Princess Diana: Ballet 'was important in her life' says Deane

When you subscribe we will use the information you provide to send you these newsletters. Sometimes they’ll include recommendations for other related newsletters or services we offer. Our Privacy Notice explains more about how we use your data, and your rights. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Tragically Diana never reached the first truly “significant” birthday in a woman’s life. The dreaded 40… or 50. On Thursday she would have been 60 and looking forward to free prescriptions and eye tests. But all this was taken from her when she died, aged 36, at her most beautiful, most iconic. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve seen so many photographs of her in those final hot August days of 1997, long-legged and sun-kissed, glamorous, goddess-like.

She had an extraordinary effect on people. I never met her but in the late 1980s my husband was having lunch in Launceston Place, the restaurant in Kensington which was one of her favourites. She – the most famous woman in the world – slipped in quietly, wearing a navy blue suit to join a friend.

The place fell silent.

“It wasn’t that she was stunningly beautiful”, said my husband, clearly besotted, “but she was radiant. She seemed lit from within”.

I was in my mid-20s when Diana appeared first, photographed with the sun streaming through that cotton skirt, a slightly awkward posh teenage girl who was a nursery school teacher. She was not exactly an object of contempt but did seem just another dim Sloane who would do nicely as a royal bride. Not likely to rock the boat. How wrong we were.

I was a little envious of the fact that she was younger than me, probably – now I think about it – the first time I’d fretted about ageing. But only envious in the inconsequential way in which one thinks about celebrities and, if they’re more or less contemporary, compare their lives with your own.

I hadn’t planned to watch the wedding on that beautiful day in July, almost exactly 40 years ago. But of course I did, glued to the telly for hour after hour.

Suddenly I wanted a fancy wedding too, though I’d never thought about it before. I wanted that entrancing neckline on the Emanuel wedding dress.

People complained that the silk looked crushed. What did they know? I wanted that crushed silk. And a few years later I wore a wedding dress with a big skirt that, yes, crushed.

When she became pregnant with William people said that she was too young and should have waited a bit before plunging into motherhood. People said she was too thin. It was as though sections of the media wanted her to be unhappy because all fairytale princesses must have their comeuppance.

She had two boys. I had two boys (and I added on a girl too).

There must have been women all over Britain watching their children keeping pace with William and Harry. Clarrie in The Archers called her first son (born in 1983) William. Of course she did.

Diana was a template for young mothers. Every woman who has ever kicked off her shoes and done the mothers’ race at a school sports day remembered those pictures of triumphant Diana bursting through the winning tape at the Wetherby School. I usually came last having been elbowed out of the way by beefy young matrons who were a good deal sportier than me.

Diana did the log flume at Alton Towers with her boys. So did I! So did mothers up and down Britain. That or something similar.

Without being conscious of it we used her as a model of cheery young motherhood. And then she was gone.

Now of course I’m grateful to have had all the years of living which were snatched from her. The shock of a premature death is intense at the time but it gets more poignant as the years pass, not less. You dwell on what the person who has died has missed, the children growing up, the family events, the grandchildren.

If she had been alive I would have thought to myself, welcome to your 60s Diana. Join the club.

It’s not a bad place to be now that 60 is no longer code for “little old lady”.

These days 60, if you’re healthy, can be a fabulous time of your life.

How would Diana have “done” 60?

Her mere living, breathing presence would have had an enormous impact on the way that the lives of the family have played out since.

Would Charles and Camilla have settled down together in such a comfortable way? Would William and Harry have been so angry with the world and each other? Would they have married different women? Our lives are determined by the most random decisions and events.

Change one detail, pull at one thread, and everything else can unravel.

One thing seems certain. Whatever her personal attachments at the age of 60, Diana would be in the peak of condition. She would look great, a living testimony to the truism that “60 is the new 40”.

She would still be hitting the gym and maintaining that amazing figure. Men would still be drawn to her like moths to a flame. And she would have loved that power, maturity allowing her to enjoy it in a way that she couldn’t when there was still a touch of Shy Di about her.

Her death turned us into a much more touchy-feely country than we had once been and if she’d been alive she would still have had a similar impact on the nation’s psyche.

She had a gift for showing compassion and empathy which seemed utterly genuine and which her daughter-in-law, the Duchess of Cambridge, shares.

Together they would have made a formidable team. Kate’s Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood, highlighting the first crucial years of a child’s life, would have been right up Diana’s street.

Would she have been good friends with Meghan if Meghan had been on the scene? Both women would have recognised in the other a certain steeliness.

Whether this would have led to mutual admiration or something else entirely is anyone’s guess. I have a feeling that Diana would have “dealt” with the Meghan problem very effectively.

She would have been a terrific grandmother, perhaps pulling rank over Carole Middleton in the granny stakes if she felt it was necessary. We would have enjoyed endless pictures of hugs and fun and those Cambridge children beside themselves with glee when she showed up with presents and treats and a sense that her arrival meant something wonderful was going to happen.

And social media? Diana was a child of the letter-writing era, an old-fashioned girl with her looped handwriting and courteous thank you letters. I can still imagine her posting a few pretty pictures on Instagram. She’d have millions of followers on Twitter but would restrict her comments to the circumspect and polite.

She’d be as “woke” as was necessary. Partly because of her genuine sympathy for others but also because she would never be able to resist sending a shot across the bows of the establishment as she did with her championing of Aids victims. She liked ruffling feathers.

Prince William’s recent assertion (following the revelations about the Martin Bashir interview) that Bashir’s actions fuelled Diana’s paranoia would have annoyed her. Nobody likes to be cast as a victim. Though in any case, the Bashir story would have never come to light if she hadn’t died because a single comment from her would have killed it.

In her life Diana progressed from innocent Sloane to feminist icon. Since her death she has been repositioned as troubled, fragile and slightly potty.

Most of us are all of those things at certain times in our lives but we’d hope that wasn’t the final word.

And I reckon Diana would hate that to be history’s verdict on her. So would many other women, the ones like me who were roughly her contemporaries.

We’ve shared some of the same things. And in our 60s we can lay claim to the benefits of experience and something approaching wisdom.

If Diana was still alive she would be a towering example of how to “do” 60 well, and those who loved her or were fascinated by her would be celebrating that now with a warm, flesh-and-blood woman instead of a cold statue unveiled by her furious, feuding sons.

What a sad thing it all is.

Source: Read Full Article