4

DIANA MISSED HER mother deeply, but with Charlie to look after she could not express her own grief. Everything in her life had changed. Although she still lived at Park House it was a different place without her mother. She tried to hold on to the memory of Frances coming into the nursery at night, smelling of verbena cologne, the gay vases of flowers she had placed around the house, the barking of her dogs as they followed her about, even her crying, which had made Diana want to hug her until she was happy again. With her father so distant and sad, Park House was a grim place.

Nannies came and went Diana and Charlie hated most of them. Their father always interviewed the applicants and chose the most attractive one. The children devised tricks that they hoped would drive the intruder away. After heavy rain, one nanny’s clothes were tossed from the nursery windows into the puddles below. Another sat in a chair where the tip of a safety-pin pointed upward.

But nothing they could do brought their mother home, and on 2 May 1969, their parents’ divorce became absolute. A month later, Frances and Peter Shand Kydd were married. Peter moved into the flat in Cadogan Place and they purchased a pleasant, unpretentious cottage in Sussex. They were apparently happy, but Frances “suddenly seemed to have aged. She was far more serious, almost sombre. How shall I describe it?” a close friend mused. “She walked with an air of recent sorrow.”

Diana was haunted by all elements of the divorce. Once a teacher had called her into her office to tell her that a judge was coming to the school to ask her whether she wanted to live with her mother or her father. She was overcome with terror at the prospect of earning the wrath of whichever parent she rejected. The judge did not come and Diana never had to make such a choice, but she worried when her father was accorded custody that her mother would believe she had chosen to live with him.

She did not understand what had taken place between her mother and Lady Fermoy. Yet she was aware of the chilly atmosphere between them. In this her loyalty was with Frances: memories of her grandmother’s visits just before the divorce reinforced her sense that Grandmother Fermoy had had something to do with the loss of her mother. Diana felt betrayed by both her parents and her maternal grandmother—and somehow responsible for it all. The guilt increased as their father spent even less time with Charlie and her. She yearned for his love and attention and fought for it the only way she knew how: by making small disturbances and trying to push the nannies into leaving. But Johnnie Spencer was too involved in his own grief at the death of his marriage to recognize his children’s needs.

There were respites, “cool-water oases,” one friend called them. At Easter in 1969, her father took all four children to Althorp, where Grandmother Spencer’s kindness eased the pain and confusion of Diana’s days at Park House. She organized an Easter-egg hunt and had presents for all the children. Diana adored her, clung to her, and was never brushed aside. “You must remember that you are special,” Cynthia told her.

“Why?” the child enquired.

“Because you are a Spencer,” her grandmother replied.

Diana attended the Easter services at the small church in Great Brington with her grandparents, father and siblings, in seats next to the chancel where, with a side-glance, she could see the stone effigies of her Spencer ancestors. Once she asked a nanny if when you died you were turned to stone. “Of course not,” the woman replied. “You become dust.” That idea intensified her fear of the dark, which she equated with death.

This visit to Althorp was most memorable to Diana because of Grandmother Spencer’s affection. On one rainy day she took Diana and Charlie to the vast attic where they opened trunks filled with grand uniforms and lovely gowns that had once been worn by Althorp’s former occupants. Cynthia told them stories of the balls that had been held there, the coronations at which their ancestors had participated, royal weddings they had attended.

Shortly after the holiday, Diana and Charlie went to London to meet their stepfather for the first time. Peter Shand Kydd was waiting at the station with Frances when they arrived. He won them over almost immediately: he had a natural affinity with children and showered them with presents. He was also far more permissive than either of their parents.

A competition ensued between Johnnie and Frances for their children’s love. On Diana’s seventh birthday her father gave a party for her at Park House at which the main attraction was a camel called Bert from nearby Dudley Zoo. A platform was built for the young guests to climb on to Bert’s back for a bumpy but exciting ride.

