when I am sure I am in love

Diana, acutely attuned to the radar of disaster, later recalled listening, at the age of five, from her hiding place behind the door of the drawing room at Park House to the distressing sounds of a violent parental row. Her elder sister Sarah used to turn up the record player to drown out the shouting matches.

{The Diana Chronicles excerpt.
They used to do the same thing in the Bouvier household when the parents had screaming fights: Jackie would turn up the volume on the record player, according to biographies. ...}

{Chronicles excerpt continued}---------...Diana later told her friend Cosima Somerset that her mother's exit was "the most painful thing in her life, that the children weren't told why she was leaving permanently." Charles Spencer remains equally disturbed by the deception. On the day his mother's maid, Violet Collison, was suddenly very busy, Diana told him she came across Mrs. Collison and their mother packing all her dresses and their mother said, "I'll be back very soon!" ...She recounted that her six-year-old self sat quietly at the bottom of the cold stone stairs at her Norfolk home, clutching the wrought-iron banisters while all around her there was a determined bustle.

She could hear her father loading suitcases into the trunk of the car, then Frances, crunching across the gravel forecourt, the clunk of the car door being shut, and the sound of a car engine revving and then slowly fading as her mother drove through the gates of Park House and out of her life. Diana sat on the steps week after week forlornly imagining her mother's return to live with them again.

...Johnnie was granted custody of the children. It was the shattering surprise witness to Johnnie's superior parenting claims that swung the verdict against Frances -- her own mother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy. ...It is hard not to conclude that Ruth was driven by the same ruthless social politics that had caused her to propel Frances into Johnnie's arms in the first place. Divorce was such anathema at court, after the reverberations of Mrs. Simpson, that Ruth felt impelled to sell out her daughter to preserve the high ground. ...

...The spirit of gaiety was gone from Park House along with Frances's furniture. ...The forty-three-year-old Viscount incarcerated himself in his study, speaking in words of one syllable to his chauffeur and his gamekeeper and sitting morosely for hours staring out of the window. ...His own formal childhood had moored him irrevocably to the detached parenting style of the aristocracy. Diana and Charles always took their meals with the nanny in the nursery while he supped in solitary grandeur in the dining room.

Journalists later rhapsodized about Diana's "grand upbringing," but life for the children at Park House was desperately limited, timidly local. There was a reason why, as Princess of Wales, Diana never used her position, as Jacqueline Kennedy did, to invite an interesting mix of people to dinner parties. Socially, she felt inadequate. Her father fraternized with the dullest of landed gentry, whose children offered her a narrow range of friends. Her absentee mother could provide carefree sailing holidays on the coast but not much else in the way of expanding her children's horizons or building their confidence. Her highbrow grandmother, Lady Fermoy, was hardly diligent -- as her friend the Queen Mother was with her own grandson, Prince Charles -- about exposing the Spencer children to stimulating ideas and people or offering warm encouragement to their developing interests.

Nanny Mary Clarke, meeting Diana for the first time, found her talkative and friendly, but obsessed with the idea of romance. "I remember her saying 'I shall only get married when I am sure I am in love so that we will never be divorced,' and this became something of a theme for her."
--------------- {end excerpt}

[The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown.
Copyright 2007. Random House. New York.]

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