This author crossed paths with Princess Diana three times. It inspired a novel

It’s 26 years since the death of Princess Diana. She is now an historical figure, in a proper historical context. I thought that she deserved a proper historical novel and that was one reason why I chose her as a subject.

I can also claim to have met her, in a way. I used to work for glossy magazines in London and my path crossed Diana’s several times. The first was at a Buckingham Palace garden party where I stood next to some Chelsea pensioners (old soldiers). Diana, stopping to talk to them, included me, and for a few dizzying seconds, those famous blue eyes and light girlish voice were directed at me.

By the second time, I had made friends, through my job, with the wife of the Brazilian ambassador. She was a friend of Diana’s, who came to a party I was at. She came in, wearing a stunning grey, lace dress, and while everyone pretended not to notice, it was obvious they were watching her every move. I remember thinking how strange it was to be under such surveillance, even at a private event.

The final time we met was at the Christmas party held by the national newspaper I was by then working for. Diana stood in the middle of the room, in a shimmering column dress, talking to the paper’s editor. We were all terrified of him and so kept our distance, which was a shame as I never saw her again. By the next Christmas, Diana was dead.

I had moved jobs just before the news broke and my new editor, who prided herself on being counterintuitive, wanted a piece about the Princess’s sense of humour. Thus it was, while the whole world mourned, I rang up men who had worked out with Diana at the gym and collated examples of her startlingly rude jokes.

I realised that I didn’t really know the steps Diana had taken from shy schoolgirl to Princess of Wales.

I have always been interested in people’s journeys to great fame, the portals through which they pass from obscurity to celebrity. It’s usually a series of steps, one thing leading to another. I realised that I didn’t really know the steps Diana had taken from shy schoolgirl to Princess of Wales. She became the most famous woman in the world and yet that part of her life – the backstory to the front story – was relatively little-known. How, exactly, had it happened?

The royal wedding of 1981 came about because of a combination of two opposing forces. By the late 1970s, Prince Charles was 30 and under pressure to marry. The right girl had to be found, and fast. She must be young, pretty, Protestant and an aristocrat. “Without a past”, too, as the euphemism went. Pure and undefiled. The problem was, few girls matched this criteria. In accordance with the eye-widening double standards of the time, Charles had already been out with almost every eligible girl in Europe. Spotted by the Queen Mother at a family wedding, Diana was about the only one left. The palace machine swung into action.

Lady Diana Spencer, as she then was, was more than delighted to be selected as a possible future bride. But while the Windsors’ reasons were practical and dynastic, her motivation was different. Inspired by her obsession with romantic novels, she thought Charles was the ultimate dashing hero. She was head over heels, madly in love, and looking forward to a life of bliss.

This contrast is what The Princess is about; the fact that Diana and Charles were coming from completely different directions and neither had a clue about the other. That was always going to cause problems. On the other hand, what better material for a novel?

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To draw a convincing portrait of the young Diana and her romantic hopes, I had to immerse myself in her background and imagine what it felt like to be the very grand, but very damaged, daughter of parents whose acrimonious divorce darkened her childhood.

But despite her bitter experience, Diana took refuge in an alternative romantic universe where love was rewarded and couples stayed together. This was the world of sugary, romantic novels: the young Diana was obsessed with [her step grandmother] author Barbara Cartland. She must have read hundreds of her books; ridiculous titles, preposterous plots and all. Most Diana biographers regard this as evidence of her lack of intelligence, but I felt it was much more significant, possibly crucial.

One of the themes I explore in The Princess is the possibility that these heart-racing, head-spinning paperbacks about dashing, worldly dukes and innocent young women gradually came to form Diana’s world view. Her idea of love became founded on the unrealistic scenarios of her favourite reading matter. This explains why, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, she regarded Charles as the epitome of a romantic hero who would offer a life of bliss.

Diana’s schooldays were great fun to reimagine, especially after I discovered her boarding school ran what we would today call an outreach program to a local mental health facility. An understanding of such places, and the conditions within them, were in their infancy in those days, and most of the schoolgirls, not to mention the teachers, were terrified of the patients.

Diana, however, stepped out from the crowd of her peers with confidence and knew exactly what to do. Her sympathy, imagination and courage were instinctive from the start, and of course, pointed the way to what was to come. Finding – and fictionalising – that episode was inspiring.

I had great fun imagining the flatmates: Diana’s cheerful Sloaney life in her Kensington flat with her girlfriends and goldfish...

The fateful moment – in a ploughed field in Norfolk – when Diana met Charles, is another crucial part of my story. The complicated route to the royal engagement had begun. It was a sort of social Grand National, with different hurdles to jump along the way. Prince Charles usually introduced his girlfriends to the press at a polo match, so that was the starting line. The winning post was of course the altar at Westminster Abbey, or St Paul’s as it turned out.

Balmoral was the course’s Becher’s Brook; many former girlfriends had come a cropper there. Bored and freezing on the bank as Charles fished in the river, one ambassador’s glamorous daughter packed up and went back home. Another famous socialite’s visit was ruined by the press. Diana, however, passed the test with flying colours, playing charades with Princess Margaret, hide and seek with the Queen and even spotting the paparazzi over her shoulder using her compact mirror.

Looking into these exclusive worlds was fascinating. But information was sometimes hard to come by. How, for example, to find what a week on the Royal Yacht Britannia during the Cowes regatta was like? Fortunately, I had a huge collection of books on every royal subject imaginable. One just happened to be about Britannia, and full of details such as Prince Philip’s storm-proof candelabra and the Queen’s special at-sea knighting stool.

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I had great fun imagining the flatmates: Diana’s cheerful Sloaney life in her Kensington flat with her girlfriends and goldfish, doing all those ’80s things like shopping at the Benetton sale, making spag bol in a steam-filled kitchen, or watching TV with a bowl of cereal on her knee. Those were my favourite bits to write because they were happy and full of banter. I imagined them sharing clothes, answering the phone in silly voices or banging on the bathroom door.

Diana, who owned the flat, was in charge of the cleaning rota and had a sign on her bedroom door, “Chief Chick”. Leaving all this fun behind to move into Buckingham Palace must have been so difficult. That was the final section of The Princess and the most dramatic to imagine. From various sources, I pieced together what few seemed to have considered before: those five strange and lonely pre-wedding months when Diana, still only 19, had the attention of the entire world but none of the Windsors took the slightest interest in her.

Diana was so desperate for company, she sought out the footmen, who brought her burgers from the McDonald’s in nearby Victoria station. Eating disorders followed, and growing suspicions about Charles. The romantic dream unravelled, as did, to an extent, Diana herself.

But the wedding went ahead and that’s where I leave my story – at the point the fairy-tale princess steps out of her golden carriage. The point at which the fairy tale ended.

The Princess (Welbeck ANZ) by Wendy Holden is out now.

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