Free Diana--A Closely Guarded Secret by Ken Wharfe

Then, with the niceties out of the way, we got on with the job in hand, walking the route the Princess would take, to ensure that she would encounter no surprises, or be placed in any sort of risky situation.
    ‘I propose to introduce the Princess first to Dame Ninette de Valois, our founder and Governor,’ she began. This was another of the great names in ballet: Ninette de Valois made her stage debut in 1914, and toured with Diaghilev in the 1920s, becoming one of the pioneers of British ballet, and a choreographer and teacher of enormous distinction. At once, Patrick started taking meticulous notes so that he could draft a full factsheet to brief the Princess.
    ‘Then we will proceed through the Salon, where our Director of Music, Mr Blackford, will be holding a practical music class with the First Form,’ she said, flinging the door open to make a dramatic entrance.
    ‘Then, gentlemen, we will go through the Library, where thePrincess will see children working with Mr John. Next into the Pavlova Studio and then on to Forms Four and Five, where the fifth-year students being taught by Monsieur Anatole Grigoriev are engaged in some French oral.’
    At this point, I’m ashamed to say, Patrick and I were overtaken by an attack of the giggles. Dame Merle, realising that her words might have been misconstrued by her two inane male guests, icily remarked,
    ‘I see, gentlemen. Perhaps I ought to rephrase that?’
    Two weeks later when we returned with the Princess, Dame Merle made no such slip of the tongue, although, knowing the Princess’s sense of humour, I am sure that she too would have been unable to resist laughing. None the less, the visit was a triumphant success, and I could glimpse in Diana’s excitement and enthusiasm something of the girl who had once longed to dance.
     
    For some reason, at about this time Diana seemed to have to perform an unusual number of engagements out of town in Devon and Cornwall (the Prince of Wales is, of course, also Duke of Cornwall, with considerable land holding in the West Country). She was, however, far too professional to mix royal business with personal pleasure, despite the fact that James Hewitt’s country home, in the shape of his mother’s cottage, was also in the West Country. There was, though, one pleasure in which she freely indulged. Perhaps oddly for a woman who, it would later be claimed, was a martyr to bulimia she usually had a healthy appetite. As a consequence, whenever we went to official engagements in the West Country the Princess wasalways keen to get hold of some clotted cream and Cornish pasties – proper ones, not the pale imitations sold in London. Pasties were among her favourite snacks, and she also liked to bring some back for her sons. So invariably my first job on arrival for our visit was to instruct my counterpart from the local Special Branch, Detective Inspector Peter Rudd, who justifiably believed that he was there to counter a possible terrorist threat or worse, with his first mission of the day – to ensure that the Princess had a box of Cornish pasties and some clotted cream to take back with her.
    On one occasion, however, DI Rudd took this assignment rather too seriously. Instead of returning with the customary half-dozen pasties and a pot of cream, he sent a local distributor into a frenzy when he turned up brandishing his badge and telling the manager that the Princess loved Cornish pasties and clotted cream. He returned from his mission with several boxes, each containing two dozen pasties, and two giant vats of clotted cream. As we flew back to London on a BAe 146 of the Queen’s Flight, the aircrew looked a little surprised by our cargo – it looked as though we had just made a royal visit to the local supermarket. There were so many pasties that when we got back to Kensington Palace Diana decided to hand them out to the policemen on the gate, and thereafter we were rather more cautious about instructing police officers to