Diana’s anguish age 5 when her mum left home
Brother tells of her broken vow to visit
PRINCESS Diana’s brother has told of how his sister waited heartbroken on the doorstep for their mum to return after she left home for another man.
Earl Charles Spencer said they were devastated when Frances walked out on Johnnie, the 8th Earl Spencer, for wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd when they were children.
And their mum told five-year-old Diana she would come back to see her – but never did.
Charles said he grew up close to Diana, two years his senior, at the Spencer estate in Althorpe, Northants, because their two older sisters were away at school.
He said: “Our father was a quiet and constant source of love but ut our mother wasn’t cut out for maternity. nity.
“Not her fault, she couldn’t do it. She was in love with someone else. While she was packing king her stuff to leave, she promised Diana she’d come back to see her.
“Diana used to wait on the doorstep for her but she never came. She ORDEAL Earl Spencer had therapy over childhood woe could hear me crying down the corridor but was too scared of the dark to come to me.”
Johnnie later married Raine McCorquodale, the daughter of novelist Dame Barbara Cartland. But she was said to be unpopular with her stepchildren, who called her Acid Raine.
Charles, 56, also revealed he has been in and out of therapy for 20 years learning to deal with his unhappy childhood.
Writing in the Sunday Times Magazine, he added: “I did a lot of very profound work on my unhappy childhood last year, which was agonising and horrible.
“I don’t say that out of self-pity, it was intriguing to me that it was so desperately unpleasant. But the result has been cathartic. Coming out the other side has been good.” At Diana’s funeral fune in 1997, the Earl paid tribute to his sister’s efforts to be a mother figur figure to him, describing her in his eulogy as “the big sister who mothered me as a baby”.
Diana was 36 when she died in a Paris car crash with lover Dodi Fayed.
Frances died in 2004 aged 68.
Diana could hear me cry but was too scared of the dark to come to me
EARL SPENCER ON THEIR TRAUMA AT MUM LEAVING