In September 1970 Diana was sent to Riddlesworth Hall, a boarding-school in Thetford, Norfolk. She was only nine and would be separated for the first time from Charlie. She worried that he would be lonely without her, which he was. Also, her father had just emerged from his depression and had become altogether warmer and brighter. Separation from both parents, Charlie and Park House worsened Diana’s sense of instability. Park House and King’s Lynn were where she was rooted and she was terrified to leave. She cried and pleaded with her father to change his mind about sending her away, but to no avail.

After a tearful parting with Charlie, the current nanny accompanied her by train to her new school. Labels had been sewn into all her clothes and while the nanny took care of the luggage Diana held tightly to a small cage containing one of her pet guinea pigs, which she had been assured would have a place in the school’s pet corner. A car met them at the local station and drove them to the school where the nanny delivered Diana into the hands of the headmistress, Elizabeth Ridsdale.

Diana was assigned a narrow metal bed in an austere dormitory. The girls were allowed to have some personal possessions, and Diana had brought with her a select number from her menagerie of stuffed animals.

Riddlesworth Hall was a large, neo-classical house set in a rather dull, flat landscape. About seventy-five girls, ranging in age from seven to eleven, attended the school and one of the reasons Riddlesworth had been chosen for Diana was that Alexandra Loyd was also going there. Her presence helped ease Diana’s homesickness over the first few weeks. Once again the school uniform was red and grey. Gloves, a bowler hat and sensible black shoes were to be worn to Sunday church services and on all other outings.

Once Diana had settled in and made friends, she was relatively happy. One of the games the girls in her dormitory played was “the Water Jump.” This involved leaping over one bed after another—including the one that its occupant wet each night. Usually this brought a school prefect quickly to the door to insist they stop what they were doing. Immediately.

Elizabeth Ridsdale, or Riddy, as she was known to the girls, believed in learning by rote. The girls chanted their multiplication tables, had to ask permission to turn a page in an exercise book before continuing, and library books were kept in locked cases. Their maimers were constantly scrutinized and they were reminded daily of the respect due to their eiders. It was not an agenda that lent itself to the enquiring mind or welcomed debate.

Diana was unexceptional in the classroom, but turned her energy to sport—she swam like a water sprite and won a cup for diving in her first term—and the piano. She loved to play and got on well with her teacher. Lessons and practice were a joy to her. “She showed talent and curiosity, always wanting to do the next lesson before she had finished what we were working on,” her teacher said. She also enjoyed dancing, and had lessons in tap and ballet, but ballet music drew her to the more classic form of dance and a lifelong devotion to Tchaikovsky’s work. She dreamed of becoming a ballerina and of dancing in the Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake.

She enjoyed being in school plays but only if she had a non-speaking part In one production she was made up as a silent Dutch doll. She hated being called “Di,” which remained true throughout her life, and as every girl at school had a nickname, she became known as “Duch” for the impressive mime she gave as the Dutch doll.

To her surprise and delight, when she returned to Park House for her summer break, a swimming-pool had been built on the south side of the house. Warm, sunny days were spent in joyous water-play with her siblings and Alexandra Loyd. In a wildly extravagant moment, her father had had the pool imported in sections from the United States and constructed on site. The American pool, he claimed, was better made and safer than any British product. She took tennis lessons with a Mrs. Lansdowne, but was not as keen on the court as she was in the pool where she performed back flips off the side and was proud of her ability to dive with perfectly straight legs.

The train rides to London or Sussex to see her mother at weekends during the summer were a time of painful recollection. She and Charlie usually travelled together, and there would be tearful partings from Frances: she would cry and declare that she could not bear them to leave. On their arrival back at Park House their father complained that their mother and Peter spoiled them and made things more difficult for him. On their journeys between parents, both children were filled with apprehension at what they would have to deal with at their destination.

Where her parents were concerned, whatever Diana did she never seemed to get it right And when she felt most confused she would raid the refrigerator. Her bad eating habits escalated when she returned to Riddlesworth Hall. “I ate and ate and ate,” she admitted. “It was always a great joke—let’s get Diana to have three kippers at breakfast and six pieces of bread. And I did all that.”

