‘It was her character that came alight’: read an extract from Swan Song by Charles Spencer
In Swan Song, Charles Spencer provides the most intimate, loving and honest portrait yet of his sister, Diana. Read on for an extract from the book.
There was a weekend at Althorp, in late 1977 or early 1978, when our elder sisters’ regular troupe of friends came to stay. I noticed how they all looked at and listened to Diana quite differently from how they had previously done so. To them ‘Duch’ was no longer a younger sibling of the house, who had to be humoured and tolerated, but a highly intriguing personality in her own right. She had a fresh confidence, allied to a terrific sense of humour – offbeat, quick, and very, very, funny. Diana now demanded to be noticed through force of personality. It was as if, free from the regular chiding of teachers for the academic shortcomings that were never her fault, she suddenly – for the first time – found herself.
Yes, she had always been a pretty adolescent, and there were clear hints of the beauty she was to become. But it was her character that came alight now, a sense of enormous fun, from someone who did not seem to take herself too seriously, and who had a gift for repeatedly opening a joyous lens to the playful and absurd. She could be moody when younger, and subjected to classroom humiliation, but she was now enormous fun to be with.
It was at this time that Diana met Prince Charles properly for the first time since childhood. He came to stay for the weekend at Althorp at the end of November 1977, as a guest of my sister Sarah. They had been seeing one another since the summer. My father hosted the grandest of dinner parties at Althorp on the Sunday night, to mark the visit not just of the prince, but also of Queen Margrethe of Denmark and her husband Prince Henrik.
Prince Charles sat between our stepmother, Raine, and Sarah. Diana was on the opposite side of the table. Other guests included Robin Leigh-Pemberton, who would later be governor of the Bank of England, and Peter Carrington, who would serve as Margaret Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary.
My father was a trencherman, as the four-course menu that evening reflected: vol-auvent with haddock and prawns, followed by crispy chicken with cheese sauce, then chocolate mousse, after which a traditional English savoury was served – devils on horseback (cooked prunes wrapped in bacon).
Out of Althorp’s cellars rolled the big guns – Château Latour ’64, Château d’Yquem ’55, Taylor’s Port from ’24 – my father’s birth year – and Hine brandy from ’14.
Diana had been present as Sarah’s kid sister, but she did not remain in the shadows. Her newfound confidence saw her noticed by Prince Charles, who seems to have found her charming and fun.
Diana greatly enjoyed the unusually grand Althorp weekend, revealing in her next letter to my father that ‘I liked Prince Charles’, while pointing out: ‘He is clearly someone in need of a wife.’ Perhaps she thought Sarah would fulfil that role. Or perhaps – despite being only sixteen – she wistfully meant something else.
Within three years, the two of them would be dating.
The British press’s cat-and-mouse relationship with Diana’s privacy – and her life – had been an issue since the moment she came onto their radar.
In November 1980, during the early days of her courtship by Prince Charles, Diana had driven down from London to take me out from my boarding house at Eton College, as she often did. We had, as usual, booked a table for Sunday lunch that day at the Hind’s Head, a restaurant my father had introduced us to in nearby Bray. It was one that he had gone to with his parents, when at the same school forty years earlier. The appeal of the Hind’s Head had always been, for generations of Etonians, the generosity of its servings and the decadence of its puddings – perfect fare for Diana and me, teenagers both.
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 145 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 (part of east London where many of Britain’s national newspapers used to be based) 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.
People often used to ask me if it was the prince or the person Diana fell in love with, and I have always been sure that it was the person first. I found, as we spoke over lunch on that day when she took me out from Eton, and at other times in the first months of her relationship, that Diana was clearly smitten with Prince Charles.
She had been unusually clear in her thoughts about marriage from a very early age. As my nanny Mary Clarke would remember Diana saying, when she was just ten years old: ‘Her only ambition . . . was to fall in love, get married, and have lots of children . . . She would never marry unless she was really, really in love.’ To do otherwise, Diana felt, would be to risk divorce.
Diana shared all this as a young girl – but it is a reminder of her extraordinarily tender age when she entered public life, that she wed less than a decade after sharing this considered childhood ambition.
On the day when she sprang me from school for Sunday lunch, she was pining for her love. Prince Charles had recently set off on a three-week royal tour of India and Nepal. Coming to see me was a way of taking her mind off the ache of his absence for a few hours.
Sometimes the public got their own glimpse of Diana’s feelings. When the prince’s favourite horse, Allibar, died under him on a routine ride a few weeks later, Diana was photographed looking distraught at his heartbreak.
She had watched him come second in a race at Ludlow on Allibar the previous year, cheering him on as she stood beside Camilla Parker-Bowles, whom she understood to be a former girlfriend.
This was the first occasion on which Diana and Prince Charles were to be seen publicly together as a couple.