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The handwritten note was sent to close friend Dudley Poplak to thank him for three drawings he gave to Diana for her 30th birthday. A year later she separated from husband Prince Charles and six years later she was killed in a Paris car crash. The letter, on Kensington Palaceheaded notepaper, is dated June 27, 1991 – four days before Diana’s milestone birthday on July 1. She addresses it to “Dearest Dudley”, an interior designer who she first met in 1981 when he was asked to renovate Highgrove House, the Gloucestershire home of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Diana confesses that she had already opened the presents before her big day, although she doesn’t say what the drawings are of.

She wrote: “Since when have I be (sic) able to keep a present for the right day & I’m afraid your three wonderful drawings were no exception!” She then made a joke at the expense of her stepmother Raine Spencer, who it seems had a reputation for selling family items.

Diana said: “I am deeply touched to be given something that means such a lot to our family & that Raine hasn’t put under auction!”

She then added a haunting line about her future: “I do wonder what the next ten years will bring, the last ten I have learnt a great deal in an interesting way!”

Then she ends with: “So many thanks, Dudley, for my pictures and my love too, from, Diana.” One lifelesson she may have been referring to was how, two years before she wrote the letter, she confronted Camilla Parker Bowles over her affair with Charles. He and Diana are both acknowledged to have had extra-marital affairs.

Diana’s contemplation of her future is made tragic by the fact she died on August 31, 1997 – when she was just 36 – alongside her new love Dodi Fayed.

Meanwhile Dudley died in 2005, aged 74. The letter to him has emerged 29 years after it was written and has been put up for auction by a retired autograph and manuscripts dealer.

It is being sold with a separate note by Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, in which she writes how her son Charles Spencer “took on the world” in his eulogy to his sister at her funeral at Westminster Abbey.

Frances, who died after a long illness on June 3, 2004, wrote it four months after Diana’s death.

She had just delivered her own speech at a memorial mass for her daughter at St Columba’s Cathedral in Oban, where she lived.

She admitted she was “scared rigid” with nerves beforehand but added “since my children had taken on the world in the Abbey I really thought their mum should be able to do her home pitch!”

The letters are for sale in Penzance, Cornwall, next Thursday with a tag of £600. Mimo Connell Lay, of David Lay Auctioneers, said: “The letter from Diana is quite short but the content is strong.

“The line where she contemplates the past decade during which she got married, became a mother and her marriage broke down, and what the future holds for her is very poignant.”

davidlay.co.uk

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