Throughout these eating binges she never knew, of course, that she was starved of affection. Neither Frances nor Johnnie were inclined to hug or kiss their children, but Diana would often embrace Charlie and he would cling to her—they were “stuck together,” she would often say. She rarely saw Sarah and Jane, whose term dates were different from hers and who therefore “drifted” in and out of her life: both parents found it easier to have just two of their children with them at a time.

At Christmas, though, the four siblings gathered together at Park House. The cold weather kept them mainly indoors where they spent many hours in Sarah’s room exchanging confidences. Diana sat wide-eyed at Sarah’s feet as her sister told stories of life at West Heath. There were shared giggles, a sense of comradeship, of belonging.

Each year, a month before Christmas, Diana and Charlie were given a catalogue from Hamley’s, London’s largest toy shop, and told to put a tick beside the toys they would like. On Christmas morning they would find them prettily wrapped beneath the tall tree that stood in the hall. The element of surprise—as well as the personal touch—was missing from their father’s presents but there were imaginative gifts from their mother and stepfather—a new saddle for Sarah, a musical box, whose lid lifted to reveal a ballerina twirling on one foot to music by Tchaikovsky for Diana, an admiral’s hat for Charlie. Lady Fermoy could be relied upon for book tokens and Grandmother Spencer for pretty jumpers and frocks.

Lady Fermoy joined the children and their father at Park House for the holiday and accompanied them to services at St. Margaret’s Church. “I remember Diana used to sit on the fifth pew on the right-hand side next to her father,” Wendy Twight recalled. “I was one of the bell ringers and sat opposite them. [Her father] was a churchwarden. I remember her in a lovely hat and coat. … She was a very shy, retiring little girl, very fond of animals and quite a delightful little character.”

“She had a sweet singing voice and liked to join in when the hymns were being sung. It was common talk that her mother had left her children,” another of the church staff remembered. “It was a shocking thing. We all felt sorry for the father but much more saddened for the little ones. You couldn’t help but notice that Diana was playing the role of mother to her younger brother. She would sit between him and her father at services and whisper to him from time to time and when they got up to leave she always had him tight by the hand.”

For years the Royal Family had spent Christmas at Sandringham. In 1964, though, they went to Windsor.* However, there was still much activity on the estate as the staff and workers remained. Sandringham House, though labyrinthine and containing 365 rooms—Queen Mary described them as having been laid out much like a rabbit warren—is one of the Queen’s private homes. The main rooms are not on such a grand scale as in her other houses, and were decorated in a less grandiose style by their first occupants, the future King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, when they married in 1863. The children’s wing is especially comfortable and there is a small cinema where the family gathers to see the latest movies.

With spring’s arrival, invitations to Sandringham were extended occasionally to Diana and Charlie. Later she complained they were “shunted over” to Sandringham three years in succession to watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, starring Sally Ann Howes and Dick Van Dyke—it was then Prince Andrew’s favourite film—with Princes Andrew and Edward, their cousins David and Sarah Armstrong-Jones, Princess Margaret’s two children, and the children of Sandringham estate workers. All the young guests viewed an invitation to Sandringham to see a film as a command, and knew they had to curtsy to the princes and wear their best clothes.

All the children felt that they were expected to be grateful for inclusion in this lofty circle. Prince Andrew was a terror, a handsome youngster, arrogant and overbearing, who enjoyed imitating farting noises then looking in an accusatory manner at someone else. “Talk about spoiled!” one of the other young guests to these Sandringham children’s parties recalled. “He had the most outrageous toys—a shiny grey miniature Aston Martin convertible, perfect in every detail and with JB 007 for James Bond on the licence-plate. He could really drive it around the grounds but we were not allowed to touch it!”) Edward, who was Charlie’s age, was inhibited, afflicted with a rather “rabbity nervousness” and seemed to resent being forced to watch the film and play host to children he only saw at gatherings organized by the Queen’s staff.

Diana would “kick and scream” that she did not want to go, and one of the staff would run for her father who would demand angrily that she dress immediately: one did not refuse to attend an invitation from a member of the Royal Family, he insisted. It was rude, unacceptable behaviour. She always gave in. Other children among the twenty or so guests at these gatherings say they felt much the same about them. One described Diana as “painfully shy. She kept her head down quite a lot and stayed very close to her little brother’s side. He seemed to idolize her. Great big eyes, I remember, always looking her way.”

