I met Camilla very early on... I wasa threat
liked it, but more velvet hairbands. I got terribly fat because my fingers were always in the saucepans, for which I got fined.
It wasn’t my idea of fun, but my parents wanted me to do it.
At the time it seemed a better alternative than being behind a typewriter — and I got a diploma!
THE COUNTRY HOUSE... NEAR CAMILLA’S HOME
CHARLES said he wanted to be in the Duchy of Cornwall vicinity, but it’s only 11 miles from Camilla’s house. He chose the house and I came along afterwards.
I first went there after he bought it. He had painted all the walls white. He wanted me to do it up, even though we were not engaged. I thought it was very improper, but he liked my taste.
(Interior designer) Dudley Poplak did up my mother’s house ten years previously and had always been a friend of my mother’s, so I said to her: ‘What do you think?’ She said: ‘Well, use him — he’s been marvellous, very loyal.’
I chose the decorations and had a free hand to do that.
GIGGLING AS THE PRINCE PROPOSES
ON FeBrUAry 3, 1981, prince Charles, then 32, proposed to diana in the nursery at windsor Castle. She was 19. Their engagement was announced three weeks later, on February 24. That same day, in a BBC interview, Charles, when asked if they were in love, famously responded: ‘whatever in love means.’ Before nightfall, diana had moved out of Coleherne Court, her South Kensington flat, and into the Queen mother’s residence, Clarence House, on The mall. That wasn’t the only radical change in her life. in the six months leading to the engagement, she — and her flatmates — had come increasingly under press scrutiny. OUR relationship sort of built up from there (the Braemar Games weekend). Then the Press seized upon it.
Then that became simply unbearable in our flat, but my three girls were wonderful — star performers, loyalty beyond belief. The feeling (in Sandringham) was: I wish Prince Charles would hurry up and get on with it. The Queen was fed up.
He wrote to me from Klosters (the Swiss skiing resort) and then he rang me up and said: ‘I’ve got something very important to ask you.’
An instinct in a female tells you what it is. I sat up all night with my girls, saying: ‘Christ, what am I going to do?’ diANA had regularly asked her flatmates for advice on how to conduct her romance. Carolyn Bartholomew recalled: ‘it was pretty normal procedure that goes on between girls. Some of it i can’t disclose, some of it would have been on the lines of: “make sure you do this or that.” it was a bit of a game.’ BY THAT time, I’d realised there was somebody else around. I’d been staying at Bolehyde (Manor, home of Camilla and her husband Andrew) with the Parker Bowleses an awful lot, and I couldn’t understand why she kept saying to me: ‘Don’t push him into doing this, don’t do that.’
She knew so much about what he was doing privately and about what we were doing privately . . . like if we were going to stay at Broadlands (the Mountbatten family seat in Hampshire).
I couldn’t understand it. Eventually, I worked it all out and found the proof of the pudding, and people were willing to talk to me.
Anyway, next day I went to Windsor and I arrived about 5 o’clock and he sat me down and said: ‘I’ve missed you so much.’ But there was never anything tactile about him. It was extraordinary, but I didn’t have anything to go by because I had never had a boyfriend. I’d always kept them away, thought they were all trouble — and I couldn’t handle it emotionally. I was very screwed up, I thought. Anyway, so he said: ‘Will you marry me?’ and I laughed. I remember thinking: ‘This is a joke’, and I said: ‘Yeah, OK’, and laughed.
He was deadly serious. He said: ‘You do realise that one day you will be Queen?’
And a voice said to me inside: ‘You won’t be Queen, but you’ll have a tough role.’
I thought: ‘OK’, so I said: ‘Yes.’ I said: ‘I love you so much, I love you so much.’ He said: ‘Whatever love means.’ He said it then. I thought that was great! I thought he meant that! And so he ran upstairs and rang his mother.
In my immaturity, which was enormous, I thought that he was very much in love with me, which he was. He always had a sort of besotted look about him, looking back at it, but it wasn’t the genuine sort. Who was this girl who was so different? But he couldn’t understand (me) because his immaturity was quite big in that department, too. (LATER) A briefcase comes along on the pretext that (Prince) Andrew is getting a signet ring for his 21st birthday and along come these sapphires. I mean nuggets! I suppose I chose it, we all chipped in. The Queen paid for it.
FLATMATES SCREAMING ABOUT HER BIG NEWS
iT wAS only after they were engaged that diana was allowed to call prince Charles by his first name; until then she had called him Sir. This was
We sat on a hay bale. Charles was all over me – he leapt on me practically I was a fat, podgy, no make-up, unsmart lady — but I made a lot of noise and he liked that