No one could take it all in
THE word was shock and it spilled from people’s lips and gripped at their hearts yesterday.
Millions woke in disbelief at early morning news bulletins on radio and TV and at the hastily reassembled front pages of the Sunday newspapers.
Others heard it on a tremorous grapevine, from friends and family, in shops and supermarkets, on buses and just from the highly charged gossip on the street.
Diana is dead — killed alongside her lover Dodi Fayed in a horrifying Saturday night car crash in Paris.
No one could take that all in in one go. It was not just the manner of her death, but all the implications that went with it.
Her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, were foremost in people’s thoughts. ‘ We must pray particularly for the two boys, who will now grow up without a dearly loved mother,’ said the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey.
Tony Blair paid his tribute as he attended church in his Sedgefield constituency. ‘ She was the People’s Princess and that is how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and our memories for ever,’ the Prime Minister said. The Princess’s home at Kensington Palace in West London became an unofficial shrine — a place where people flocked in their thousands to lay flowers, cards, messages, even baseball caps. Buckingham Palace, too, became a focal point for people to gather, even before dawn. Some were on their way home from clubs, snatching flowers from St James’s Park to lay at the gates. Others changed their itinerary to pay their respects.
RON HAYES, 58, on holiday from Accrington, Lancashire, with his wife Margaret said: ‘I’m just so shocked she has died in this way. She was so full of life and so beautiful, and it has all come to an end.’ Boxing champion Naseem Hamed was among those bringing flowers, dropping them from his Lamborghini before driving off without a word.
Buckingham Palace set up a page on its website for people to send condolences. The blackbordered page, featuring a picture of the Princess, concluded: ‘Thank you for your kind messages of condolence for the sad loss of Diana, Princess of Wales.’
At Harrods, flowers and tributes to Diana and Dodi Fayed were piled high in the doorways.
BBC TV prefaced its news with the Union Flag and the playing of the National Anthem. Programmes across the networks were scrapped to devote time to the tragedy.
As a stunned nation came to a standstill, the afternoon’s football programme was postponed. Officials in Blackpool decided not to switch on the famous illuminations. Muffled peals of bells greeted many worshippers to churches across the country, where prayers were said for the Royal Family. At Westminster Abbey many of the congregation were in tears.
Canon in residence, the Rev David Hutt, said Diana had found fulfilment ‘ in embracing the dangers and difficulties that face other people, and let us pray that we, too, may discover this sense of service to others’.
At Tetbury in Gloucestershire, close to Prince Charles’s Highgrove home, worshippers wore black ties while the cross of St George flew at half-mast on the Church of St Mary the Virgin.
‘Everyone is just numb,’ said local priest, the Rev John Hawthorne. ‘ She was often seen in the street and in the shops, and the people here will feel they have lost someone from the town.’
A few miles away, Prince Charles’s mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, was said by her housekeeper to be ‘ absolutely devastated’. Diana’s former lover, Captain James Hewitt, was said to be ‘in a state of shock’.
Mourners laid flowers at Diana’s family home, Althorp in Northamptonshire. Among the congregation at St Mary the Virgin Church at nearby Great Brington — where Diana’s father’s ashes are interred — was Betty Andrews, 76, housekeeper and cook at Althorp when Diana was growing up there.
She said: ‘ She was just an ordinary, shy little girl. She would come in from school, plonk her bag down and raid the larder. Even after I retired, she kept in touch.’