Diana:Her True Story

 Like many of you, I have been watching season 4 of The Crown.  Here and there a review pops up listing the inaccuracies of the show; to me, most seem to be simple attempts to compress scenarios to keep things moving.  The Charles and Diana story takes center stage here, but the Margaret Thatcher scenes deserve attention as well.

A friend and I arrived in London the day before the wedding - yes THE wedding.  Tickets had been purchased months before the big event was announced and we decided to go with whatever greeted us upon arrival. Chaotic. Festive. Every little village had local celebrations in honor of, well, basically, Diana.  We stayed with the mother of a long time friend in a quaint village called Sittingbourne.  As you can imagine, we were exhausted from the flight and hoped to sleep in the next morning, but no...at 4 AM, we heard warbly little bird voices singing "God Save the Queen." TV coverage had begun and Gwen invited all her little lady friends over.  For the next three hours we could hear them guessing what her dress would look like, wondering where they would live, would they kiss in public, and speculation on the level of happiness "poor Diana" would have once she became an official member of the royal family.

Memories came flooding back as I watched The Crown and it seems the right time to reread Andrew Morton's scandalous book, Diana:Her True Story.  He begins with her early story, which was just about as dramatic, traumatic and sad as her marriage.  Diana lived in two different worlds; in one world she was gifted with material goods, palatial homes, and education in the best boarding schools in England and Switzerland.  Her peopled world was cold and divided.  Her mother bolted, and eventually her parents divorced.  Her father married a woman Diana and her siblings did not care for and she made their lives unpleasant.  It seems that Diana hardly knew her brother or her two sisters, except in the context that the girls preceded her in boarding school, and she fell beneath the shadow of their successes.

Troubling on many levels, this story of a girl who became a princess before she had time to become an adult. I wish I could leave you with some happy thoughts about Diana's life, and maybe that lies in the years she spent overcoming multiple adversities to emerge as a stunning, and knowledgeable  spokesperson for many charities and environmental issues.  So strong. If you're watching The Crown, you might want to breeze through this book.  

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