At this time Prince Charles and Princess Anne were away at school. Diana had seen them fleetingly at Sandringham on various visits, but that was all. Usually at the end of one of the Sandringham children’s gatherings, the Queen would make a brief appearance and shake everyone’s hand. What impressed Diana was that on these occasions the Queen wore gloves even though she was indoors. She saw less of Prince Philip, but the few glimpses she had were of a tall, brusque, good-looking blond man who seemed not to like children. The young guests sensed it and everyone “kind of froze up when he appeared.”

During the Christmas holiday Lady Fermoy always took the children to King’s Lynn so they could do their own shopping for presents. Afterwards they went to Ladyman’s for tea. Diana was conscious of the attention they attracted. People of Lynn, as the townsfolk called themselves, felt sorry for them. “We all knew who the children were,” one shopkeeper said, “and about the scandal. It was a sad thing. ‘What in God’s name is their poor father to do with all those little ones?’ was the question most asked. The boy was one thing, but three girls? We expected he would remarry. Who, was the mystery everyone wanted to see solved. He used to come in my store alone, do his shopping himself about once a week. He was all alone in that big house once the children went off to boarding-schools. Must have been pretty lonely in that rattling old Victorian place they lived in.”

Johnnie Spencer’s emotional state had not improved since the divorce. Once again he was considered a good catch, but after the failure of his marriage he was wary. He had also begun drinking again. With the children he was short-tempered and remote, and ruled his household with a rod of iron. Charlie recalled that his father’s voice was always the last to be heard. He did not allow his children to eat with him until they were nine or ten. Instead he occasionally came up to the nursery to have tea with them.

Diana and Charlie were happiest at Park House when Sarah and Jane were there too. Sarah, with her shock of red hair and expressive eyes, was growing into a beautiful young woman. She was still mad about horses but she also talked a lot about boys. She had to watch her weight and was already on a diet. “You mustn’t eat so much,” she warned Diana. “One day soon you’ll be sorry. It’s not good to be fat. Boys don’t like fat girls.”

Sarah was having severe emotional problems, although no one in her family had recognized how serious they were. She, too, had suffered from her parents’ divorce, yet as the oldest child she had been expected to bear up and set an example for the others. She held in much of the turmoil she experienced. She was desperate for a steady boyfriend but in her cloistered life as a schoolgirl there was little opportunity to meet a young man. She had already had a teenage battle with alcohol. She has admitted that she drank anything she could lay her hands on—“whisky, Cointreau, sherry or, most usually, vodka,” because she believed the latter could not be detected on her breath. She hid the bottles in her underwear drawer at school and disposed of the empty ones when she went out. Her addiction made her more daredevil than ever, but somehow she was able—for a while, at least—to keep her drinking undetected, although it is doubtful that Jane was unaware of it.

Sarah and Jane were independent of outsiders but codependent on each other. Their characters had been moulded by the way in which they had been forced to use their own resources. Like Diana and Charlie they stuck together. However, the younger pair at least had a parent close by, albeit self-absorbed, during the crisis period. “Their father was a very distant man,” admitted Jean Rowe. “He came of the generation and background where parents lived quite separate lives from their children.” That was true certainly, but he also had about him a vulnerability that promised more affection than he could give. All the children lived in hope of a time when he would reach out to them.

Diana remained in awe of Sarah. “I used to do all her washing when she came back from school. I packed her suitcase, ran her bath, made her bed, the whole lot. I did it all and I thought it was wonderful.” Sarah, loving and appreciative of Diana’s slavish attention, often stopped what she was doing to hug her. The only other person who hugged Diana was Grandmother Spencer, whose visits to Park House were infrequent

During the spring of 1972, Johnnie took Diana and Charlie to Althorp while Sarah and Jane went to their mother. Despite their fear of their grandfather, and frequent reminders not to touch this or that, the children had a marvellous time. Their special kingdom remained the long range of attics where, besides the trunks of old clothes, “they discovered such fascinating and forgotten objects as chamber-pots, and piles of old diaries and albums.” Tea-time was always special, with tiny sandwiches cut in unusual shapes and Grandmother Spencer telling them stories about the people whose pictures they had found in the attic.

