Free Diana in Search of Herself by Sally Bedell Smith Page B

Clarke, were Diana’s increased willfulness and a tendency to “make unfavorable remarks about her father.” Johnnie didn’t help matters with his inability to cope with Diana and Charles on their return. “After he made them welcome, he would normally retire to his study and leave me to return equilibrium to the house,” said Mary Clarke. While at Park House, Diana didn’t say a word about her mother.
    The scars on her children, especially Diana and Charles, caused Frances profound sadness. “It was agonizing for her,” said cousin Fiona Fraser. Nevertheless, in 1972, Frances and Peter Shand Kydd made a radical move by relocating to a hill farm on the remote Isle of Seil off the west coast of Scotland. Somewhat defensively, Frances later explained, “Peter and I had no wish to distance ourselves from anyone. We just wanted to live in Scotland.” Yet the move made routine weekend visits impossible and effectively cut off regular maternal contact when Diana was only eleven.
    Children normally worship their parents without recognition of their quirks and flaws until adolescence or adulthood. A natural reaction for a girl in Diana’s situation would be to fault her own inadequacies for her mother’s departure. “She never felt good enough as a child, blaming herself for her mother’s leaving and subsequently living with a stark sense that those she loved would abandon her,” wrote Diana’s astrologer Debbie Frank. Only later, when she was in her twenties and thirties, did Diana shift the blame for her misfortunes. “Diana said her mother was not there when she needed her,” said her friend Roberto Devorik, echoing other friends to whom Diana had made the same complaint.
    As a child, Diana didn’t talk about her guilt, but an incident she recounted to Andrew Morton showed how burdened she had been. At age nine, she was asked to be a bridesmaid in a cousin’s wedding, and she had to choose between dresses given to her by her father and mother. Although she couldn’t recall which dress she wore, she did remember feeling “totally traumatized” that her choice might signal that she favored one parent overthe other. The impulse to inflate such small dilemmas into full-blown crises became more powerful as Diana grew older.
    The push and pull between Johnnie and Frances meant that they often placated Diana when they should have set limits. “She learned how to manipulate her parents by playing one off against the other,” explained one of her close friends. “They both wanted her attention, so they indulged her.” Diana boasted that she was her “father’s favorite” and freely admitted she could “get away with murder.” Combined with her numerous insecurities, this kind of power allowed Diana to expect people to accept her terms, establishing behavior patterns that would lead to trouble later in life. “The problem was,” said her cousin Robert Spencer, “few people had said no to her.”
    The ultimate effect of Diana’s turbulent childhood was her sense that she could not depend on either of her parents. A feeling of healthy dependence—the certainty that parents are “there” for a child—is the usual path to security and confidence in later life. In her insecurity, Diana eventually became obsessively dependent in her search for a provider of the continuous love and understanding she needed.

Chapter 4
    A few years after the divorce, Diana’s father decided to send her to boarding school, which, under ordinary circumstances, probably would have caused scarcely a ripple. In the English upper class, boarding school was a time-honored ritual: Boys tended to go off at age eight; most girls left several years later. For boys, boarding school marked the start of a rigorous education. For girls, with the exception of a handful of demanding “public” (in fact, private) schools such as Cheltenham and Roedean, the aim was more social than academic. Girls learned the basics of English, math,