Diana--A Closely Guarded Secret (16 page)

A few days after her visit to Champneys we set off for Rugby, where Relate has its headquarters. I decided it would be quicker to go by train than to drive, so I had bought two first-class rail tickets and we sat in the front carriage with other passengers on the 8.20 am train out of Euston station. Diana read the
Daily Mail
as the other travellers, with typical British reserve, pretended not to notice us. She was in an ebullient mood, which always made her mischievous.

‘Have we got any back-up with us today, Ken?’ she asked, referring to the close-protection officers I had arranged in advance of the visit. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I replied, wondering what was coming next. She looked at me a moment, then said, ‘Why don’t we give them the slip? It would be fun.’

‘No, ma’am, we can’t do that. It would be unprofessional,’ I said. Disappointed, she slumped back in her seat, and I silently hoped that that was the last of her mischievous schemes for the day.

We were met by the chairman of Relate, David French,
whom the Princess regarded not simply as the head of one of her patronages, but as a friend. He introduced her to the two course trainers, Irene Short and Moira Fryer; and she then joined them for a ‘debriefing lunch’ after sitting in on a counselling-skills exercise. Afterwards she joined in role-play of marital conflict and a discussion, telling me later that she had found both particularly enlightening.

Somehow though, she still found the means to play one of her customary practical jokes in between the drama of playing an abused wife. As I found out later, she had slipped out during the hour-long afternoon session and briefed the unsuspecting receptionist that if one of the back-up protection officers came back, they should tell him that she had already left for London by train. So when the unsuspecting PC Ron Haywood returned to Relate’s offices to be greeted with the news that we had just left for the station, the poor chap panicked, since he was meant to be on the train with us. He was about to go sprinting through the streets of Rugby to the station when I managed to contact him. Diana the prankster had managed to work some mischief after all, despite the constraints of being on a formal visit to one of her most-admired charities. Such incidents – and there were many of them – were part of her playful nature, and show a character quite different from the self-obsessed depressive of so much of the popular mythology surrounding her memory.

Her visits to Relate and other charities demonstrated that despite her depression, fears and occasional fury over Charles’s infidelity, Diana did her best to get on with her job. She toured Britain, winning over hearts and minds for a family which had already begun the process of repudiating her. With the public,
unlike with her in-laws, she could do no wrong. Many of them seemed to have an unconscious gift for bringing her back to earth with a bump.

‘You don’t remember me, sir, do you?’ the driver who met us at Manchester airport said in his strong local accent as we headed towards his home city on an ‘awayday’. I was sitting in the front, with the Princess reading her briefing notes in the back, psyching herself up for the walkabout she was going to make. I was not in the mood for small talk, but the police driver persisted irritatingly.

‘I said…’ he began.

‘I heard what you said,’ I snapped. ‘Just get on with it.’

‘But I drove you the last time you were up here, sir,’ he replied plaintively.

Before I had a chance to pull rank on the talkative constable, the Princess decided to engage him in conversation. Unlike me, she was polite.

‘I remember you; you drove so very well,’ she chimed in, although I was pretty certain she didn’t know him from Adam. Unfortunately, this only encouraged him.

‘Oh, really ma’am, I am honoured. You must have so many people drive you and you remember me …’ There was no stopping him now. I am also fairly sure that the Princess engaged him in conversation just because she knew it would exasperate me.

Eventually we arrived at our destination where, as always, a large crowd had gathered to greet her. As she made her way into the centre of the throng, one woman seemed especially anxious to make Diana take notice of her, following her as
she walked along a path cleared by local police, who held the onlookers back.

‘’Scuse me, Your Royal Highness … ’scuse me,’ the elderly woman said as she frantically tried to catch the Princess’s attention.

Diana stopped. ‘Ken, there’s an old lady over there,’ she said, her signal for me to bring the woman to the front of the crowd. I nodded to a couple of the officers, and they cleared a space to let the grey-haired supplicant through.

‘Hello, ma’am,’ she said when she reached the Princess. ‘You’ll never guess what – my son’s your driver.’ Diana smiled and spoke to her for a few moments, and then the whole circus moved forward, protocol now re-established.