Diana remembered this visit in vivid detail because it was the last she made to Grandmother Spencer. Shortly afterwards, Cynthia died of a brain tumour, aged seventy-five. Diana had difficulty in controlling her sobs during the memorial service held at the Chapel Royal in St. James’s Palace. But Sarah realized how lonely her grandfather would be in that vast estate by himself and began a correspondence with him which, for the first time, exposed the softness that was hidden beneath his gruff exterior. “The shine is gone from my life,” he said, after his wife’s death. He withdrew from most of his former activities and became “a solitary man, living on memories.”

Frances and Peter Shand Kydd had recently bought a house on the Isle of Seil, near Oban off the coast of Scotland. All four Spencer children joined them there with Peter Shand Kydd’s three children in August for a carefree holiday filled with boating, fishing and setting lobster-pots. It was followed by a family upset: Sarah was caught drunk at school and was asked to leave West Heath. After numerous family conferences it was decided that in September she would be sent abroad to study the piano at a conservatory in Vienna, which pleased Lady Fermoy more than it did Frances, who was still not speaking to her mother.

Diana celebrated leaving Riddlesworth with an excellent report. In September, she would go to West Heath, where Jane would be in her final year. It would be the first time that she had ever been at school with one of her sisters and she was looking forward to it.

West Heath was in Kent, a short distance from Sevenoaks, where Jack Cade’s rebels defeated Henry VI’s army in 1450. With its half-timbered facades, steep gables, mellow bricks, and its near proximity to London—just twenty-five miles—and to two of the largest and most historic homes in England, Knole House and Hever Castle, the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, tourists crowded the streets and its shops and restaurants during all but the most inclement days. But West Heath was surrounded by rolling hills and verdant countryside. It was a small school of some 120 girls, well known for the élite families of its students. Eighty-five years earlier, the Queen’s grandmother, Queen Mary, when she was Princess May of Teck, had been a pupil.

Ruth Rudge, the Australian headmistress, recognized Diana’s musical talent and encouraged her to continue her piano and dance lessons. To begin with Diana threw most of her considerable energy into these fields, to the detriment of her other studies. She also accepted “dares”—perhaps hoping to gain Mends—such as night-time raids of the school larder. She was soon in trouble with Miss Rudge, who perhaps feared she had another Sarah on her hands, but Diana soon settled in and got on with her schoolwork.

She slept in a long, narrow, ten-bed, sparsely decorated dormitory. There were portraits of the Royal family on the walls, one of the Queen and, prophetically, one of Prince Charles, in his investiture robes as Prince of Wales, over her bed. As always, she had brought with her some stuffed animals and photographs, of Charlie, her mother and Peter Shand Kydd, and a snapshot of the three sisters taken just before she left for school. She also had one of her father holding her as a small child.

At West Heath all the girls had to do community work in Sevenoaks. At weekends, Diana helped an old lady with light cleaning until she was moved into hospital. Then she visited handicapped children at a nearby home, and later spent many hours at Derenth Park, a large psychiatric hospital. This was frustrating work that disturbed most of the other girls, but Diana got great satisfaction from eliciting smiles from her patients and never tired of visiting them.

Her life at West Heath was not entirely happy: she worried constantly about Charlie. She felt guilty that she was not with him to help him through his loneliness at Park House, his inability to communicate well with his father, and then being sent at six to boarding-school. Neither could she come to terms with the way she kept growing. At twelve she was over five foot ten, and her ballet teacher had told her that now she could never become a ballerina. Her height caused other problems: all her peers, male and female, were shorter. She hated attending parties as she felt awkward and out of place.

