Chapter Eleven ‘Sing Openly, as You Planned’
Chapter Eleven
‘Sing openly, as you planned’
Hundreds of letters arrived for me at Althorp from the day after Diana died.
These were from all over the world, penned by people who needed someone close to Diana to talk to.
I am sure that the vast majority had probably had no idea that Diana even had a brother till seeing me give my brief, devastated statement outside my Cape Town home, hours after her death.
My words that day prompted many to choose me as the person they wanted to communicate with, sharing their love for Diana, and their horror at her shocking death while being pursued by the paparazzi.
Nearly all of the letter-writers shared one concern, when casting their minds forward: what would happen to ‘the boys’ now? William and Harry’s future had not been a worry when Diana was alive because her positive, modern, maternal touch was always so obvious.
Diana’s break with royal tradition had been evident from the start.
She had insisted on taking nine-month-old William with her on her first overseas tour, to Australia and New Zealand, in 1983.
This formed a striking contrast with how the Queen had been as a royal mother.
When she undertook her extended tour of the Commonwealth in 1953?4, the new monarch had left Prince Charles and his sister Princess Anne behind for six months.
On her return, her young children were presented to her in public, at which point she gave them each a formal handshake.
People remembered Diana’s open joy in her children.
The images were unforgettable. The one that most readily comes to my mind is the reunion, in 1991, in Toronto, when she ran towards nine-year-old William and seven-year-old Harry on the deck of the Royal Yacht Britannia, after a tour of Canada.
Diana enveloped her young sons in her arms as she bent down to hug them with an unrestrained joy that any parent could identify with.
Diana was always extremely tactile with her sons when they were young.
Harry would recall in 2017 how ‘She would just engulf you and squeeze you as tight as possible, and being as short as I was then, there was no escape. You were there as long as she wanted to hold you.’ Diana’s joyful maternal style was as far from a regal handshake as you could get.
As they got older, Diana had also encouraged her sons, in her own words, to have ‘an understanding of people’s emotions, their insecurities, people’s distress, and their hopes and dreams’.
She had taken them on public transport, and to fast-food restaurants, like normal kids.
If they went to an amusement park, she ensured they joined the end of the queue and waited their turn with her, like any other family.
She also sometimes took both sons with her when visiting the homeless.
She had done a lot to arm them for life ahead as princes but also as people.
I remember Diana bringing a young William and Harry up to Althorp one summer’s day, while I was playing in a match on the cricket ground at the back of the house.
Diana had got to know several of my players and their wives pretty well over the years, and she and her sons hung out with us all for several hours.
Diana encouraged her sons to join in the chat and enjoy the laughter, while always quietly watching out for them, and gently reminding them of their manners.
It was the same at public events, or in the private confines of my children’s christenings at Althorp.
She wanted them to become the best versions of themselves, despite all the royal trappings, and in the face of the sycophancy their position so often prompted in others.
She set thoughtfulness and good manners as the goal, with sensitivity to others also at a premium.
All this, while knowing how truly loved they were by her – unconditionally and for ever.
I have never, in my life, come across a better mother.
However out of touch many in the Royal Family seemed, there had always been the reassurance for the public that their mother was going to give William and Harry values, insight and the emotional security that British princes had previously been denied.
But now what would happen to them? They were still young enough to be easily influenced, and perhaps even to forget their mother’s guidance and example.
Would they, at such a formative stage, be dragged back into the archaic ways of the monarchy, just as they seemed set on the enlightened path picked out by their mother?
Might the chill element of royal tradition still have time to root out the seeds that Diana had sown and nurtured?
As I contemplated composing my eulogy, I realized that these were questions I must look at on behalf of the countless number who grieved for Diana. I had to do this, I appreciated, through her lens, while considering the lessons of her past.
*
Diana’s most difficult times as a child took place in the classroom.
It is clear to me that she suffered from learning difficulties, but such things were poorly understood in England during the time she went to school.
She was never even tested, despite the evidence of significant problems being there from the start.
Diana had some of the key symptoms associated with ADHD.
Her kindergarten teacher noticed that: ‘Her span of concentration in any one activity is short’, and found that Diana was particularly unable to focus if a school lesson involved passive learning.
When bored, Diana would unconsciously get up from her desk, and also had a habit of chipping in to finish other people’s sentences.
It was the same when she went on to primary school. Miss Lowe repeatedly noticed Diana’s ‘flibbertigibbet’ mind, remarking in her first term at Silfield, when she was five, that: ‘Her lack of concentration hampers her progress.’
This issue was noted again, in the spring of 1971, after she started at prep school when she was nine: ‘Diana has great difficulty in concentrating for any length of time,’ her first report from Riddlesworth Hall said, ‘and tends to become very restless during lessons.’
Diana’s academic assessments in her termly reports are pitifully brief.
Miss Lowe, always slow to condemn and quick to encourage, noted that ‘Diana finds arithmetic rather difficult.’ The teachers at Riddlesworth were less thoughtful.
