Diana (16 page)

A co-owner of the Young England Kindergarten remembers that, upon hearing that one of the
teachers was engaged to a man named Charles King, Diana rejoined: “How funny that you are marrying Charles King, and I am married to the future King Charles.”

On fulfilling her first duties as a royal wife in Carmarthen, Wales: “The people who stood outside for hours and hours in the torrential rain. They were so welcoming…. I was terrified.”

To put an obviously nervous host at ease, she said, “I’d love a really black coffee. I went out with friends last night and I’ve got a bit of a hangover.”

At a polo tournament, she turned to a fellow spectator and said, “[Polo is] very boring, isn’t it?”

A stranger called out to her, asking: “May I kiss you?” “No,” she replied, “but you can kiss my
hand, though you never know where it may have been.”

At one affair, she danced with various men, without apologies. “It’s all so innocent, and I don’t intend to act like the guilty party.”

Responding to a letter from her friend Oliver Gilmour apologizing for several controversial remarks he made while conversing with Diana at the wedding of a mutual friend: “Oliver, I don’t know what you’re talking about. As you’re so tall, it would have gone straight over my head anyway.”

Stroking her host’s dog at a dinner party, he remarked that he didn’t think she liked dogs. “I don’t like corgis,” she replied, referring to her mother-in-law’s famous brood of Welsh corgis. “They always get blamed for the farts.”

On the difficulties and pressures brought about by public life

After her first official engagement: “What a long time to sit! I’ve got pins and needles in my bottom. I’ve never had pins and needles in my bottom before in my life!”

“I am terrified that one day I might pop out of a low-cut evening dress and show everything. That would be too terrible for words. I would feel so terrible.”

Presenting awards for courage to ten youngsters at Westminster Abbey in 1985, she said, “I feel shy sometimes and still pretty nervous on big occasions.”

“Staying in the public eye is not worth the pain it’s going to cause.”

One night she attended a gala concert, despite a bad cold. She later told the press: “Every time there was a quiet note, I’d go cough, cough, and you know when you’re not supposed to cough, you cough more.”