“It was queer about Diana,” one of her schoolfriends said. “She could have been the most popular girl in the class. She was one of the prettiest and, although she hated her height and was always hunching herself up to look shorter, or flopping down, cross-legged on the floor in a group instead of standing or sitting in a chair, I thought it [her height] made her look even more attractive. She never seemed to trust people. Most of us confided the most personal things to each other. It formed a bond. Diana was never able to do that, although she had a few close friends. She had a great sense of humour. Rather flip, very sharp, very fast. And she read a lot. Always had her nose in a book when we had time to ourselves. Romance novels mostly. She had fallen off a horse, she told me, when she was younger and was afraid of them and so she never was involved with riding, which was an important aspect at West Heath.”

Her passion for the piano remained and for a time she fantasized about becoming a concert pianist. Her tennis remained passable, but she won several medals for swimming and diving. Mathematics, French and English grammar were her downfall, and she had trouble keeping up her marks. A friend recalled, “I remember how much she liked pretty clothes. She always looked trim and rather stylish, an almost impossible task during the early teens. Maybe it was her height. But I don’t think that was it. She had what I guess you would call an eye. She knew what looked well on her.

“She was somewhat compulsive about her clothes, always ironing them to get out every wrinkle, and she had a way with her hair. None of us were allowed to wear makeup, but her lovely colouring saved the day. Those startling blue eyes. And I seem to remember that her hair was rather reddish then. Yes, certainly auburn, not true blonde. Whenever we did something against the rules—had food in our rooms, or the light on too late, or were late too many times to class—Miss Rudge gave us yard work to do as a punishment. Diana seemed to relish this. She would weed like a crazy person. The rest of us hated it.”

Carolyn Pride was also in this dormitory of West Heath’s youngest girls and the two became fast friends. They shared not only many interests but were both children of divorced parents, which was still a rarity.

Diana had grown from “a very quiet, reserved child to being a self-reliant, loving, domesticated person,” Albert (Bertie) Betts, Johnnie’s butler at Park House, noted of her return home during the Christmas break of 1974. “She washed and ironed her own jeans and did all her own chores. She was always immaculate. My wife Elsie [the cook-housekeeper] used to make her a lot of raspberry and strawberry ice cream. Diana was very fond of lemon soufflé and loved chocolate cake with butter icing, which my wife used to make for her tuck-box before she went back to school.”

In the summer of 1975, just before her fourteenth birthday, her grandfather Earl Spencer died aged eighty-three. The old gentleman’s death changed her life dramatically. Her father was now the 8th Earl Spencer, she was Lady Diana Spencer, Charlie, at eleven, had become Viscount Althorp, and the family was to take up residence at Althorp House, set in a 600-acre park on an estate of 13,000 acres. There was also Spencer House in London (which was leased to the Economist Intelligence Unit), the fabulous Spencer library, works of art, antiques and family jewels. Her father was now a very wealthy man, no longer dependent on his father for support. Speculation was rampant as to when he might remarry.

He claimed that until this time he “had fought shy of any emotional commitment … I just wanted to bring up my children and it was very hard alone. … I had my chances with the girls. I took out one or two but in London, never at home, but somehow they didn’t seem, well, suitable.”

“Well, of course,” one of these ladies said, “Johnnie Spencer was eminently eligible. He would one day—sooner or later—become Earl Spencer and have a great house and money. He was not the most fascinating company, though. Travel, the world, even gossip did not seem to interest him much. No wonder when he was once mentioned as a possible husband for the Princess Elizabeth before she became engaged to Philip she crossed him off her list. Although they could well have discussed dogs and horses, I should think. He was good-looking and from a great family, but he lacked charisma. And after Frances left him he also had four children who were not that easy to deal with, from what was being said about them, and in addition, Johnnie was a man of high and low moods. He had impeccable manners, and—I don’t mean to shoot him down too much—he could be good company. But then he would suddenly grow silent—long, morose silences. I was wary, and I guess not as hungry for the splendours and responsibility of an estate like Althorp as some women might have been.”

Enter Raine, Countess of Dartmouth, mother of four, daughter of the legendary romantic novelist Barbara Cartland. Raine’s parents had divorced when she was young and she had had difficulty in adjusting to her mother’s new husband and her step-brothers. From her youth she had seemed determined to make a grand success of her life and to upstage her famous, flamboyant mother. With her marriage, she acquired a title, which her mother did not have, but Raine was bored with her husband and disappointed that his title did not come with a great house.

