Diana:What will the next ten years bring?
Her poignant letter six years before tragedy struck
HER marriage was in trouble and she had two young sons, so as Princess Diana approached her 30th birthday it is not surprising that she was worried what her future held.
In a recently discovered poignant letter, she confessed: ‘I do wonder what the next ten years will bring, the last ten I have learnt a great deal in an interesting way!’
Within 18 months, she and Prince Charles had separated amid lurid revelations about their infidelities. And six years after she wrote it, Diana was dead.
The letter, dated June 27, 1991, was written – on Kensington Palace headed notepaper – to Diana’s close friend Dudley Poplak to thank him for three drawings he had produced for her 30th birthday four days later.
One life lesson Diana may have been referring to was how, two years earlier, she had confronted Camilla Parker Bowles over her affair with Charles. Charles and Diana had a notoriously difficult marriage in which both admitted to affairs.
It is not clear what the drawings Mr Poplak gave to Diana were, but she confessed that she had already opened them, writing: ‘Since when have I be [sic] able to keep a present for the right day & I’m afraid your three wonderful drawings were no exception!’
She then made a joke at the expense of her stepmother, Raine Spencer, who had a reputation for selling the family treasures, writing: ‘I am deeply touched to be given something that means such a lot to our family & that Raine hasn’t put under auction!’
The letter has emerged in a sale by David Lay Auctioneers of Penzance, Cornwall.
Alongside it is a separate note by Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, in which she wrote how her son Charles Spencer ‘took on the world’ in his famous eulogy to his sister during the princess’s funeral at Westminster Abbey in September 1997.
Writing four months after she had delivered her own speech at a memorial mass for Diana at St Columba’s Cathedral in Oban, Argyll, where she lived, Mrs Shand Kydd admitted that she was ‘seared rigid’ with nerves before her delivery.
But she added: ‘Since my children had taken on the world in the Abbey I really thought their mum should be able to do her home pitch!’ Mrs Shand Kydd died in 2004. The letter and note are being sold next Thursday by a retired autograph and manuscripts dealer with an estimated value of £600.
Mimo Connell Lay, of David Lay Auctioneers, said: ‘The letter from Diana is quite short but the content is strong. The line where she contemplates the past decade during which she got married, became a mother and her marriage broke down, and what the future holds for her, is very poignant.’
Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed were killed in a car crash in Paris in August 1997.
Charles and Diana had met interior designer Mr Poplak in 1981, when he worked on Highgrove, their Gloucestershire home. Diana remained firm friends with him and the pair exchanged many letters.
Mr Poplak died in 2005, aged 74.