Chapter 1Park House

Foreword

I first saw her face in a place she had never been. It was a kiosk on a cold street in a city where I was posted, years ago, where the Western magazines arrived late and water-stained and cost more than a day's wage, and on the cover of one of them — under a language that was not English, in a country that had no reason to care about the internal arrangements of the House of Windsor — was Diana. I remember thinking it was strange. I had spent that decade learning how power actually moved in the places I was sent to: who signed the orders, who controlled the roads, who could have a man arrested before breakfast. Diana could do none of these things. She held no office. She commanded no ministry. And yet there she was, on a newsstand nine time zones from Kensington, outselling the men who ran the country she was standing in.

That contradiction is the reason this book exists. My subject has always been power and the people who hold it — the ones with armies, or oil, or the machinery of a state at their fingertips — and for twenty years I wrote about them from the places where their decisions came to ground. Diana was, on paper, the softest assignment I had ever accepted. No frontline. No junta. A palace, a wardrobe, a wedding the whole world sat down to watch. I took her on almost as a rest.

She was not a rest. Within the first months I understood that I had not left my beat at all — I had only found a stranger example of it. Here was a woman handed no power the constitution recognized, who had assembled, out of a face and a photographic industry and an instinct for the exact gesture, an authority that the institution which made her could neither control nor survive. I had watched governments fear tanks. I had not, until her, watched a monarchy fear a photograph.

The record I worked from was not the one I was used to. In the field you work from what you can see and from whoever will talk to you at cost to themselves. Here the difficulty was the opposite: too much record, not too little. Sixteen years of it. The published memoirs and the authorized accounts and the ones the Palace wished had never been written; the files of a divorce conducted as statecraft; the tape transcripts, the leaked calls, the inquest testimony; and above all the photographs — some two and a half million frames of a single human face, which turned out to be less an archive than a weapon that had gone off in slow motion across two decades. I had expected to spend three years correcting the myth. I spent them, instead, learning how carefully the myth had been built, and by whom, and against whose wishes.

What I found was neither the fairy tale nor the tragedy, both of which have been sold to exhaustion. I found a study in power: its acquisition without permission, its exercise without office, its ruinous cost to the person who wields it and cannot put it down. The girl who stood at a nursery window in Norfolk and heard her mother's car leave on the gravel became the one adult in the whole story who understood, before any of the professionals did, that the camera was not the enemy of the throne but its rival. She lost almost everything to that understanding. She also, for a while, won.

Then the tunnel.

I have written about the powerful in rooms where the power was real and the danger was real and the two were the same thing. I did not expect to meet that combination in a life that began at a garden party and ended in a Paris underpass. I met it anyway. That is what the true subjects do to a writer. They take the map you arrived with and quietly redraw it, and by the time you have finished you are no longer certain the frontlines were ever where you thought.

— Vivian Ashcombe, London

Chapter 1 · Park House

She always came back to the gravel.

In the fourteen years between the morning her mother drove away from Park House and the afternoon Diana Spencer stepped into the glass coach that carried her to St Paul's, she would tell the story of that sound a dozen times to a dozen different listeners: therapists, confidants, her brother Charles, the tape recorder Dr James Colthurst carried to her rooms at Kensington Palace on Andrew Morton's behalf twenty years later. The sound was the same each time. A car's wheels turning on pea gravel. The slow pressure of rubber against stone. A Land Rover, or something like one, accelerating down the drive and away. She was six years old. Her mother was gone. The founding myth of her life was born in the crunch of a driveway she had no power to cross.

Park House stood, then as now, on the edge of the Queen's Sandringham estate in Norfolk, a rented property on royal land, a brick-and-stone Victorian box with bay windows and low ceilings and a lawn that ran down toward the stone wall separating the family's world from the wider estate. The Spencers leased it from George VI, and later from his daughter, and the arrangement had the comfortable weightlessness of aristocratic reciprocity: Edward John Spencer (Johnnie, equerry to two monarchs) and his wife Frances had known the royal family for most of their lives. The Queen was a cousin by marriage. Prince Philip was a neighbour. Prince Andrew was a year older than Diana; she was sometimes invited to tea at Sandringham House to keep him company. The boundary between commoner and royal, which the coming decade would teach her was the only boundary that mattered, was in her childhood not quite visible.

What was visible, from the windows of Park House, was sky. Norfolk sky. Flat and enormous and cold. The land unrolled in beet fields and beech coverts toward the dunes and the grey tidal light of the North Sea. In winter the marshes iced over. In summer the light stayed until after ten at night. Children who grew up on that coast grew up with a certain relationship to silence: to rooms where nothing was happening, to afternoons that had to be filled. Diana, the fourth of four and then the fourth of five, was born into that silence on the 1st of July, 1961.

She had been meant to be a boy.

