Penny Junor: Prince William

But Diana didn’t know how to be a mother. She adored William, and Harry when he came along two years later – there is no doubting her all-consuming passion for them both and the love she showered on them – but she had never been successfully mothered herself and therefore had a skewed view of motherhood.

She continued to suffer bouts of depression – compounded by postnatal depression – and self-loathing from which the only release was to cut herself, to the alarm of all those around. At times, Barbara Barnes must have wondered who needed more looking after, mother or baby. As Diana said herself of that time, ‘Boy, was I troubled. If he didn’t come home when he said he was coming home I thought something dreadful had happened to him. Tears, panic, all the rest of it.’ Always in the back of her mind were the feelings of loss and abandonment she had experienced as a six-year-old and the fear that it would happen again.

Her mind became a cauldron of jealousy. She imagined Charles with Camilla Parker Bowles, whom she knew he had loved and was afraid he still did love. He was crass in his handling of the situation. Unable to put himself inside the head of an insecure twenty-year-old, he kept a photograph of Camilla in his diary, which, inevitably, fell out in front of Diana; and he wore gold cufflinks on his honeymoon that had been a gift from Camilla. ‘Got it in one,’ she said. ‘Knew exactly. “Camilla gave you those, didn’t she?” He said: “Yes, so what’s wrong? They’re a present from a friend.” And, boy did we have a row. Jealousy, total jealousy …’

The rows were tumultuous and terrifying but they were only half the story. There were good times too, which were precious. When she was feeling happy and confident, Diana was pure delight. She was funny, carefree and impish and there were days when the house resounded with laughter. Friends remember going to lunches when she and Charles would giggle and joke throughout. Others remember arriving to go to the theatre with them one evening and Diana saying to Charles, ‘Come on, let’s go and say goodnight to the children – I’ll race you to the top of the stairs!’ The pair of them then ran up the stairs and collapsed at the top in a heap of laughter.

KP, as Kensington Palace was known, was not the grandest house that the heir to the throne might have lived in, but the idea was that it would be a London bolt hole. The master plan was that they would base themselves at Highgrove, the country house Charles had bought near the Cotswold town of Tetbury in Gloucestershire in 1980. He was never happier than in the country, and although the house had one or two security drawbacks – like a public footpath running through the garden – and was neither very large nor architecturally imposing, Charles fell in love with it and it has remained one of the greatest pleasures in his life. And while he set about creating a garden, he gave Diana a free rein to do up the inside of the house, for which she once again turned to Dudley Poplak.

Although not palatial, Highgrove did have four good reception rooms, nine bedrooms, six bathrooms, a nursery wing and staff accommodation. While outside there was a big stable block with room for ten horses, a lodge, a farm manager’s house, a couple of farm cottages, farm buildings and a dairy.

But what he really fell in love with were the trees and the parkland surrounding the house, which he felt had ‘a particularly English feel’ and he developed an instant passion for a 200-year-old cedar tree, just feet from the west side of the house.

The garden swiftly became Charles’s passion. He sought the help of a family friend, Lady Salisbury, known as Mollie to her friends (mother of the 7th Marquess), who designed, amongst others, her own garden at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. She was a legendary plant expert and garden wizard, and was much amused some years later that, having gardened without the use of chemicals since 1948 and been written off as a crank, she was suddenly fashionable. She taught the Prince almost all he knows about landscaping and horticulture and as they dug, plotted, measured and planted side by side, many of her ideas rubbed off on her eager student.

But there was another influence on Charles in his conversion to organics, Miriam Rothschild, a scion of the famous banking family, whose passion for bugs, butterflies and wild flowers was second to none. The influence on the Prince of both women was profound.

The sadness was that while Charles became ever more immersed in his creation, of which in the early days Diana kept a photographic record, Highgrove soon lost its charm for her and she increasingly chose to stay away, preferring to be in London.

Early in 1983, when William was nine months old, Charles and Diana set off for their first foreign tour together – six weeks in Australia and New Zealand. In another break with tradition, they took William with them, prompting stories in the press that they had done so against the Queen’s wishes, which was not true. But they did defy the custom that no two heirs to the throne should travel in the same plane together. And so with William, Nanny Barnes, an entourage of twenty staff and a mountain of luggage, the royal party arrived to a rapturous reception.

William, with his own little entourage of Personal Protection Officer, nanny and chef, spent the first four weeks of the trip safely installed on a sheep station called Woomargama in New South Wales, while the rest of the country went into a frenzy that verged on hysteria over ‘Lady Di’, and wanted to know every last detail about her infant son. They turned out in their thousands to see her, and as she and Charles zigzagged their way across the Continent, she was treated more like an A-list celebrity than a member of the British Royal Family. Waving flags and clutching gifts, they were desperate to catch her eye, shake her hand, touch her coat, engage her in conversation or in some way feel they had claimed a bit of her; and they were much more vocal and demanding than the Welsh had been when she and Charles toured the Principality the year before.

Once again, it was obvious that Charles was no longer the star. He had never particularly sought the limelight, but like all members of the Family he was used to it, and to find himself eclipsed after thirty-four years was painful. Proud though he was that so many people seemed to love Diana, he had never expected to play second fiddle to anyone other than the Queen. In Wales, the murmurs of disappointment when the people on one side of the street realised they were getting Charles and not Diana were faint; Down Under, they were unmistakable.

Returning to Woomargama every so often between engagements to see William was a blessed release. As Charles, always a prolific letter-writer, wrote to friends, ‘I still can’t get over our luck in finding such an ideal place. We were extremely happy there whenever we were allowed to escape. The great joy was that we were totally alone together.’

To Lady Susan Hussey he wrote, ‘I must tell you that your godson couldn’t be in better form. He looks horribly well and is expanding visibly and with frightening rapidity. Today he actually crawled for the first time. We laughed and laughed with sheer, hysterical pleasure and now we can’t stop him crawling about everywhere. They pick up the idea very quickly, don’t they, when they’ve managed the first move.’

In New Zealand they all stayed together at Government House in Wellington, where William experienced his first photo call. In the garden, dressed in an embroidered romper suit, with bare legs and feet, he swiftly demonstrated his newfound skill and set off across the carpet that had been laid out for the trio to sit on, stopping only when his father grabbed him. As Charles proudly wrote to his friends the van Cutsems, ‘William now crawls over it [Government House] at high speed knocking everything off the tables and causing unbelievable destruction. He will be walking before long and is the greatest possible fun. You may have seen some photographs of him recently when he performed like a true professional in front of the cameras and did everything that could be expected of him. It really is encouraging to be able to provide people with some nice jolly news for a change!’