Diana (2 page)

Discussing her time at West Heath private school in Sevenoaks, Kent, where she boarded from 1972—1977: “I was a St. Trinian’s—style terror, often
in trouble. In spite of what my headteachers thought, I did actually learn something, although you wouldn’t have known so from my O-level results. My years at West Heath were certainly happy ones. I made many friends, who I often see. Perhaps now when future generations are handing out punishments for talking after lights out, pillow fights, or illegal food, they will be told to run six times round this hall.”

Punishment for misbehavior at boarding school was running six times around the assembly hall or weeding the garden. “I became a great expert at weeding.”

“I wasn’t any good at anything at school; I just felt hopeless. A dropout.”

On the volatile marriage of her parents

“The whole thing was very unstable. I remember my mother crying. Daddy never spoke to us about it. We could never ask questions. Too many nannies.”

The night her parents broke up was “just awful, awful.”

The divorce of parents is “a discovery no small child can bear.”

On her sisters

“[My sisters] always seemed to be leaving me behind.”

She once told her nanny, Mary Clarke: “I can’t wait to grow up and be like my sister Sarah. I
can’t wait to fall in love and get married and have lots of children. But I’ll never marry unless I really love someone. If you’re not really sure you love someone you might get divorced. I never want to be divorced.”

On her father’s second wife, Raine

The Spencer children loathed their father’s lover, Raine, whom he married in 1976. “I couldn’t bear Althorp [father’s estate] anymore,” Diana said. “A hard Raine was falling.” The children also referred to her as “Acid Raine,” and regularly chanted within earshot the nursery rhyme, “Rain, Rain, Go Away.”

When Charles recalled for the press how he’d noticed Diana as “an attractive sixteen-year-old,” she remarked, “I suppose it makes a nice little segment of history, but I think he barely noticed me at all.”

Charles reencountered Diana when she was nineteen, in the summer of 1980. Three years had passed, and he noted, “No more puppy fat.” She blushed, and joked: “I’m just taller now. I’ve stretched the puppy fat.”

During that encounter, Diana mentioned how touched she had been watching him on television at the funeral of his beloved great-uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten. “You looked so sad when you walked up the aisle at the funeral. It was the most
tragic thing I’ve ever seen. My heart bled for you when I watched it. I thought: It’s wrong. You are lonely. You should be with somebody to look after you.”

On her age difference with Charles: “Never really thought about it.”

“Gee, he’s thirty-two. I’m only nineteen. I never thought he’d ever look twice at me.”

“At the age of nineteen, you always think you’re prepared for everything, and you think you have the knowledge of what’s coming ahead. But although I was daunted at the prospect at the time, I felt I had the support of my husband-to-be.”

Charles was to marry an unabashed virgin: “I knew I had to keep myself tidy for what lay ahead.”