Chapter Two ‘Transported Back to Our Childhood…’ #5
Perhaps the most exciting outings we had as children were our trips with our father to Brancaster beach, twenty minutes from home.
Diana and I had two regular competitions with one another en route to Brancaster: the first was guessing how many ducks we would discover swimming on the village pond in Bircham that day.
The other was to see who could catch the first glimpse of the sea, as we glided through the gently undulating farmland in our father’s Jaguar.
We were lucky enough to have a wooden beach hut in Brancaster’s dunes and, while I might occasionally ride my pony there, we would mostly play with buckets and spades in the sand, and swim in the bracing North Sea. Ice creams from a shack near the golf club signalled that it was time to head home.
Soon after her separation from Prince Charles Diana was widely quoted as saying: ‘I dream of the day I can walk along the beach alone.’ I like to think that she was hankering after those idyllic days on Brancaster beach when she contemplated that fantasy.
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Outside school, we made occasional trips to the local town, King’s Lynn, where shopping opportunities were extremely limited.
We were allowed a few sweets from Woolworths and scoured WHSmith and Boots for other things to buy with gift tokens received on birthdays or at Christmas, topped up by our modest pocket money.
But our father frowned on the concept of spending money on ourselves.
He taught us that this was a rude self-indulgence, although I forget his supporting logic.
Our father was, during our Norfolk years, extremely frugal.
I still have his handwritten records totting up how much each of us four children was costing him.
He broke down these expenses into: ‘Park House rent, rates, food, electricity, oil, staff, clothes, telephone, petrol’, and ‘Travel fares, Xmas expenses, fireworks’, as well as ‘school fees & extras, outings, scrapbook, cats and dogs, dry cleaning and laundry’.
All this was to be recharged to our family’s trustees, because my father’s income was derived from a modest farm that he had bought near the hamlet of Ingoldisthorpe, a short drive from Park House.
Some of the rest of his week was taken up with unpaid charitable commitments, which were a fine example for his children, if of no consolation to his bank manager.
The most demanding of these was his role as chairman of the National Association of Boys’ Clubs, a body that helped youths from deprived areas to find a positive purpose, largely through sport.
He would bring home programmes of boxing matches he had attended as fundraisers for his cause, with autographs by Britain’s boxing greats of the time, Joe Bugner and John Conteh among them.
I remember on several occasions returning from school to see my father slumped, himself like a defeated prize-fighter, in front of the TV in Park House’s drawing room, absorbing the hit that another hike in taxes from the ruling Labour Party was going to have on his wallet.
Bert the camel’s appearance for Diana was a very rare example of extravagance, beyond the household team whom he thought essential.
He was never diagnosed as such, nor would he have dreamt of referring himself for any form of assessment, but it seems to me that my father was in a state of depression for many years after my mother’s exit from their marriage.
He had the listlessness, and lack of energy or focus, which suggest this might have been so.
We younger children would pass his study, off the front hallway of Park House, to see him in his chair, forlornly staring out of the window across the lawn, to the tennis court where he and my mother – he was a good player, she a gifted one – had enjoyed some of the good times of their union.
I have read some of my father’s written output – from military despatches, when he was a decorated tank lieutenant advancing through Normandy after D-Day, to speeches written either for his charitable causes, or for political reasons (he served as a Conservative county councillor).
It is clear from these that he had a good, perceptive brain and excellent writing skills.
But he had no proper job, and no clear purpose other than waiting to inherit Althorp.
Despite my father’s unhappiness after the divorce, and his lack of a clear professional role, I still maintain that Park House was an exceptionally happy family home.
Generally, we four children were a good team, growing up.
My last nanny, Mary Clarke, wrote thirty years ago about how well the quartet of Spencer children got on at Park House, and observed our internal dynamics.
She saw how Diana enjoyed looking up to Sarah, the two sharing a similar energy and innate naughtiness, while Diana and I were close in a gentler way.
Meanwhile we all loved Jane but saw less of her at Park House than we might as she preferred to spend time with my mother, after the divorce.
Unlike my three sisters, I have no memory of my parents being together there.
Despite its superficial stateliness, Park House’s soul was wonderfully warm.
It proved to be a relaxed and happy family home for my three sisters and me.
Though we left it when I was eleven, it has always been the place I think of as home.
That was the case for all four of us. One of our quartet has found it impossible ever to return, during the half-century since we reluctantly quit this childhood idyll.
It would simply be too painful for her to do so.