Princess Diana
anybody who’s had morning sickness before, so every time at Balmoral, Sandringham or Windsor in my evening dress I had to go out, I either fainted or was sick.”
She told of being labelled a problem.
Four months pregnant with William, she threw herself down the stairs at Sandringham, in a desperate bid to get Charles’ attention.
“When I was four months pregnant, I threw myself downstairs, trying to get my husband to listen to me. I had told Charles I felt so desperate and I was crying my eyes out. He said I was crying wolf. ‘I’m not going to listen’, he said. . ‘You’re always s doing this to me. I’m going riding now’. So o I threw myself f down the stairs. I knew I wasn’t going to lose the baby (though I was) quite bruised around the stomach.”
Diana told of being alone..
“I knew what was wrong with me, but nobody else around me understood me. I needed some rest and to be looked after inside myy house and for people to understand the torment and anguish going on in my head. It was a cry for help. I’m not spoiled – I just needed to be allowed to adapt to my new position.”
Diana told of her post-natal depression after William’s birth. She also revealed the role of former prime minister Malcolm Fraser in having a nine-month-old William accompany her and Charles on their first foreign trip, to Australia and New Zealand.
“We never had a fight (about taking William on tour). The person who never got any credit was Malcolm Fraser, who was then prime minister. He wrote to us out of the blue. I was ready to leave William. I accepted that as part of duty but he wrote to me and said, ‘Would you like to bring your child out?’ And Charles said, ‘What do you think about this?’ I said, ‘Oh, it would be wonderful.’ ”
She tells of the enormous strain of that Australian tour and of how she learnt quickly what it was to be a Royal.
“That first week was such a traumatic week for me. I learnt to be royal, in inverted commas, in one week. I was thrown into the deep end. Nobody ever helped me but they’d be there to criticise me, never to say, ‘Well done.’ ’’
Diana said she changed after the Australian trip.
“I was a different person – more grown up, more mature.”
She recalled a heartbreaking, conversation with a three-year-old William, at Highgrove, when she was telling him off about something. “William turned to me and said: ‘You’re the most selfish woman. All you do is t think of yourself.’ And I was so st stunned. I said: ‘W ‘Where did y you hear that?’ ‘O ‘Oh, I’ve often h heard Papa sa saying it.’ ’’
Diana rer recalled that between the births of William and Harry it was a period of “total d darkness”. But th the six weeks before Harry’s birth was the closest she and Charles had been. “Then su suddenly, as Harry was born, it went bang, our marriage went down the drain … I knew Charles had gone back to h his lady.”
Diana’s tapes reveal a young woman, desperate for help, but who never leant on anyone.
“For a long time none of my family knew what was going on. Jane, my sister, after five years of me being married, came to check on me. I had a V-neck on and shorts. She said: ‘What’s that marking on your chest?’ I said: ‘Oh, it’s nothing.’ She said: ‘What is it?’.
The night before I’d wanted to talk to Charles about something. He wouldn’t listen. “So I picked up his penknife off his dressing table and scratched myself heavily down my chest and both thighs. There was a lot of blood and he hadn’t made any reaction whatsoever. (After I told her) Jane just went for me. She said, ‘You musn’t let the side down.’ And I turned on her and said, ‘Give me some credit that I haven’t troubled any of the family in five years about this’.
“Now they’re annoyed by the lack of support from my husband.”