THE STORY OF WALLIS WARFIELD AND HER LONG-TIME friend Mary Kirk fascinated me when I first read of it. Decades-old female friendships are complex and go through many different phases, as theirs seems to have done. I stuck to the main facts in writing about them, but I imagined events from Mary’s point of view: what did it feel like to be her? In this, I was greatly assisted by a tip-off from Anne Sebba in her excellent 2012 biography of Wallis entitled That Woman. She wrote in her endnotes of a self-published biography of Mary produced by her sister Anne Kirk Cooke and niece Elizabeth Lightfoot, entitled The Other Mrs Simpson. It took a while to track down a copy, and it’s not in any sense a conventional biography, but it reproduces Mary’s letters home from London, and thus let me hear Mary’s voice and catch a glimpse of her joyful, generous nature.
The ending of my novel is also true: Mary died of cancer at the age of forty-five, leaving behind her beloved Ernest and her two-year-old son Henry (aka Whistlebinkie). In 1943, Ernest was sent to Bombay as a post ordnance officer, overseeing munition supplies, and Henry went to Pennsylvania to stay with a friend of Mary’s called Elizabeth Schiller. He returned to Britain after the war, at which point he was sent to boarding school and does not appear to have spent much time with his father. Seven years after Mary’s death, Ernest got married again, to Avril Leveson-Gower, described in the press as a ‘sportswoman and socialite’; from photographs online I can see a vague resemblance to Mary. I like to think that Mary was Ernest’s favourite among his four wives; certainly he wrote to her sister Anne after her death, How close Mary seems to me all the time – so close in fact that for the most part I do not have any sense that she is gone.
Wallis continued to write to Ernest until he died in 1958, and he helped her when she was writing her memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons (1956). I have quoted directly in the novel from some of the letters she wrote to him after their separation, and there can be no doubt that she missed him.
In 2003, British papers were released revealing that Wallis and Ernest were subject to Special Branch surveillance from 1935 after King George V requested help from Prime Minister Baldwin because he was alarmed by the amount of money the Prince of Wales was spending on Wallis and concerned they might be blackmailing him. Superintendent Albert Canning was put on the case and he reported on Wallis’s pro-German links and stated that she was having an affair with a Mayfair car salesman called Guy Trundle. (There’s not a shred of evidence to support this.) From then until after the war, Wallis was under constant surveillance by British security services, as was Edward, even during the brief period he spent on the throne, and the FBI also kept a dossier on the couple. They were both opposed to America entering the war and naïve in their friendships with leading Germans, but it’s hard to believe they were knowingly spying for Germany.
The rumours about Wallis having an affair with von Ribbentrop continue to be investigated by biographers today, and several books and TV documentaries explore her Nazi sympathies and those of the Duke, including Andrew Morton’s Seventeen Carnations (2016). The Constance Spry bouquets delivered to Wallis are variously reported to have been roses or carnations and may in fact have been both. The engraved platinum bracelet is an invention of mine.
Ernest kept his Jewish heritage very quiet, since prejudice against Jews was widespread in Britain in the early twentieth century and it would have adversely affected his business and social standing. His sister Maud only told Henry about it after his father’s death, when he was eighteen years old, and as an adult he decided to embrace his Jewish roots and emigrate to Israel, taking the name Aharon Solomons. He fought in the Yom Kippur war as part of the Israeli Defence Force, and became a scuba-diving and free-diving instructor in Eilat (you’ll find videos online of him explaining his methods).
Wallis Warfield (seated, left) with the bridal party, before her marriage to Win Spencer. Mary Kirk is standing third from the left. © Topham Picturepoint
As a novelist, I like dramatising the lives of famous figures from the past, but it becomes tricky when they are still alive or have close living relatives. At the time of writing it is almost twenty years since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, but I decided not to make her a character in this novel. Instead, I invented the characters of Alex, Rachel and Susie Hargreaves, and viewed Diana, and the investigation into her death, through their eyes. The reason for Diana and Dodi’s twenty-eight-minute visit to Villa Windsor on 30 August 1997 is still not entirely clear but the painting was my invention. Certainly it seems unlikely that Diana would ever have lived there.
I have no evidence that Diana met the Duchess of Windsor, although it’s possible. Wallis was said to be very fond of Prince Charles, whom she met in 1971 when he visited her and the Duke in Paris. She came over to Britain for the Duke’s funeral in 1972 and spent three days as a guest of the Queen at Buckingham Palace, after which Charles wrote to her. She is said to have considered bequeathing some of her jewellery to his future wife, but in the event this did not happen. Both Charles and Diana attended Wallis’s funeral in 1986, at which her remains were placed next to the Duke’s in the royal burial ground near Windsor Castle.
Alex’s investigation of the crash that killed Princess Diana is only described in my novel between 31 August and Christmas 1997, by which time the conspiracy theorists were just getting started. For the stories of the ‘flash before the crash’, the search for the Fiat Uno, Diana’s premonitions that she would be murdered, the arguments over the carbon monoxide in Henri Paul’s blood, the large amount, of money that had been deposited in his bank account, the delays in an ambulance getting Diana to hospital, and many more controversies, there are a number of books available, as well as documentaries that can be found online.
Two programmes were shown on British television in June 1998: one backing the conspiracy theorists and the other, by journalist Martyn Gregory, pointing out the flaws in their arguments. Martyn Gregory’s account seems to me the more convincing, but opinion polls at that time indicated that a staggering 85 per cent of the British public believed Diana had been murdered.
The French investigation into the crash did not report until 1999; it concluded that Diana died as a result of an accident caused by Henri Paul driving at high speed while intoxicated. It was followed by Operation Paget in the UK in 2004, an investigation into the various conspiracy theories, and a full judicial inquest, which reported in April 2008 that Diana and Dodi were killed as a result of the gross negligence of Henri Paul, and that the pursuing paparazzi were a contributory factor. For a full account of the crash, you can read the inquest findings online.
The emotional impact of Diana’s death was very real. There were dozens of sobbing faces in the crowd outside her funeral, and statistics show that the suicide rate in England and Wales increased by 17 per cent in the four weeks after her death, while documented instances of self-harm rose by 44.3 per cent. However, it would be hard to prove that it signalled a long-term change in the British national character, as some claimed at the time. Was the communal expression of grief valuable for those concerned? Or do some look back on it a little shamefaced now? Certainly it started a trend for massive floral tributes after the deaths of much-loved celebrities, with the north London display for George Michael a recent example.
I agree with the opinion Susie Hargreaves expresses in the novel, that Diana would have gone on to make a valuable contribution to the world. She would probably have had a few more romantic dramas as well. It will be fascinating to see the new perspectives on her all-too-brief life that will undoubtedly emerge around the twentieth anniversary of her death on 31 August 2017.