Charles: Victim or villain?. Penny Junor
Читать онлайн книгу.
racehorse, Allibar, along the gallops at Lamborne early one morning. He was in training for a race at Chepstow the following weekend, and having completed seven furlongs, they were walking quietly home for breakfast, when Allibar had suddenly collapsed with a massive heart attack and died in his arms. The Prince refused to leave the horse until a vet arrived, and was so distraught that he couldn’t drive. It was his detective, unusually, who drove them back to Highgrove.
It was obvious as soon as the car arrived back at the house that something was wrong, and Diana went into the kitchen with Michael to explain what had happened, while the Prince went off to be alone for a moment. But the treadmill of his life pauses for neither courtship nor grief. That afternoon, a helicopter arrived at two o’clock sharp to take him to an engagement in Swansea. Meanwhile Diana and Michael Colborne went into the drawing room for the first of many lengthy heart-to-hearts. Later, as they wandered around the garden together, Diana told him all about herself, her family, her parents’ divorce, her father’s illness and her stepmother. The relationship between them was cemented. He was struck by how young she was – she had puppy fat and quite ruddy cheeks – and how badly educated. He also realised how little discipline she had had in her life, and wondered if she had any idea what she was taking on. Twenty-seven years her senior, he felt like a father to her and became one of her closest friends in the Palace. They shared an office in the run-up to the wedding and he tried hard to help her understand and prepare her for what lay ahead, but knew it was going to be difficult.
‘Is it all right if I call you Michael, like His Royal Highness does?’ she asked, to which he said, ‘Of course.’
‘Will you call me “Diana”?’
‘No,’ said Colborne. ‘Certainly not. I appreciate what you’ve just said, but if it all works out you’re going to be the Princess of Wales and I’ll have to call you Ma’am then, so we might as well start now.’
Two days later the engagement was officially announced and Diana was swept into the royal system. The idea was to rescue her from the media that had made her life so impossible. She had certainly found the attention extremely frightening at times and was pleased to be rescued. But the effect was to make her lonely and insecure. Buckingham Palace is not a home by any normal standards, and not even members of the Royal Family would describe it as such. Over 200 people work there, from the Lord Chamberlain to the telephone operators who man the switchboard. There was no alternative place to take her, but with hindsight, nobody – least of all her fiancé – had thought through the implications of removing a nineteen-year-old from a flat full of jolly giggly girls and setting her down in a suite of impersonal rooms with no one of her own age for company, and a fiancé who was always busy.
Diana told Andrew Morton that it was during the first week of her engagement that her bulimia started. One of Diana’s flatmates said, ‘She went to live at Buckingham Palace and then the tears started. This little thing got so thin. She wasn’t happy, she was suddenly plunged into all this pressure and it was a nightmare for her.’
In fact she was initially treated not for bulimia but for anorexia nervosa, which was the same eating disorder that her sister Sarah had when she first met the Prince of Wales in 1977, shortly after breaking up with a previous boyfriend. Desperate to find ways of encouraging Sarah to eat, her family would refuse to let her speak to the Prince on the telephone unless she put on weight. In the end she sought professional help in a London nursing home, and she recovered.
The two conditions are similar in that the root cause of both disorders is an upset in childhood, but the trigger is some sort of emotional stress in the present, and teenage girls are the most commonly affected. Bulimia involves binge eating followed by self-induced vomiting, whereas anorexics go to ingenious lengths to avoid food. Secrecy is a key element, and also denial. Both result in dangerous weight loss, and a host of related medical problems, and both can be fatal.
Shortly before the engagement Diana started taking the contraceptive pill and, as so many women do, put on a lot of weight. Her reaction was to stop eating, and her weight loss was dramatic. The blue Harrods suit she wore for the engagement photograph was a size fourteen. In the five months to the wedding in July, her waist measurement fell from twenty-nine inches to twenty-three and a half, and it continued to diminish.
Diana’s memory of the events as told to Andrew Morton are repeatedly at odds with what others remember. Her first night at Clarence House, the Queen Mother’s London home, is a case in point. She told Morton that there was no one there to welcome her. In fact, she had dinner that evening with both the Queen Mother and the Prince of Wales, and the next day moved to Buckingham Palace, where she was greeted with open arms by many of the Queen’s household who had known Diana and her family for years. A particular friend was Lady Susan Hussey, a lady-in-waiting, who had known Diana all her life, and in the coming months spent hour upon hour with her. She had a son almost exactly the same age as Diana, and was like a mother to her. She thought Diana was quite adorable, and was thrilled for the Prince whom she also adored. She and Diana went shopping for clothes together and prepared for the wedding and talked about all Diana’s hopes and fears.
There were others in the Palace whom Diana loved in those early days and who were deeply fond of her. Lt.Col. Blair Stewart-Wilson, the deputy master of the household, was one, whom Diana kissed on the station platform on her wedding day to his utter confusion; Sir Johnny Johnston in the Lord Chamberlain’s office another, and Sir William Heseltine, the Queen’s deputy private secretary. She used to go into their offices and sit on their desks and talk to them, or invite them to lunch or to drinks. And she was forever popping in to see the ladies-in-waiting and the helpers who had been taken on to deal with everything that needed to be organised for the wedding. She would pop in to chat or to giggle about some extraordinary present that had arrived, or to show off clothes that she had bought. Her sister Jane was with her a lot, her mother too, and she frequently met friends for lunch. Yet she said she was unhappy and lonely.
One of Diana’s fears at that time, which she often talked about, was the Prince’s former girlfriends. Charles had made no secret to Diana of his previous love affairs, and possibly with his fatal compulsion to tell the whole truth when half would be kinder or more sensible, he told Diana everything. He had never experienced jealousy himself, and had no understanding of how a young girl might feel, knowing that he had loved other women, particularly those who were still friends that he saw regularly. It didn’t cross his mind that there might be a problem. From her perspective, at nineteen with precious little education, no accomplishments, no sense of style and no knowledge of the world, they were grown up, clever, smart and sophisticated, and they made Diana feel desperately insecure. One of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting had also married a man much older than herself when she was nineteen, and she and others repeatedly told Diana she must forget about these other women. Yes, of course the Prince had had girlfriends and some quite serious relationships in his time, which at thirty-two years old was to be expected; and yes, they were older and more sophisticated than she was, but the Prince hadn’t married any of them – the one he wanted to marry was her.
Jealousy and insecurity nonetheless gnawed away at her. She was even jealous of the Prince’s relationship with his mother. He put letters and memos that came from the Queen into a safe to ensure no one could copy or steal them. He had always done it as a matter of course, but Diana was suspicious that the Queen was writing about her and that Charles was deliberately keeping it from her. ‘Why don’t you just ask me about the things that are worrying you?’ Charles would say, but she never would. When she arrived at Clarence House there was a letter waiting on her bed from Camilla Parker Bowles. It was dated two days previously and said, ‘Such exciting news about the engagement. Do let’s have lunch soon when the Prince of Wales goes to Australia and New Zealand. He’s going to be away for three weeks. I’d love to see the ring. Lots of love, Camilla.’ It was a friendly note sent with the best of intentions. She and Diana had seen a lot of each other during the previous few months, and Camilla thought they were friends. She thought Diana was young, but good fun, as most of his friends did.
Diana told Andrew Morton she thought ‘Wow’ and organised lunch, ‘bearing in mind that I was so immature, I didn’t know about jealousy or depressions or anything like that … So we had lunch.