As soon as we got back in the car, her duties over, the Princess found the perfect solution to keeping our garrulous chauffeur quiet. ‘You’ll never guess what,’ she said to him, trying not to laugh. Curious, the driver, who was beginning, rather presumptuously, to regard the Princess as a newfound friend, turned around, no doubt about to offer his next instalment in inane chit-chat. Then the Princess struck her killer blow: ‘I’ve just met your mother.’

‘Bloody hell, no,’ he said in alarm, flushing bright scarlet. He focused on his driving from then on, and we had a peaceful journey back to the airport.

Incidents like that underline one of the problems for members of the royal family, namely that although they are often keen to see ‘real life’, their status tends to prevent people from acting normally in their presence. Wherever they go walls are freshly painted, everything cleaned up or tidied
away, and people stand awkwardly before them in their finest bib-and-tucker. So what royalty actually sees is a distorted, cleaned-up image of reality. Somehow, Diana managed to transcend this, her innate humanity putting people at their ease, letting them see beyond the trappings of royalty to the real person underneath.

On an ‘awayday’ to Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire in mid-June she had attended the Festival of the Rose Queens, where she crowned the three 1990 Rose Queens at the local marina. With the ceremony over, she was then escorted to a narrow boat, the
Judith Mary
, moored on the canal, for lunch among the local notables who clog up such occasions. Once on board, she was introduced to the boat’s owner, Rob Sharpe, who told her that he hired his narrow boat out for trips on the canal.

‘You must get some funny people on here,’ she innocently commented.

In a thick Midlands accent, Mr Sharpe, a no-nonsense sort of character, replied: ‘Oh, we get some right funny people ’ere. I remember once we had a group of lads on a stag night, and they asked us to take ’em down canal, like, to local pub, like, which we did, but I said I want you back on boat by eleven o’clock.

‘By eleven-fifteen nobody had shown, like, so I went in pub and I told ’em to get on boat, and they turned up a few minutes later with these three prostitutes …’

The Princess was enthralled, even as the collection of local dignitaries cringed in embarrassment. There was no stopping Mr Sharpe, however.

‘That’s when I told ’em, ma’am – told ’em straight, like, I did – I do not allow any shagging on my boat.’

Her laughter rang out clearly in the stunned silence that followed this gem: ‘Oh well, Mr Sharpe,’ she replied. ‘Boys will be boys.’ By then I turned away, almost bursting with the effort of trying not to laugh myself.

Two weeks later, on 28 June, Charles broke his arm badly in a fall while playing polo locally. In terrible pain, he was taken to the hospital in Cirencester, not far from Highgrove, where doctors decided to set the double fracture without pinning it. On leaving hospital he posed for photographers with Diana at his side, before she drove him back to Highgrove. Within minutes of dropping him off, however, she left again – with me, since I or one of my officers had to be with her at all times – for Kensington Palace. I understand that, shortly afterwards, Camilla Parker Bowles arrived to look after her injured man.

As we drove back to London, Diana confessed, quietly and sadly, without any hysterics but with absolute determination, that this was the final straw. She had wanted, she said, to care for her husband, but he had made it clear that during his convalescence, which was likely to be a long one, since the bones were not pinned, he did not want anyone near him. After that, Diana said she was simply no longer prepared to try to make anything of her marriage. Camilla effectively moved into Highgrove and the Prince allowed her a free rein; a fervent anti-smoker himself, he even allowed his mistress to smoke anywhere in the house.

I have absolutely no doubt that Diana desperately wanted at least to play the part of the caring wife, nursing her injured husband through his pain. He simply would not allow it. Perhaps it was a godsend. Throughout July and August
Charles’s temper worsened as his arm failed to heal properly. Eventually, a second opinion was sought, and a new treatment suggested, which would involve an operation on the arm. After much lobbying the Prince agreed, and he was booked into the Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham. Diana was not consulted about this, nor did I ever hear her offer an opinion of any kind about Charles’s decision. He arrived at the hospital in early September 1990 and his entire entourage followed, decamping from St James’s Palace to set up office there, much to his wife’s distaste, and even greater distrust. I drove her to Nottingham to visit him, but from the moment she arrived his obsequious aides made it clear that she was neither needed nor wanted.

