drive from my grieving family to St James’s Palace, where the funeral procession would set off.
The streets vibrated with the low energy of a multitude who had come together to mourn as one. Some sections emitted a quiet murmur, but most seemed to be tight-lipped and silent, trying to process the weight of emotion that they saw around them, and felt inside.
*
I had had no contact with Prince Charles since hanging up on him after he had disrespected Diana and disparaged our family’s sense of duty.
On arriving at St James’s Palace, I was ushered along corridors towards his presence. I was prepared for a tense atmosphere, a prospect that did not worry me at all, as my thoughts were on Diana and her loss, and very far indeed from the ludicrousness of royal kowtowing.
As I neared the place where I was to meet Prince Charles, I spotted William and Harry in a side room, with its large television on.
I heard snatches of commentary from the screen about the global celebrities arriving in the congregation – including, I later discovered, a Hollywood contingent of Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.
I was delighted that Cruise had spoken forcefully against the tabloids after Diana died.
I caught a close-up of the hulking figure of Luciano Pavarotti, a friend to Diana, and an active supporter of her charitable work, slumped forward in disbelieving grief.
As I walked on, I thought how very unsettling it must be to watch the preamble to your mother’s funeral on TV and was impressed for the first of many times that day by my nephews’ apparent composure at such an impossible time.
The day before, they had both, like the Queen, gone into the street to look at flowers and messages left in their mother’s memory.
They had thanked members of the public for their condolences.
It seemed a lot for two young sons to do, but they had done it superbly well.
I worried about the internal burden of such gestures and the toll they must exact.
I was shown into a sitting room where Prince Charles was seated, alone.
He was polite and formal. Neither of us mentioned our phone call altercation.
It was as if we had not seen or spoken to one another for an age.
We talked about other matters – how my mother and elder sisters were coping, and the beauty of the weather that morning. That sort of thing.
He did not question me at all about the contents of my eulogy.
I felt the stiff pages of the speech in my pocket, neatly folded into four.
They seemed to be crackling with urgency, demanding not to be forgotten.
I sensed that the words on them might have a power that I would soon be unleashing, and I wondered how they would be perceived.
Were they what people expected? Were they what the occasion required?
More importantly, I questioned how – indeed, if – I would succeed in getting through them all.
I had practised the speech out loud, by myself, perhaps forty times, and I had come to recognize where the pitfalls lay: the passages that were so damned difficult to get through, even when I declaimed them without an audience.
The most dangerously emotional parts were, I soon realized, where I addressed William and Harry, either directly or when summoning forces to protect them.
I have always been emotional, but talking to children of the family about their dead mother represented a magnitude of difficulty that I had never encountered before.
Prince Charles and my stilted time together was punctuated by the kind interruptions of Tiggy Legge-Bourke. A year younger than me, Tiggy and I had first met when we had been page and bridesmaid at a society wedding in 1970. My father’s photographs show us as fair-haired innocents.
‘Now, listen,’ Tiggy said to me, with hearty kindness.
‘The best of luck with your speech today! I’m sure it’ll go really, really well, but maybe these might help a bit?
You know – if your throat dries up!’ She handed me a tube of Polo mints.
I thanked her for her kindness and put it into my pocket.
At last, it was time to head downstairs, and out into the waiting world.
*
I have never watched the vast bulk of Diana’s funeral’s coverage. My memories of the day have always been distinctly personal, what I saw, felt and heard.
I do not recall having been told about the length or the course of the walk to Westminster Abbey. Suddenly, I was outside St James’s Palace, knowing that Diana’s coffin would soon appear, waiting to be pointed in the right direction by someone who knew the plan.
Prince Philip was there, his usual gruffness replaced by a calm and quiet kindness. He was clearly determined to help his motherless grandsons in their walk to the funeral, and he did so with grace.
Prince Charles tried to take charge, having seemingly thought hard about the formation that the five of us chief mourners would adopt behind Diana.
When he said, ‘Now, I will walk in the centre, with William on my right and Harry on my left’, Prince Philip overruled him in an even voice that closed down any possible dissent.
‘No, that isn’t how we will do it. Charles,’ he said, nodding towards me, ‘is representing his sister and their family, so he will walk in the middle, with William and Harry either side of him, and you,’ he said, talking to his eldest son, ‘and I will be on the outside flanks.’ Prince Charles looked pained but capitulated to his father’s authority without a word.
Having progressed from her home at Kensington Palace, along Kensington High Street, and through Hyde Park, Diana’s coffin now arrived in front of us, on top of a gun carriage – a vehicle that struck me as being completely at odds with my sister’s inherent love of peace.
I was struck by the ghastly beauty of it all.
White flowers were laid out on the coffin – lilies from my family and me, with a bouquet up front that particularly drew the eye.
It showed the agonizing word ‘Mummy’ on its card, in a young hand.
That, for me, remains the searing image of the day: a son’s silent, written cry of desolation, to a mother, gone.
Ted Hughes caught the poignancy of that marker of family tragedy, and the jarring note of the military vehicle selected for Diana, in the final lines of the verse[*1] he wrote, as Poet Laureate, for that day:
…For worship, for mourning:
God is here, is gone.
Love is broken on the Cross.
The Flower on the Gun.
The cruel beauty of that September morning’s sunshine fell on the horses of the King’s Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery, with the silver of their tack clinking, and the leather of their bridles creaking.
This was the team selected to pull the sturdy wooden gun carriage, with its gleaming coffin atop, to Westminster Abbey.
I felt the need to salute Diana, out of love and respect. I crossed myself – a gesture I had never made before, but it struck me, at that moment, as a suitable symbol of deference to my sister.
I later learnt that we were on camera from the moment we had stepped outside, but that aspect of the day was far from my mind at that moment.
It was na?ve of me not to realize that this desperately sad, seemingly private preamble to the most public of processions was being beamed around the world.
The breach of Pavarotti’s privacy in that close-up shot in the Abbey should have taught me that.
I was in thrall to two immense and related forces: the shock of being a brother, with my dead sister before me; and the duty of being an uncle, whose young nephews needed my support at this uniquely demanding time.