Chapter Thirteen ‘Her Extraordinary Appeal…’ #2
Looking out of my bedroom window, waiting for my sister to arrive in the quiet street below, I was excited when I caught sight of her approaching red Mini Metro.
But I was stunned to see that she was far from alone.
She had a dozen strange cars and a motorbike in tow.
The normally sleepy cul-de-sac of Eton’s Common Lane was thrown into chaos by the noise of all their engines, powering a convoy engaged in my sister’s pursuit.
Diana parked carefully outside my house, while the strangers’ vehicles slewed to a halt haphazardly in the middle of the street, their ignitions still on, disgorging men – some alone, others in pairs – who converged on her like hyenas closing in on a gazelle.
Because Diana was merely Prince Charles’s latest girlfriend at this stage, rather than his fiancée or wife, she was entitled to no police protection.
This left her, at nineteen years of age, entirely vulnerable to the harrying of these mercenaries from a hugely powerful, well-resourced, and insatiable media force.
I had seen, from a distance, something of the pressure Diana was under at that time as the new royal love interest. There had been footage on the news of reporters and photographers jostling round her as she went in and out of Coleherne Court, the apartment block in London’s Earls Court where my mother had bought her a flat.
But such coverage had been sanitized for public consumption and presented as nothing more than a bit of fun and games.
The reports failed to capture the terrifying energy of a seething mob of men around a fragile young woman.
To view it in the flesh was truly shocking.
Diana was unfortunate in the timing of her romance. Things had become more agitated in the world of royal reporting after Prince Charles had innocently said, in 1975: ‘I personally feel that a good age for a man to get married is around thirty.’
No doubt he had felt, back then, that he could kick the marriage question away for a few years, and so gain some space for his own privacy.
But time went by, and the heir to the most-famous throne in the Western world had turned thirty, two years earlier.
Since then, the media had approached the arrival of each new possible princely girlfriend with the question, ‘Could this be The One?’
When Diana first broke cover, having spent a few clandestine days with the Royal Family at Balmoral two months prior to her Eton visit, she had refused to reply to the royal reporters and photographers as they jostled round her, shouting at the mystery young woman to surrender her identity to them.
In the face of her polite but determined silence, one of the encircling scrum lost patience and ripped her suitcase from her hand.
He had noticed the luggage tag round its handle, looped there by Balmoral staff to ease their logistical planning for guests.
From the moment that he read it, the press knew that this new woman in the prince’s life was Lady Diana Spencer.
Such rough treatment of a startled teenager, who was working quietly as an assistant at a kindergarten, took place at a time when the rougher element of Fleet Street[*2] was entering the period of perhaps its greatest power and worst excesses.
This two-decade era coincided, utterly disastrously as it would transpire, with Diana’s time on the world stage.
Before Diana, things had been very different.
Those connected with the Royal Family were generally treated with caution, if not respect, by the British media.
Famously, in the 1930s, when the man who would briefly become Edward VIII was having an affair with the twice-divorced American femme fatale Wallis Simpson, the rest of the world was reading about the King’s scandalous love life, while his British subjects bizarrely found no mention of it in their newspapers.
How much was to change, over the ensuing forty years…
While the throng of photographers and reporters at Eton that Sunday would have said they were merely doing their jobs when hounding Diana, it was clear to my schoolboy eye that they were bullying my sister.
For the first of very many times, I felt angry that this boorish, all-male mob felt entitled to intrude into her space as they wished.
She was, to them, a commodity to be exploited, not a sentient being worthy of respect.
That day, as we ran the gauntlet of their lenses, Diana whispered to me not to reply to their provocative questions.
They duly got their shots of ‘Lady Di and the other Charles in her Life’, as some of them called the spread in their papers the next day.
We both look fraught in these pictures, and it is clear from them that I am seething with impotent rage that they were being taken.
Diana had to whisper to me again and again: ‘Keep calm – whatever you do, don’t lash out! ’
The only privacy we enjoyed that day was when we were inside the Hind’s Head. There, we had the chance to catch up with one another while the reporters decanted into the bar, one or two keeping watch on us from a distance, while taking advantage of their expense accounts.
Diana and I tucked into roast beef and the endless dishes of vegetables brought to us by a succession of smiling waitresses.
These ladies were each thrilled to get a close-up look at Diana, having previously only seen her in the papers.
She exchanged a few jokey and appreciative words with each of them – she was always so natural and at ease with strangers – and they all went from our table beaming with delight.
It was a phenomenon I would see repeatedly, over the remaining years of Diana’s life, the extremely rare gift for connecting with people of all walks of life, putting them at their ease, and leaving them utterly charmed by her quick wit, lively humour and lack of stuffiness.
After sharing a slab of the restaurant’s famed treacle tart, we braced ourselves before heading back outside into the baying mob of journalists and lensmen.
As would be true throughout the rest of her brief life, the photographers were clearly not satisfied with what they had taken before.
With Diana, they seemed never to have enough. They always wanted more.
Skip Notes
*1 Cooked prunes wrapped in bacon.
*2 Fleet Street was the part of east London where many of Britain’s national newspapers used to be based.