Raine possessed an indomitable will and had personally accomplished a great deal. After a tough campaign she had been elected to the London County Council to represent West Lewisham, and then Richmond-on-Thames. She became chairman of the Historic Buildings Board, the Covent Garden Development Committee and a member of at least a dozen more important committees. She appeared on television and radio, gave lectures, and became well known for her trim figure (5’8”, 36-24-34), and her immaculately coiffed bouffant hairdo. She was not a great beauty, but she was a woman of striking vitality and an astute business sense. She enjoyed the company of men, and knew how to win them over.

She had only met Johnnie Spencer at an occasional dinner until they both attended a Kensington garden party in the summer of 1974. “It was a hot day and everyone was in the garden,” she recalled. “When I went inside there was only one person there—John. ‘I haven’t seen you in twenty years,’ he said. ‘Things are so coincidental aren’t they?’ I replied.”

From that moment on, Raine channelled all her energy into Johnnie. Her impact on him was enormous, for Johnnie liked having his life directed for him. A colleague of Raine described her as having “an iron hand in an iron glove, which is so beautifully wrought people don’t realize that even the glove is made of iron until it hits them.” Another exclaimed, “She’s absolutely wonderful, you know. If you brief her properly, she will take everything in and once she has the bit between her teeth she’ll never let go!”

By the time Diana and her siblings arrived home for the summer in 1975, Raine was in full charge. Their father explained that Countess Dartmouth had kindly offered to help him move from Park House to Althorp. Decisions had to be taken as to what furniture and art should go with them and, more importantly, what work needed to be done at Althorp to accommodate its new occupants.

On Diana’s arrival at home, boxes and crates were everywhere. She took the deep stone stairs two at a time to make sure her bedroom had been left untouched. Empty packing cases stood outside the door but as yet nothing had been moved. She put on a bathing suit, locked the door and went for a swim. Although she had realized that when her grandfather died they would move to Althorp, she had not been prepared for the sudden reality of it. Park House had been the only home she had known and it was frightening to be leaving it, especially as Althorp had overwhelmed her with its vast magnificence.

That evening her father had arranged for his four children to meet Countess Dartmouth for the first time. Nothing was said then of any serious relationship between Raine and Johnnie, and in any case the Countess was married to someone else. That night, apparently, her husband had commitments in London, which was why he would not be joining them.

Raine arrived at Park House at about half past six that evening in a chauffeur-driven car, wearing a floral chiffon dress, a blinding diamond pin and a rather large picture hat. Diana and Sarah exchanged a look as she entered the room on their father’s arm. Raine had done her homework and knew quite a lot about them all, their interests, what they had been doing lately, and she found something on which to compliment each of them. Diana loathed her immediately, although she was impressed that she was the daughter of Barbara Cartland, one of her favourite authors.

They went in Raine’s limousine to the Duke’s Head Hotel, the only venue in King’s Lynn for an elegant dinner. Diana and Charlie insisted on sharing the front seat with the chauffeur. The party was whisked inside and upstairs to a private room that overlooked the ancient Tuesday Marketplace, which had recently been modernized for use as car parking. Across the square was the old Corn Exchange and beyond that the historic port.

Diana would have preferred to eat in the dining room, which seemed jollier than this lacklustre room, but it was soon evident that this was to be a special dinner and that their father did not want them to be exposed to curious eyes. As the dinner was served, Raine carried the burden of conversation. They would be driving to Althorp the following day with Raine, who had supervised the redecorating. Johnnie kept insisting how kind of her it was to take so much time from her important work to help them, and how grateful they should be. After dinner, the children were driven back to Park House while their father remained at the Duke’s Head “for a short talk with Raine.”

Sarah had immediately dubbed the Countess “Acid Raine” and not one of the four young Spencers was inclined to accept her intrusion into their lives without a struggle.

*In 1989 the Royal Family reverted to their earlier agenda and have spent Christmas at Sandringham ever since.