Chapter One ‘A World in Shock…’
Chapter One
‘A world in shock…’
People often feel the need to tell me where they were when they heard that Diana had died.
I was at my home in Cape Town, alone with my four children, when I learnt that my sister had been killed.
The phone next to my bed rang in the middle of the night, but after I sleepily leant over to pick it up it went dead in my hand.
My kind old neighbour, Mr Lindsay, later explained it had been him, thinking he would let me know that he had seen an item on the news: Diana had been in some sort of traffic accident.
‘But I thought,’ he said, ‘why wake you? I reckoned you’d be able to deal with it in the morning.
It seemed like nothing too terrible – then. ’
When the phone woke me for a second time, it was my middle sister Jane, calling to inform me of the crash. She was not overly worried, just performing her usual quiet, pivotal role in the family.
As children, Diana and I had enjoyed the thrill of looking around our father’s study when he was not there, rootling through the paperwork and trying to make sense of his mysterious adult life.
We had once come across a conciliatory note to him, our primary parent, from a great-aunt: ‘At least in Jane you have one stable child,’ she wrote, and we took some time to realize how this left us in others’ eyes.
Jane, ever that steady fulcrum of the family, and the primary transmitter of its news, was letting me know that Diana had been involved in a car crash in Paris.
She apparently had an injury – it might possibly be a broken leg, but nothing more than that.
Jane’s husband, Robert, was the Queen’s Private Secretary[*] so I felt confident that he would have access to accurate information from the front line of Diana’s extraordinary, free-rolling life.
Despite the reassurance, I got out of bed, padded quietly downstairs so as not to wake my four children in their ground-floor rooms, and turned on the kitchen TV.
Since Diana had married Prince Charles, sixteen years earlier, I had taken to paying particular attention to the opening of any newscast, knowing that if anything awful had happened to my youngest sister, it would for sure be the lead bulletin.
Knowing that even a seemingly minor traffic accident would be a major story, I flicked between the BBC, Sky News and CNN, piecing together their satellite updates on events in Paris. The seemingly inconsequential prang was already – as I had known it must be – big news.
Many of the usual commentators and journalists were wheeled in to give their thoughts on Diana in a general way.
The gravity of the crash had yet to sink in.
Most of the royal reporters were referring to my sister with the casual contempt that much of the British media had become used to deploying about her in her final couple of years, after she had been shorn of Palace and police protection.
Their tone was, as had somehow become normal then, patronizing, misogynistic and dismissive.
I was upset that nobody was speaking up for her even after she had been hurt in a traffic accident.
The commentators’ theme seemed to be that this was the sort of thing that happens when you impetuously spend your summer gallivanting with a playboy – yet another silly, preventable melodrama in a life that had seemed to become so much more haphazard since she had quit the Royal Family.
There was no compassion for a human who must be in distress.
Such constant, carping criticism had long been encouraged by Diana’s enemies in the Palace, and here it played out again.
Jane and I spoke frequently as the situation became more worrying. Diana had shattered her leg, Jane said. No, she had actually taken a blow to the head.
The brutality of the crash became clear when it was confirmed that Diana’s boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, and the French driver of their car, Henri Paul, had died instantly, on impact.
And then, on perhaps our fifth or sixth call that night, when escalating dread had us both floundering a bit for words, I heard my brother-in-law, Robert, talking in the background on the work line in their home.
‘Oh, no!’ he half bellowed, and half sighed, the air heaving from deep in his chest in a mighty detonation of stunned disbelief.
And Jane, witnessing the completeness of his shock, relayed to me, in a soft voice: ‘That’s it… It’s curtains…Duch is dead…’
‘Oh, God, Jane!’ I said, the world going still for a moment. Then, not knowing what I could possibly add, I hung up.
I returned to the TV, where the talking heads had yet to be informed of the terrible news.
As had been the case for me, the realization began to dawn in those far-off studios that something pretty serious had in fact happened, then an understanding that the situation was grave, before, incredibly, Diana’s death was confirmed.
The lag while all this unfurled was terrible.
I remember, at one point, as I sat there alone, in agonized disbelief, recalling a long-ago English lesson at school, when I had been taught what dramatic irony was.
Knowing that Diana was dead, and that these absurd commentators had yet to register that fact – but must, soon enough – was, I thought, the most extreme case of dramatic irony imaginable.
I inwardly cursed these figures I knew to be of scant knowledge, whose stock-in-trade was presenting bouquets of barbed yet bogus words to the world.
Such self-appointed ‘royal experts’ had been booked, for a few hundred quid each, to spout yet again against Diana.
I watched as their jaded contempt was interrupted by concerning updates, before troubled glances betrayed their bewilderment.
As Diana was pronounced dead by the host presenter, they were among the very first to experience the utter astonishment that would ricochet around the world that day.
How many of this chorus of disapproving hypocrites, I think now, truly cared about the cruel snuffing out of a loving young mother’s life? And how many quietly calculated that an income source that had seemed endless an hour earlier had just been turned off for ever before their startled eyes?
My young children continued to sleep innocently along the hallway as the family tragedy unfolded.
A generation earlier, the children asleep in the Spencer family home had been Diana and me.
Skip Notes
* In Britain’s royal households the Private Secretary is the most senior adviser, and Chief of Staff.