Chapter Fourteen ‘Selfless Humanity’ #2
‘You sit here, in my history division, doing not very well at the subject’ – he had recently refused to mark one of my essays because its opening paragraph was a side in length – ‘and you can’t even recognize history when it’s happening right under your nose!’
The class caught the contagion of the master’s scorn and laughed loudly. I blushed.
I had, of course, realized that having a sister marry the Queen’s son was a big deal.
But I remained a sixteen-year-old younger brother first, and I had witnessed my two other sisters marry in the previous few years.
I had seen the huge excitement at those unions flare up, before everyone got used to the situation and normality resumed.
I thought Diana’s engagement and wedding would be similar: thrilling when the news came out, less so later on.
But it soon became clear that this time things would be very different – that, where Diana was involved, our family news was now also public fodder.
Soon afterwards, in a school assembly, there was a panel discussion on stage with several of the more popular senior boys.
‘And who is your celebrity crush?’ they were asked.
One replied, ‘Lady Diana!’ while making a phallic gesture with his crossed arms, to raucous approval, leaving me feeling affronted on my sister’s behalf. How could it seem all right for strangers to treat her, in public, as an object of their lust?
Diana had visited me at Eton quite a few times in the previous years, sometimes with my mother. A teenaged girl, she had probably come as much to cast an eye over my older schoolmates as to check in on a younger brother.
She had had a brief, platonic romance with a floppy-haired member of Eton’s cricket team three years my senior, and I probably imagined he was the sort of person she would end up with, many years down the line: someone charming, easy-going and confident, whom my family would feel at home with.
My other sisters had gone for similar men, and they were extremely happy.
Diana was a dreamer, who devoured the undemanding literary output of romantic novelist Barbara Cartland – coincidentally, our stepmother Raine’s mother – whose idea of a good plotline (it was one she relied on in the more than seven hundred books she churned out in her lifetime) was a virginal beauty being pursued by a dashing aristocrat, before finally sinking into his arms for a life of happiness-ever-after.
There was no sex in a Barbara Cartland novel. The nearest it came to that sort of thing was when the gallant hero flared his nostrils during the final page’s clinching embrace.
There was also no pretence of reality, or acknowledgement of the ugliness and difficulties of life. In Diana’s imaginary world, a true love story was a thing of perfect bliss. It was much the same in her favourite film, The Sound of Music, which she told me she had watched sixteen times.
So, the innocent dreamer Diana, aged nineteen, was scooped up by the thirty-two-year-old heir to the British throne, who had enjoyed the busy bachelorhood that was a perk of his global eligibility.
By the time Diana came to prominence, the British Royal Family was known to the public in the way that a historic London landmark might be. There was little warmth towards it, but there was respect for the heritage it represented.
The Queen engendered particular reverence. She presented an immaculate front, and the most common appraisal of her reign was that she ‘never put a foot wrong’.
Prince Philip was more controversial, because of occasional brusque utterances, which came from an era before racial sensitivities were properly understood.
The Queen’s husband had yet to reach the stage where his great age led people to make allowances for eccentricity.
He was, to many, a forbidding figure, as I had witnessed.
One morning in 1977, when serving as a Page of Honour to the Queen at the State Opening of Parliament, I had been shocked at the bite in a sudden outburst he had directed at his wife.
She had accepted it with quiet and embarrassed resignation.
Princess Anne was often portrayed unfavourably by the press, because she clearly had no time for playing their game.
She refused to present herself to the world as some sort of fairytale princess.
This would lead to decades-long hostility in the media, until her hard work as the royal patron of good causes won through.
In 1981, just as Diana came to the fore, Anne’s faults were laid out and dissected in an unsympathetic documentary, Princess Anne: Her Working Life.
There was a gap to be filled by a glamorous young female royal.
It had been foisted on Lady Helen Windsor, a first cousin once removed of the Queen, after a beautiful photograph of her was released in 1978, to mark her confirmation.
But Helen, being only fourteen, was too young, and too distant a relative of the Queen to adorn the front page more than fleetingly.
Diana was different. She was young and fresh.
She had passed the daily ordeal of being pursued by journalists, stilling their intrusiveness with poise and patience.
She clearly was not a cold fish, as some of Prince Charles’s previous aristocratic girlfriends had appeared to be.
She was relatable and fun. And Diana sold newspapers by the tonne, their headlines made more concise when, for the first time in her life, her three-syllable Christian name was trimmed by sub-editors to ‘Di’.
The wider world bought into the ‘Lady Di’ fairytale, without the context that many in Britain had. They loved the Cinderella idea of a nursery-school teacher marrying a future king. They knew next to nothing about Althorp and Diana’s true hinterland. Meanwhile she was extremely pretty.
A harbinger of the dangerous public life she was entering occurred during her engagement. Everything and everyone she was connected to became newsworthy. Even her old Park House governess, Allie, that impeccable and charming lady of old-school values.
Diana had placed Allie on her guest list for the wedding – along with many others who had helped our family at Park House and Althorp – while knowing that she was seriously ill with cancer.
When extremely weak, Allie suffered the enormous distress of finding a stranger dressed as a medic by her hospital bedside, taking photographs of her.
This was a tabloid photographer, determined to get to someone important in Diana’s past, who persisted in taking pictures of Allie while all she could do was weakly protest. She died soon afterwards, a month before the wedding.
Our family also became affected by Diana’s new public status, both affectionately and intrusively, as soon as she became the royal fiancée.
On the evening of the February day on which the engagement was announced, my father was sitting as one of the governors of the boarding school he had attended as a boy.
One of his fellow governors, a close friend since those long-ago schooldays, remembered saying to him: ‘You must be very proud, but this is going to be quite an undertaking.’
He recalled my father pausing before replying thoughtfully: ‘She’ll be all right, she’ll be all right.’
‘And I sensed in that moment,’ my father’s friend would recall, ‘the depth of fatherly pride, wisdom and confidence which those few words carried.’
My mother, who liked to serve at the counter of the gift and toy shop that she owned in Oban, heard two customers on a coach trip chatting at her till about the upcoming Royal Wedding. After one expressed concern about Diana’s lack of years, the other turned to my mother and asked what she thought.
My mother replied: ‘Well, it’s hard for me to say…’ prompting the first woman to spring in with ‘Quite right, deary – it’s not really a matter for a shop assistant to have opinions about.’