Whatever happened now, the marriage was, to anyone on the inside, clearly beyond salvation.

They did not have much to say. Charles lay in his hospital bed, bemoaning his fate, and Diana simply sat and listened. Neither wanted to be in the other’s company, and after the briefest of periods (long enough to be seen as acceptable when, inevitably, her visit was reported in the media) the Princess left his private room and walked along the hospital corridor. It was then that she found a middle-aged woman sitting outside the intensive-care ward, sobbing. Her name was Ivy Woodward. Diana’s ability to interact with people she had never met before was extraordinary. In one natural motion she knelt beside the woman and then put her arm around her to comfort her.

‘Do you mind if I come in?’ she asked. In the ward, Ivy’s son Dean lay oblivious to his royal visitor. He had been involved in a serious road accident on 30 August, and had been rushed to
the Queen’s Medical Centre by ambulance. Doctors there had done their best to revive him, but had just told his family that his chances of recovery were not considered good. His wife, Jane, sat by his bedside, lost in her own thoughts.

‘He’ll pull through. I know he’ll pull through,’ Diana told the two women. She could have left it at that, just a kindly and comforting word from a passing celebrity. For some reason of her own however, she insisted on going back to comfort Ivy and her family. Every time she went to visit Charles, she also visited Dean. The story soon leaked out to the press, but Diana was not doing this for publicity. She genuinely wanted to help a family in need. On one of our trips to Nottingham, she did not even bother to visit her husband, but instead went to the Woodwards’ home. In the late autumn Ivy’s prayers were answered when her son came out of the coma that had claimed him for so long. Diana telephoned him as he convalesced in the City Hospital, to which he’d been moved after he began to recover, and promised to visit again.

The bitter irony of this curious interlude did not escape me, although I’m not sure the Princess saw it. She had tried to comfort and care for her husband, and had been unfeelingly rejected. At the same time, she had offered her sympathy and comfort to a family of strangers, and had been welcomed. Beyond that, however, she had genuinely ‘made a difference’.

Diana’s relations with other royals is best described as tricky. I have already said that she was in awe of the Queen, who remained a remote, if powerful, presence to her. She was nervous around the Queen Mother, always conscious that her
grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, a close friend of the Queen Mother, had, as she put it, ‘done a good hatchet job on her’. Lady Fermoy had been, however, right in her advice that royal life would not suit Diana; their outlook, lifestyle and sense of humour were very different from hers. Yet she might have coped even with these hurdles, had it not been for an incident during Charles’s arduous recovery from his broken arm that confirmed her worst fears, as well as her increasing sense of isolation. In the autumn of 1990, while Diana carried on her life in London, Prince Charles escaped to the Queen Mother’s Highland retreat, Birkhall, one of the houses on the Queen’s Balmoral estate. While there, he was photographed, for the first and only time during his marriage to Diana, in the company of Camilla Parker Bowles. Photographer Jim Bennett captured the Prince of Wales and his mistress on film as they left the whitewashed mansion and stepped into a waiting car. What is not generally known, however, is that the Queen Mother was also staying at Birkhall at the same time, confirming Diana’s belief that the royal family had sanctioned Charles’s adultery at the highest level. It was a devastating blow and one that convinced her that she had to escape.

By now her relations with many of her husband’s family were at an all-time low. The Queen was chilly and distant, as well as concerned about some of Diana’s good works, notably AIDS. The Queen Mother, she commented once, seemed to regard her with a kind of detached pity. She found the Duke of Edinburgh impossible; although to be fair, in his own bluff way, he had tried to offer her an olive branch, only for her to slap it in his face. She liked Prince Andrew, whom she
thought was underestimated, and Princess Anne she found stimulating, although she never felt that she could have a sisterly chat with her. She did, however, adore her Kensington Palace neighbour, Princess Margaret, who had been kind to her, as well as understanding, from the moment she had joined the Firm. Perhaps, with ‘Margo’s’ extravagant lifestyle, her celebrated, sometimes tragic, love life and her occasionally almost bohemian independence, the two women empathised with each other.