Johnnie Spencer was the heir to the Spencer earldom, an older creation than the Windsor dynasty itself, and the estate at Althorp that waited for him in Northamptonshire could descend only through the male line. His first two children were daughters: Sarah, born 1955, and Jane, born 1957. The third pregnancy, in 1960, produced a son, John, who lived ten hours. The fourth was Diana. She was given no royal names (the Queen had been scheduled to be godmother to a male heir, and when the baby turned out to be a girl the arrangement quietly lapsed), and she entered a household that was, in the language of the period, in mourning for the child she was not. Her mother, who would later describe the months after John's death as the darkest of her life, was twenty-five when Diana was born. She was exhausted. She had been told, by consultant obstetricians, that the failure to produce a male heir lay in some unspecified inadequacy of her own reproductive machinery. No one had told Johnnie this. Frances carried the diagnosis alone. Nearly three years later, finally, came Charles, the heir the family had waited for. By then Frances was done. She had given the dynasty what it required. The marriage, already brittle, began to open along a seam that had been there all along.

The parting, when it came, was protracted. Frances met Peter Shand Kydd at a dinner party in London in 1966. He was a wallpaper heir, married, witty, good with children. He and his own wife had been introduced into the Spencer social circle for the usual reasons (a friend of a friend, a country weekend), and by the following spring he and Frances were in love. She left Park House in September 1967. She had intended, she later said, to take the children with her to a rented flat in Cadogan Place; she had intended, she later said, to return for them once she had sorted out what life as a divorced woman would look like; she had intended, she later said, to be a mother to them always.

She did not return. In the custody case that Johnnie brought against her in the spring of 1968, a case in which Frances's own mother, Ruth Fermoy, testified against her daughter in support of her son-in-law, Johnnie was awarded custody of all four children. The judgment rested on an assessment of Frances's behaviour (she had left the marital home; she was living openly with a man not her husband; her own mother had declared her morally unfit) that the law would no longer countenance five years later but that in 1968 was the settled business of the English courts. Diana saw her mother on weekends and at half-terms. The rest of the time, Park House was a house of men and girls.

The absent mother is a figure that appears in the case histories of an entire generation of aristocratic English children. It was not unusual, in the 1950s and 1960s, for upper-class families to send sons to boarding school at seven and daughters at eleven; not unusual for parents to winter in the south of France or summer in the Highlands without their children; not unusual for nannies and governesses to raise three or four successive batches of small Spencers and Talbots and Cavendishes while the actual parents conducted their marriages on a different emotional continent. What made the Spencer case was not the absence itself but the formal ruling that enshrined it. The courts had decreed that Diana's mother was not fit to raise her. Diana was six. The ruling entered her bloodstream as a first principle: mothers could be taken away. A woman's goodness could be adjudicated and found wanting. The people who came after, in the form of new women, could be forces of invasion rather than of rescue.

The nannies, as a result, mattered more than they would have mattered in an intact household. There were several. Mary Clarke arrived in 1971, when Diana was ten, and stayed two years, and was remembered by Diana as one of the first adults to speak to her as if her observations were of any interest. Mary read her books. Mary took her to the sea. Mary let her cry. Inge Crane, earlier, had been gentler. Others had been brisker. Gertrude Allen, known in the family as Ally, had been Frances Spencer's own governess, and taught Diana and her siblings their letters.

Diana's older sisters, Sarah and Jane, were at boarding school by the time Frances left. They appeared in pulses, returning at the ends of terms, and then vanished again. Charles, the heir, born 1964, was three years younger than Diana and too small at the moment of the departure to form the compact with her that the two of them would form later, after Althorp, after their father's remarriage, after the childhood they would come to feel had been wiped clean of its mother like a chalkboard wiped between lessons. In the intervening years it was Diana who looked after him — got him dressed, read him to sleep, held his hand on the drive to school. She had, from six onwards, a baby brother to mother, which was the first of the many arrangements by which she would be given, in the absence of love from above, the love of a smaller creature from below, and would learn to accept this as sufficient.

She herself was remembered, by the adults who moved through Park House in those years, as a dreamy child. She danced. She was tall for her age, all bones and fine ash-blonde hair and enormous slightly shy eyes. She swam laps at the Sandringham indoor pool with a doggedness that her mother's riding instructors had predicted, incorrectly, would translate into equestrian ambition. (Diana fell off a horse at nine, broke her arm, and declined to ride again; her mother and grandmother, both horsewomen of some accomplishment, never forgave her this act of self-determination.) She liked small animals. She loved a guinea pig named Peanuts with an intensity that the adults around her found either charming or peculiar depending on the adult. She watched the clouds from her bedroom window on the top floor, which had been the nursery floor of Park House in its original arrangement and which she continued to associate, long after she had outgrown the furniture, with a certain quality of afternoon sunlight and a certain smell of polished floorboards.

