Diana waited in vain for her mother to come home, says Earl Spencer
When Frances Shand Kydd walked out on her children for another man, she told her daughter, Diana, that she would ‘‘come back to see her’’.
The future British princess, then aged five, would ‘‘wait on the doorstep for her, but she never came’’, according to Diana’s younger brother, Charles Spencer.
In an interview in the Sunday Times’s Magazine, the 9th Earl Spencer reveals in harrowing detail the ‘‘damage’’ inflicted by their ‘‘agonising’’ and ‘‘ruptured’’ childhood.
Charles, who was two when his parents separated, said Diana would often hear him crying in the night, but she was ‘‘too scared of the dark’’ to come down the corridor to comfort him. Their older siblings, Sarah and Jane, were away at boarding school.
Describing his childhood at Althorp, the family estate in Northamptonshire, Spencer said: ‘‘She and I were very much in it together and I did talk to her about it. While she was packing 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.’’
Frances and Johnnie Spencer, the 8th Earl Spencer, married in 1954 when Frances was 18. Johnnie was 12 years her senior. They divorced in 1969 after she left him for the wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd, whom she later married and settled with in Scotland.
In an acrimonious custody battle, Frances was dubbed ‘‘the bolter’’ and lost the care of her children.
Johnnie’s second wife, Raine McCorquodale, daughter of the romantic novelist Dame Barbara Cartland was unpopular with her stepchildren who nicknamed her ‘‘Acid Raine’’. Spencer, 56, who is the Queen’s godson, said: ‘‘Our father was a quiet, constant source of love, but our mother wasn’t cut out for maternity . . . she couldn’t do it. She was in love with someone else, infatuated really.’’
At Diana’s funeral in 1997, Spencer paid tribute to his sister’s efforts to replace their absent mother, describing her in his eulogy as ‘‘the big sister who mothered me as a baby . . . and endured those long train journeys between our parents’ homes with me at weekends’’.
Reflecting on her marriage in a magazine interview the same year, Shand Kydd said: ‘‘While I believe remorse and regret are vibrantly necessary when we have failed others and failed ourselves, I do think repetitive apologies are a form of self-pity.’’ She died in 2004 aged 68. – Sunday Times