Parental separation, divorce and the entire trauma of broken homes provided another focus. Ludgrove made counselling available, and put an emphasis on activities to keep the boys busy – a nine-hole golf course, squash courts, a swimming pool, a music block, art, ceramics, clay-pigeon shooting and a garden plot where each boy could grow his own flowers or vegetables.
‘They haven’t got the concern about what’s going on at home,’ explains Barber, ‘because they can immerse themselves in what’s going on here. It can be easier to be here than at home with all the anguish.’
Another Ludgrove tradition was to keep the boys in touch with the outside world via a daily delivery of newspapers, with current affairs discussed every morning and a test every Saturday. But on 7 June 1992, mysteriously, the Sunday newspapers did not get delivered to Ludgrove School – and there were to be a few other occasions when the headmaster and his wife had to pretend there had been supply problems. They were keen to protect William, as much as possible, from the distress of having to see the story of his parents’ failing marriage occupying the front pages.
Here was the new challenge for both William and, to a lesser extent, Harry from 1992 onwards. For the past seven or eight years they had had to experience the pain of their parents’ mutual dislike and now the two boys had to cope with this conflict going public, appearing in every lurid detail on television screens and newspaper front pages – with an added dimension. What had appeared in the Sunday Times on 7 June that year was more than simple newspaper reporting. It was a deliberate and aggressive exposure of the family’s bad blood that had been initiated, shaped and actively promoted by Diana.
The parent who claimed to be so devoted to her children and personally caring of them had had months to think about the effect on them of these revelations – secrets she had never told them yet was now sharing with the world. She had effectively revealed to William, for example: ‘I tried to kill us both when I was pregnant with you inside me by throwing myself down the stairs.’
Her True Story was Diana’s ultimate weapon in her battle with Charles – a dagger unsheathed, sharpened and aimed quite deliberately at her husband’s heart. So if William and Harry felt pain from what the Sunday Times revealed to the world in the summer of 1992, that agony had been devised and inflicted upon them by their mother.
11
Camillagate
‘Have you no shame?’
(Crowd shout to Prince Charles, early 1993)
‘Noah’, transport cafés and hush-hush tapes … The secrets of Diana’s collaboration in the creation of Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story were soon revealed. The public furore led to pressure being put on her friends in a way that she had not anticipated – and particularly on her close friends who had signed affidavits, like her former flatmate Carolyn Bartholomew.
From the moment of the book’s sensational serialisation of 7 June 1992, Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace had been insisting that it was a pack of lies. There might be some small discord inside the royal marriage, conceded the loyalists – these things happen in any marriage – but in no way could this resemble the lurid and tragic mess that had been described. It could only mean that the so-called ‘friends’ like Bartholomew who had provided material to Morton were liars.
Over the course of the next few days, the pressure shifted heavily onto Diana as Prince Charles, Buckingham Palace – and, it was made clear, the Queen herself – and even John Major in Downing Street were all looking to the princess to distance herself from her friends. She must issue a statement making clear that she disavowed them and all the untruths that they had uttered in Morton’s pages.
On the evening of Wednesday 10 June the photographer Ken Lennox of the Daily Mirror received a phone call at his Chelsea home. He should head round the corner at once to Carolyn Bartholomew’s house, he was told, to be waiting outside at nine o’clock.
‘So I shot round there,’ recalled Lennox, ‘got into the street, parked my car at the top of the street, and ran down, and there was a detective waiting for me who I recognised. And he said, “Can you do your shots from here, Ken?” Which was forty yards away from the front door. And I said, “Yes.” So he said, “I’ll leave you here and I’ll go back and sit in the car.”’
At precisely 9 p.m. Carolyn Bartholomew’s front door opened as promised.
‘Diana stepped out, looked up at me, turned round,’ recounted Lennox, commenting later on her punctuality.
‘Carolyn came to the door and out onto the front step carrying her baby, with her husband. Diana kissed Carolyn on both cheeks, kissed the baby and kissed Carolyn’s husband, looked up to see if I was shooting, walked to the car, got in the car … and looked at me all the way up the street as she drove towards me, giving me a full chance to get more photographs.’
The striking images of Diana’s kiss and supportive embrace of her friend Carolyn Bartholomew went round the world the next day. The message was unambiguous. Everything that the Princess of Wales’s friends had said to Andrew Morton was true and had her blessing.
Princes William and Harry have never spoken publicly about their parents’ catastrophic marriage and the impact that it had upon their feelings and emotional stability. In the twenty-first century the brothers have both become fervent crusaders for mental health. Both have testified movingly about their own psychological pain, talking quite graphically of the mental dislocations they have suffered in the past.
But the pain and the past that they describe is always related – if and when they agree to give any source for it – to the early death of their mother. Nothing before that. It is as if Diana’s death
