Diana's Nightmare - The Family by Chris Hutchins, Peter Thompson

Lady Diana Spencer, who had been surprised to receive an invitation. The Queen Mother and her grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, had taken a hand in that although they didn't seriously consider Diana as a possible bride at this stage. Most of what Diana knew about Charles and his tangled love life came from Sarah, her feisty, red-headed sister who had been his previous girlfriend. Like any other teenage girl in the country, Diana seized every morsel Sarah cared to drop about her famous escort.
    Diana was changing. While staying at her mother's home in Chelsea, she had started visiting Headlines, the salon of a young hairdresser called Kevin Shanley in South Kensington. He saw distinct possibilities in this lanky, hunched country girl. 'She was a natural blonde right into her mid-teens, but then her hair got darker until it was light brown,' he said. He persuaded her to put blonde highlights through her fine, mousy tresses. The effect was electrifying. She sparkled as a blonde. Looking in the mirror, Diana straightened her shoulders and marched out of the salon a new woman. The Spencer family speculated that she might marry Prince Andrew, who knew her as the girl next door at Sandringham. She had kissed him under the mistletoe one New Year's Eve. 'I'm saving myself for Prince Andrew,' she told friends. His big brother was, after all, far too old. Her family's nickname for her was The Duchess, 'Duch' for short.
    The first time Prince Charles had actually set eyes on her was when he called at Park House and baby Diana was playing happily in her nursery. She was, her father proudly told the world, 'a superb physical specimen'. Sarah formally introduced Diana, not at all glamorous in country rig of jeans, jumper and wellies, to Charles during a pheasant shooting weekend at Althorp while she was on leave from West Heath school. This famous encounter in a ploughed field near evocative Nobottle Wood in the winter of 1977 had left Charles with the impression of 'a very jolly and amusing and attractive sixteen-year-old - I mean, great fun, bouncy and full of life'. Diana was less articulate about this milestone in her life. 'Just amazing,' was all she could say about Charles.
    Lady Sarah, who suffered from the unpredictable effects of anorexia nervosa , the compulsive starving illness, made a fatal mistake after Charles invited her to accompany him on a skiing trip to Klosters. 'Our relationship is totally platonic - I think of him as the big brother I never had,' she said. 'I wouldn't marry anyone I didn't love whether it was the dustman or the King of England. If he asked me, I'd turn him down.' After that astonishing gaffe, Charles swiftly transferred his attentions elsewhere, although some believed that Sarah dumped him after rejecting his proposal. Diana observed the break-up and learned an important lesson in the ways of the Prince.
    By this time she too had begun to suffer from the effects of an eating disorder, which later developed into bulimia. At West Heath she regularly binged on four bowls of All-Bran at breakfast. 'We used to throw up together,' said a titled young lady who knew Diana in her teens.
    Her problems originated at home. She had been brokenhearted when her father divorced her mother Frances in April 1969 over her admitted adultery. Frances had married her lover, Peter Shand Kydd, but that marriage also ended in the divorce courts. To his children's deepest distress, Johnnie Spencer fell in love with Raine, Countess of Dartmouth and married her despite their open hostility. The children called her 'Acid Raine' and prayed for her to go away but when Earl Spencer suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, he survived largely because of his new wife's constant presence at his bedside. 'Raine did a lot more than will him to live,' said a friend. 'She simply refused to let him die.'
    After this trauma, Sarah and Diana were relieved to be invited to join a shooting party at Sandringham in January 1979. Jane, the quieter, more