Chapter Twenty-Nine ‘These Were Days I Will Always Treasure’
Chapter Twenty-nine
‘These were days I will always treasure’
She had arrived off a night flight into the morning of my son Louis’s third birthday, bearing typically generous gifts for her flaxen-haired nephew.
But the prime reason for Diana’s visit had been driven by romance, not family.
She had come to see for herself if this sublimely beautiful tip of Africa, where I had moved to shake off the press attention I attracted (an occasional bob in the waves, compared to the daily tsunami she endured), could provide a haven for her and her heart-surgeon lover.
Might they, she dared hope, move there together, and carve out a life?
Once she was no longer a queen-in-waiting, Diana was prone to na?ve yet impossible dreams as to how her life could be – the Garden House fantasy showed that.
With an earlier man in her life, she had enjoyed scouring the glossy property section of Country Life magazine, looking for a rural getaway where she imagined that they might live in perfect peace together.
In the latest of these whimsical scenarios, she hoped her new love could work at Groote Schuur Hospital, a few miles from my Cape Town home.
This was where Christiaan Barnard had performed the first successful human heart transplant thirty years earlier.
Diana dreamt that she and her man could live happily – normally – nearby.
The other side of the world seemed to offer the possibility of asylum.
Life in England was intolerable for Diana by this point.
It was where her sons were going to be at boarding school till they each turned eighteen.
She would have them for half their exeats and half their school holidays until then.
While the former would have to be spent in England, the holidays would not.
After a decade and a half of being tied to Britain, the world was opening up for her.
Contacted for advice by Diana in advance of her Cape Town trip, Dr Barnard called my home landline several times a day, with thoughts he wished to share with my sister. He was, he promised, busy investigating possible medical positions for her man. He was confident something suitable would turn up.
Meanwhile I had assigned myself the task of keeping my sister’s sudden visit as private as possible. It went as well as I could have dared to hope, despite journalists learning she was in Cape Town, and assuming she must be staying with me.
I had to take stock of the situation, to see how I could possibly outfox the dozens of paparazzi and reporters laying siege outside my home’s entrance. This stood on Southern Cross Drive, a quiet, tree-lined road running through the rural heart of suburban Constantia.
Having chosen to live in a nation with such a high crime rate, I had added all possible security measures to my South African home. My children mainly lived with me, and their safety was all-important.
As soon as I bought the place, I set about upgrading its security.
I had a two-metre perimeter wall constructed, with razor wire along its top.
If this obstacle was breached, there were invisible beams at shin and chest height between the wall and an inner wire fence.
Should an intruder get through all this, they were up against the dogs.
I had brought my pet Rhodesian ridgebacks, Cybill and Delia, with my family from England.
They had the run of the garden at night, from their comfortable kennel, and were alert to trouble – often too much so, joining in the night chorus of watchdogs that emanated from other properties in the area where many privileged white homeowners carefully guarded their own.
Inside, the children’s and my bedrooms were in a single section of the house that was protected by metal window bars – decorative, but strong.
The house also had internal gates that ran on sliding railings, which were locked at night.
It was relatively normal, if you could run to it, to have such an obstruction between your bedrooms and the rest of the house: if anyone did manage to break in, they could help themselves to your possessions without immediately threatening lives.
When Diana visited, I was confident that all of these measures guaranteed that nobody could possibly enter the grounds or house.
I also knew that there was no vantage point from which to take pictures of the inside of the property.
Only the small front yard was partially visible from outside, at an eighty-yard distance from the road.
I felt confident that Diana would only be vulnerable to intruders when she stepped outside my perimeter wall.
Even then, I had an ace up my sleeve. My garden ran down to a small cul-de-sac, Gemini Way, that sat at 90 degrees to Southern Cross Drive.
There was a sliding wooden gate from that side of my garden into this small street, and I moved my pickup truck to just inside of that hidden entrance.