She did not read, in the way that other literary children of her class read. She was not a scholar. Her sisters, at West Heath and elsewhere, would acquire the gentle humanities polish that English girls' boarding schools of the period imparted as a finishing coat. Diana would attend West Heath after them and would fail, in the genteel registers of the school's assessments, to do very much of anything. Her later formal attainments would consist of an interest in ballet, a facility with children, and a swimming medal. She was, in the terms her educators found applicable, an ordinary girl: pretty, dutiful, dim. None of them suspected that the ordinariness was in fact a thin skin over a highly nervous system that had been calibrated, by the departure of her mother at six, to detect and absorb emotional weather at a range of sensitivities that most of the adults around her had never developed.

She was, to put it another way, already watching.

The departure was the founding myth, but it was not the only story Park House deposited in her. There were other stories. There was the story of her father, Johnnie, who was not cruel but was cold in the way the English upper classes of the period had made a civic virtue of being. He loved his children in his manner; his manner was insufficient to what any of them required. He took photographs. He filmed them on a cine-camera (there is footage, from 1967, of Diana aged six, in a bathing costume, running from a garden hose held by a laughing adult), and the footage has the quality, watching it now, of an archive kept by a man who understood that things were slipping away from him and hoped the film would hold what memory was already losing. Johnnie was handsome, in his late thirties, rising hair not yet silvered, and would remain handsome until the stroke he suffered in 1978 took from him the gentle blurred elegance that had been the marker of his class. After the stroke he changed. He became, in some registers, warmer. Diana, by then seventeen, would nurse him for weeks. She had found in his convalescence an usefulness that the rest of his life had never permitted her.

There was the story of her elder sister Sarah, who developed anorexia at seventeen and was treated at a series of private clinics and whose illness was, in the parlance of the family and the doctors, never named but managed. Sarah recovered, more or less. She and Diana would be close in certain years and estranged in others. Sarah's anorexia sat in the household as a fact that everyone was aware of and no one discussed, and its presence in Diana's adolescence established a template that her own bulimia, at twenty, would fit into with a terrible exactness. Eating disorders ran in the Spencer women. The observation was made, in the medical literature of the late 1990s, when the literature was first paying attention to the genetic and environmental patterns behind such things. It had been true for decades.

There was the story of the Queen Mother, who loomed, across the short distance from Sandringham House to Park House, as the single most powerful woman any of the Spencer children had met. She was, at the end of the 1960s, still called Queen Elizabeth, the second Elizabeth still being referred to publicly as "the Queen"; she carried herself with the unshakable political confidence of a woman who had helped hold her husband's empire together through a world war and now, in widowhood, spent her time being the sort of grandmother small English children were trained to love. Diana met her several times. She remembered pale powder, a slight scent of gin, a warmth that operated at a formal distance. The Queen Mother's later role in Diana's marriage would be, by contrast, glacial. She had watched the child grow up and had decided at some point along the way, on grounds that Diana would never entirely understand, that Diana was not up to the job.

And there was the story of the gravel — already, by the time Diana was nine or ten, established as the story she told herself about who she was. She had been left. The leaving had been orchestrated by adults whose motives she could not parse. She had been told, by the courts and by the adult conversation she was not supposed to overhear, that mothers could fail. She had learned that love, in its English aristocratic form, withdrew without warning and often without visible cause. She had developed, by some time in her pre-adolescence, a conviction that she was on her own, and, alongside it, a growing suspicion that her nervous system would produce, if she lived long enough, a form of life that most of the adults around her would not understand.

In 1975, when Diana was fourteen, her grandfather died, her father inherited the earldom, and the Spencers moved to Althorp. Park House was closed up. The rooms she had grown up in were sheeted and shuttered. A chapter of her life, which had contained the gravel and the guinea pigs and the governesses and the long Norfolk summer evenings, was folded closed. She would not live in Norfolk again. She would return only for visits, and only sparingly; Althorp, a house she did not love and a stepmother she detested, awaited her.

But the imprinting was complete. Whatever she would become in the subsequent decades of her life (the bride, the princess, the icon, the mother, the penitent, the campaigner, the ghost), she would carry with her the child who had stood at the nursery window and heard a car driving away on gravel and had known, at six, that the love she required would have to be found elsewhere and would, wherever it was found, need to be guarded at the cost of almost everything else. She would spend the rest of her life hunting for that love. She would find it in scattered places and would lose it in all of them and would finally, in the last summer of her life, believe she had located it on a yacht in the Mediterranean.

The gravel, by then, had been inside her for thirty years.

The next chapter carries her to Althorp, to her stepmother Raine, and to the final years of the adolescence during which she would become, quietly, unremarkably, to the untrained eye, the young woman the newspapers of 1981 would describe as if she had materialised fully formed from the foam of her own wedding dress. She had not materialised. She had been made, carefully and privately, by everything the earlier chapters of her life had given and taken from her. Norfolk had made her. The silence had made her. The gravel had made her.

The biography walks with her toward Northamptonshire.