July 29th, 1981Maeve was in London for the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana. This article appeared on the morning of the big event
IT WOULD be impossible for you to know the amount of goodwill there is directed towards the Royal Couple unless you were here in London. For a month, the shops and buildings all along the wedding route have been smartening themselves up. There isn’t a space that doesn’t have the faces of the young couple decorated with flags and coats of arms and loyal greetings.
Men and women who had sparse and drab weddings themselves, people who had no honeymoons, even those who don’t have a proper home to live in – let alone a palace – are out on the streets cheering and laughing and wishing Charles and Diana a happy wedding day. It’s a combination of a lot of things. It’s going to be a great spectacle; everyone feels like a festival; it’s a day off but, most important, people think they know Charles and Diana now and what they know, they like. The couple are very, very popular.
Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in Britain have been feeling a real concern for Prince Charles, and worrying about his lonely life. They read endless descriptions of the evenings he spent alone and how he is secretly a family man at heart. Now they are overjoyed that he has fallen in love and is having a fairytale wedding to a beautiful girl.
Hundreds and thousands of girls all over the country are identifying like mad with Lady Diana who they see as one of themselves but a bit posher. They will never marry a prince and have carriages and horses and fanfares and the works but she is doing it for them in a way. In fact, it is touching to see how little envy and how much genuine enthusiasm there is.
Well liked
Charles has always been very well liked in England. He was educated, if not exactly like an ordinary person, at least like an ordinary upper-class person . . . which gave him some kind of touch with reality.
He was trained in the various armed forces and learned how to do all kinds of things like deep-sea diving and flying a helicopter and playing a cello. He also had to learn about meeting total strangers and expressing an interest in whatever it was that had to have an interest shown in it. At this, he has been very good. He decided somewhere back along the line that if he was going to have to do it, he might as well do it properly so instead of saying “how fascinating”, he says “what is this, how does it work, what’s it for”?
He is always courteous and able to send himself up. When he went through that stage of falling off every horse he sat on, he laughed at himself, and he even asked one of his aides to buy the disrespectful mug which has his ears sticking out as handles. He doesn’t yawn and look at his watch like his father does, nor does he look as tense and strained as his mother sometimes does. Very few people envy him his wealth or his estates. Hardly anyone envies him his job. He is a Good Guy.
Good girl
Lady Diana is considered a very good girl indeed. And because she was such a good girl she got the prize. Mothers can wag their fingers at erring daughters for ever over this bit of fairytale come true. Lady Diana is the living proof that men don’t respect you if you give in to them, and that princes certainly won’t marry you if there’s even a question that you might have given in to anyone at any stage.
Lady Diana Spencer has had a hard few months and if she can stand up to this, she is thought to be able for whatever else is in store. After all, very few brides have to go through the embarrassment of having their uncle announce proudly that they are virgins. Lord Fermoy, the brother of Lady Diana’s mother, made this statement, “My niece has no past.”
She has had to have a gynaecological examination to ensure that she is capable of bearing children, she has had to move in with her husband’s grandmother in order to get a crash course on how to behave like a royal. She has been instructed to keep her mouth shut, to say nothing in public. She has been asked to lose weight and to lose some of her old friends because they are not suitable any more.
To be the future Queen Diana is exciting but there are a lot of hard things to be done on the way.
But Diana Spencer is very popular too, not just because she is young and pretty . She has the kind of background that people like to read about. Old noble family, young princes as playmates when she was a toddler, nice exclusive girls’ schools, Riddlesworth then West Heath and then a smart finishing school in Switzerland where she learned to ski and speak a little French.
She had a lot of unhappiness, the kind that everyone can sympathise with, being the child of a broken marriage and because she wasn’t very intellectual, she didn’t try for A Levels.
Instead, she asked her father if he could buy her a flat in London and she would get a job. Her father bought her a flat for £100,000 and she asked three friends to share it. They paid her the rent each month, and very shortly after they moved in, she got a job helping at a kindergarden school which had been set up by two friends of hers.
She never did a season, or came out as a deb. She wasn’t a girl who went to smart nightclubs like Wedgies or Tokyo Joe. Perhaps because of her own lack of home life she tried to make her flat into a home.
She and Virginia and Carolyn and Ann lived like other debbie girls who liked shopping at Harrods and having little supper parties but they were quieter than most and spent a lot of evenings looking at television.
Long list
The telephone directory is hardly big enough for the list of names that Prince Charles was going to marry at one time or another, but very few of these are among his close friends nowadays. Only Lady Jane Wellesley remains from the old flames, and she doesn’t count because she was always meant to be more interested in her work than marrying the Prince of Wales. Another lady called Lady Tryon is a close friend. She is Australian and Charles calls her Kanga and takes her advice about everything, it is said . . . including the suitability of the new bride.
He has a hard core of male friends including Nicholas Soames, Lord Tryon, Lord Vestey and Lord Romsey . . . they are thought to be secure in their circle and don’t fear that marriage will take the Prince away from them completely. For Diana it may be different. Even though she was able to give her flatmates a phone number of Clarence House and begged them to ring her up for chats, they keep finding that she’s in the middle of this or that and it is frowned on to interrupt her.
The flat mates have been so discreet and refused very tempting bribes to tell their stories about life with Lady Di that it is believed they may well be rewarded by being allowed to remain friends. The trouble is, of course, that they are not quite upper class enough . . . but if they behave nicely it may be overlooked.
It’s easy to know all this kind of gossip and speculation about Charles and Diana. In fact in the London of the last month, it would be difficult not to know it. There is a determination to celebrate and indulge and even wallow in it all. People want to read the same old stories over and over – how he proposed, what she said, what he thought, what they said then. They are like children wanting to hear the same fairy tales over and over.
And the best bit of the fairytale is today, which is why hundreds of thousands of men, women and children have been up all night to share in it, to be a part of a world where princes are strong and kind and princesses are young and beautiful and virtuous and if you position yourself rightly you might get a wave or a smile from one of them.