Form mistresses commented on Diana’s problems with focusing, and her ‘defeatism’ when confronted with subjects – particularly French and maths – that she found impenetrable.
Miss Long, Diana’s form mistress during her first year at Riddlesworth, wrote: ‘At present she gives up far too easily when faced with difficulties and escapes into a world of her own’, and criticized Diana for being ‘far too easily distracted’.
There was little acknowledgement that Diana had arrived at Riddlesworth deeply unhappy.
She kicked against the parental decision to send her to board there, rather than continue life at Park House.
On being taken to Riddlesworth for her first day, she turned to my father as he made to depart and said to him: ‘If you loved me, you wouldn’t leave me here.
’ This is a startlingly perceptive indictment of the boarding school system by one so young.
Riddlesworth was not equipped to help a pupil struggling with learning issues.
A sprawling mansion in South Norfolk, it was the sort of old-fashioned establishment where girls from ‘good’ families went to spend five years, having a nice time, with a decent marriage rather than a career on the horizon.
It was a school with no academic pretensions whatsoever.
Its most prized area was Pets’ Corner, where the girls tended the animals that they were allowed to bring from home to live alongside them.
Even in the Britain of the early 1970s, Riddlesworth was an anachronism.
Diana gradually got used to homesickness and turned her experience of it to good effect.
In his eighties the school’s chaplain, the Reverend Reginald Sweet, would remember Diana from forty-odd years earlier, because of her kindness: ‘The new [girls] who came in and were homesick, she would take care of them. She was always very popular in that way…She was just a good all-round little girl who was anxious to please and help.’ Even her most critical form teacher at Riddlesworth noted that Diana had been ‘…a pleasant and helpful girl’.
This would become a growing theme in later assessments.
In Diana’s final Riddlesworth report, from July 1973, the month in which she turned twelve, the headmistress, Miss Ridsdale, spotted some of the key qualities that would mark Diana out as a force for good: ‘Diana has been outstandingly helpful this term. She has proved herself efficient and a good organizer.’ She then went on: ‘If only she would put the same enthusiasm into her work, she could move mountains!’
To the end, Riddlesworth failed to see that Diana needed practical help with the academic challenges of school.
Endless criticism was not the way to go.
With no help offered to her in her struggles, even a natural fighter like Diana was prepared to give up.
I have read all of her reports, and there is no evidence of constructive help or intervention from teaching staff in any of them.
I will never forget her screech of pain, and her violent sobbing, on opening her O-level results at my mother’s Scottish home, Ardencaple. It was agony for her to see on the printout, posted in a brown envelope, that she had not passed any of them. It was excruciating to witness her devastation.
She went on to have one of the most extraordinary careers of the twentieth century – as princess, philanthropist and global inspiration – but part of Diana was for ever caught up in that feeling of academic ‘failure’ foisted on her as a child.
I believe that this impacted her self-worth dramatically.
I once asked Diana if she would mind me giving an interview to Hello!
soon after I inherited Althorp, with the entire fee offered by the magazine going into the maintenance of the house.
I explained that I would, of course, only say positive things in answer to the inevitable questions about her. She told me to go ahead.
I was honest about, and fulsome in my praise for, Diana during that article, and she called me on reading it with childlike gratitude: ‘Do you really believe all that about me, Carlos?’ she asked, delighted.
‘Of course I do,’ I replied. And I did. She sounded extraordinarily happy to be validated in public by one who knew her so well.
It is probably difficult for people at this distance to understand how full of self-doubt such an icon of the 1980s and 1990s felt, deep down.
She was beautiful, extraordinarily popular, and had the elegance and poise of an old-fashioned movie star.
But she craved acceptance, admiration, kindness, and – perhaps above all – love.
And I find that this feeling of inadequacy made her – a princess who could have chosen to sit in a palace, eating chocolates and doing really very little – very moving but also quite inspiring.
For it led her to serve those whose sense of helplessness she sensed and even shared.
She got stuck into gritty, controversial, but crucial causes partly because she had a fine, natural social conscience, but also to assuage nagging feelings of worthlessness.
These sentiments grew when she felt lonely.
Diana’s unhappiness when by herself had been a problem since early in her marriage.
It led her to remain extremely active in her official life, as she preferred to be out and about, doing things, rather than remaining alone at home.
This, despite often being exhausted by the need to be on good form the whole time in public, and while suffering from chronic back issues.
These were exacerbated by standing or walking for hours – especially in high heels.
Her doctors urged her to cut down on her workload soon after William’s birth, because of the back pain. But she needed to be busy, and to connect with others, so she disobeyed medical advice, and carried on with purpose, despite the physical toll.
I am sure this drive was rooted in a need to compensate for the endless negative reports Diana received at school.
She was always very bright and engaging in conversation, but she found committing thoughts and conclusions to the page extremely challenging.
It is terrible that nobody was paying attention to this, and that Diana was made to feel as if she was stupid.
But Diana had extraordinary natural intelligence, of a type that cannot be marked in any written examination. And, beyond that, she had a genius for people.