Wendy Holden’s encounters with the beloved royal prompted her to write a fictionalised retelling of her young life.
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.Credit: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 .
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.
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.
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. 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.
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