Throughout Diana’s time with me, nobody from the media worked out that the gate on Gemini Way accessed my property.
Diana and I used this entrance repeatedly.
We even enjoyed an afternoon sortie with my four children to Noordhoek Beach, whose wild natural beauty has graced the Oscar-winning epics Ryan’s Daughter and The Piano.
We had been quite alone, because of the windiness of the day, apart from the quiet dignity of my ridgebacks, who bounded out of the back of my truck onto the sand of the empty car park, sniffing the air and keeping watch over our family group.
I had been surprised to notice that day how Diana had spent time applying a lot of make-up, even for this family trip to the beach. It did not take me long to work out that she must have feared her privacy being ambushed by a long lens.
Off-guard shots of Diana were fodder for the tabloid trough, and these were often followed by hurtful dissections of her appearance.
Recent photographs of her in her sports gear, heading from her car into her London gym, had led to gleeful speculation by Fleet Street’s leading female columnists, whose catty midweek offerings earned them the nickname of the ‘Wednesday Witches’.
They wondered whether or not Diana, this mother in her mid-thirties, had succumbed to the curse of cellulite.
They so wanted it to be the case. I recall Diana’s appalled dismay at such nastiness.
On another day during her Cape Town stay I took Diana to Meerlust, a friend’s beautiful ancestral wine estate forty minutes from my home.
Our host hired a blonde-bobbed private detective to act as a decoy, driving a car at speed from outside my property towards and down the N2 highway. This red herring proved a great success, the press pack feeling sure they had just seen Diana at the wheel of the passing vehicle.
They set off in frenzied pursuit, finally catching up with the lookalike on the outskirts of Stellenbosch. They hemmed her car in, sprang out with their cameras, before realizing that the woman they had surrounded was not Diana after all.
Furious and confused, they insisted that the lady detective open the boot of her car.
They hoped that, somehow, their elusive prey might be curled up inside.
When the boot was popped open, and was evidently empty, one of the pursuers even started prodding at the felt lining at the base of the cavity, in the vain hope that it might somehow be concealing a princess.
Meanwhile, my sister, my South African friends and I were enjoying a lunch of easy laughter and understated Afrikaans hospitality. Betty, Meerlust’s cook, possessed of a smile that lit up the sky, and Giorgio, the affable Italian winemaker, proudly showed off their wares to their guest of honour.
Taking Diana into an area of his cellars where oak barrels of fermenting wine were noisily emitting pressurized air through glass pipes, Giorgio cocked an ear playfully towards the flute-like tones and said: ‘Listen, Princess Diana, my wine is singing for you, like a choir!’
The only awkward moment occurred when one of Giorgio’s juniors repeatedly urged Diana to sample some of Meerlust’s wine.
His was innocent enthusiasm, but I could read Diana’s fear that this smiling stranger might be pressurizing her for an endorsement that he could use commercially in the future.
Resolutely teetotal, she had already politely declined a couple of times, but now she set the boundary: ‘I never drink alcohol!’ she exclaimed, through a smile strong enough to end the matter.
She then set the conversation on another, easier, course to prevent an embarrassed silence.
A decade and a half in the global spotlight had left Diana with the knack of spotting and seeing off all sorts of possible dangers.
At the conclusion of our visit, we cut back through the dirt tracks of Meerlust’s western vineyards, rejoined the highway via an anonymous cutting, and headed home safely.
Once again, I thought happily, we have managed to give the paparazzi absolutely nothing.
Diana had been able to enjoy herself, with good people, and without the aggressive intrusion that compromised so much of her life.
On one occasion during those Cape Town days this successful run seemed destined to end.
I had set off with Diana in my truck, hoping to show her the exteriors of potential homes for her and her love in Constantia and the neighbouring suburb of Bishopscourt.
We had not gone far when suddenly, at a Stop sign, Diana and I came face to face – almost bumper to bumper – with a car carrying two paparazzi. They had stumbled on us by chance.