Diana (3 page)

After a date with the Prince, she would tell her flatmates, “It’s appalling the way they push him around,” and “They work him too hard!”

Riddles abounded during the courtship. Diana told a London Press Association reporter: “I’d like to marry soon. What woman doesn’t want to marry eventually. Next year? Why not?” Then she retracted her statement the moment it appeared. “I never said anything about marriage. I am terribly worried about it. It’s very upsetting.”

During their courtship, Diana was completely quiet about Charles. She told journalist Harry Arnold: “You know I cannot say anything about the Prince or my feelings for him. I am saying that off my own bat. No one has told me to stay quiet.”

She felt she could neither confirm nor deny whether Charles had proposed. “I can’t say yes or no.”

Her demure response to Charles’s proposal: “Yes, please.”

“[Marrying Charles] is what I wanted—it is what I want.”

“I know what I’m doing. I will be able to cope.”

At a press conference just after the engagement was announced, Diana averred: “With Prince Charles beside me, I cannot go wrong.”

At her first television interview she said, “I feel my role is supporting my husband whenever I can and always being behind him, encouraging him.
And also, most important, being a mother and a wife. And that’s what I try to achieve.”

When asked what interests she shared with Charles, Diana answered, “All outdoor pursuits except riding.”

As a result of a childhood accident in which she fell from her pony and broke her arm, she never again wanted to find herself on horseback. She told one of her former flatmates: “I even prayed to God to give me the courage to ride again. I desperately wanted to please Charles, to be able to ride with him because I realized it was so important for him, for us. And yet I just couldn’t relax. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t. Sometimes I would cry alone at night about it.”

While Diana and Charles were courting, she attended the Ludlow Races, where she encountered Camilla Parker Bowles. “I felt so vulnerable. It
was clear that I was the outsider in that friendship. Charles was much keener to talk to Camilla than to me. He practically ignored me. I felt that, throughout that whole time, Camilla was simply sizing me up. When Charles finished racing, it was Camilla he ran towards and started talking to. You could tell by the way they were looking at each other that something was going on.”