A house of sorrow and secrets

“Ready?” my husband asked as I slid into the car. I always look forward to our trips, but it wasn’t as if we were on the way to the Hotel California via Route 66, or even our usual bickering, joyous peregrinations to the seaside towns of southwest England and north Wales.

No, we were going to Northamptonshire. Specifically, to Althorp, family seat of the Spencers, and the final resting place of Diana, Princess of Wales. In Northampton, the football team is known as the Cobblers. Joe Mercer, when manager of Manchester City, once said: “The miracle of 1966 was not England winning the World Cup but Northampton reaching Division One.” As writer Andrew Collins remarked, “Northampton’s biggest selling point during the 1970s and 1980s was that it was 60 miles by road or rail from London. It’s 68 miles, actually.”

In Althorp, you’ve got Diana. Dead.

As we left the home counties and shuffled into the shires, it was strange to think of Diana—that mercurial, volatile body of light, forever flying off in pursuit of pain or pleasure from one hotspot or fleshpot to another—growing up among these endless fields of nothing in the empty heart of England. We stopped to buy a newspaper, in which I read about a survey that claimed that the Midlands was the place in all the country that people least dreamed of moving to. Quelle surprise.

“No wonder her mum scarpered,” I thought as we ploughed into Northamptonshire—only to remember that Frances Shand Kydd never lived at Althorp, having bolted from Park House in Norfolk before the eighth Earl Spencer inherited the family pile. Few women leave their children without extreme provocation, and we can only guess what this spirited young woman had to put up with from her husband who, by all accounts, could rage and sulk for England. So Diana came to live—13 years old, motherless—in the middle of all these fields. Her desolation can only be imagined.



Later, I would read in the first room of Althorp’s “Diana: A Celebration” exhibition (just before I fled in tears), that she was “miserable and homesick” during her time in Switzerland and came back to England within the year. But it wasn’t to Althorp and the cold comfort of the countryside she ran; it was to the bright lights of London, where she shared a flat with other teenagers and worked as a cleaner and a nanny.

She never bothered becoming a debutante, despite being far more aristocratic than most of the upstarts who these days sell out their meritocratic birthright in order to ape the useless antics of the upper classes. For the first time, she found a happy home. And it was nothing to do with family.

Diana was modern in many ways, but one of the most interesting was in that she recognised that home is not where you come from, but where you choose to go. She believed that people should not rest on accidents of birth in order to gain respect. Rather, they should attempt to leave the world better than they found it. Her ex-husband, on the other hand, has become quite deafening in his demand that the world should go backwards and reject progress in every way possible.

Charles represented the dark moral thickets of the countryside versus Diana’s bright, searching cityscape of progress and compassion. As we drive on through the fields towards Althorp, I recall what a clunking bit of old bobbins that Elton John “tribute” was, especially the bit that went, “And your footsteps will always fall here along England’s greenest hills…” Along South Molton Street, more like. Or in the path of landmines, later. But Diana was never, ever a country girl, with the phoney baloney that implies; she wasn’t one for doing a Marie Antoinette. Her footloose kindness belonged to the wretched of the earth; she wrote her own story—literally, in her later life, with the help of Andrew Morton. She fled to the warmth of the city and found herself evicted from the cheap-and-cheerful teen Eden of flat-sharing and menial work into the cruel machinery of a family even grander, colder and more manipulative than the one she escaped from.

And here is the Althorp paradox. Now recast as her beloved family home for the purpose of opening part of itself to the paying public from 1st July (the date of her birth) to 30th August (the date before her death) each year, it actually rejected her at the one time she asked anything of it. Towards the end of her marriage, Diana asked Charles Spencer, her little brother, if she could have a cottage on the estate he inherited from their father at the age of 27 (even though he had three older sisters). An £85m estate with almost 200 cottages and farmhouses on it, that would be. “Security concerns” were supposedly the reason why he refused to give her shelter. But as soon as she was dead, it was a different story.

***

It’s hard to recall now the force with which Charles Spencer’s funeral tribute to his sister affected a nation bridling with disbelief at the time it had taken the Queen to come back from Scotland after news of the death. (It was said that crying in public was something HM Just Didn’t Do, so imagine my surprise when not long after she wept during the decommissioning of the royal yacht Britannia.) That speech, in which a courtier placed himself in opposition to the ruling house, was one of those pieces of oratory that leaves the listener hot and cold and breathless with possibilities—now, NOW, it’s going to happen, one true thing, AT LAST!—like “Speak for England!” or Cromwell’s dissolution of the long parliament. Except it wasn’t, because Spencer was a toff. And toffs screw up—both proportionately and if you factor in their headstart privilege—on a scale that leaves your average Shameless sink-estate citizen standing. There is a higher quota of drunkards, drug addicts and mentally deficient dullards in Debrett’s than there is in Deptford. Aristos actually are what people say chavs are: lazy, entitled, vulgar and acquisitive to the bone.

Every stately home is a Big Brother house, based on cut-throat principles of hierarchy, bullying and survival of the fittest. Except in the BB house, the sweetest and sexiest was the fittest, and thus the most likely winner; in the stately home house, the fittest is the malest and the meanest. When his father died, Charles Spencer had the belongings of his hated stepmother chucked out in black binbags before you could say “white trash” and refused to let the widow remove any furniture from the ancestral home unless she could produce proof of purchase. Among Raine Spencer’s perceived crimes were selling off more than £15m-worth of Althorp’s contents and replacing them with fixtures and fittings which, claimed Charles Spencer, had “the wedding cake vulgarity of a five-star hotel in Monaco.” And, most of all, opening the house to the public and spending more than a decade with the British Tourist Authority and a dozen other bodies promoting the country as a destination for visitors. Which makes it all the more surprising that Althorp is now open to the public, complete with a shop where that speech can be purchased, bound in silk, for a mere £25. While Charles Spencer himself, the alleged keeper of his sister’s flame, hasn’t done a thing worth remarking on since then. How the mediocre have fallen.

Charles the husband and Charles the brother have a lot more in common than their names and the cruelty they displayed towards Diana. They do love to flog their dead horses to a paying public. Look at the Prince of Wales with his extortionately-priced Duchy Originals, whose Cornish pasty was revealed in 2007 to contain more calories and fat than a Big Mac. Similarly, the moment you walk into Althorp you are greeted by a handwritten sign which proffers Althorp Celebration Mug and Althorp Breakfast Tea, £10, not to mention Althorp Chocolate Chip Shortbread, 2 for £5. And this isn’t in the shop, which is away in the stable block—it’s there in your face the minute you walk in the door. Gee, you feel like saying, give me a minute, will ya—at least pour me a drink and put some music on before you start doing me three ways.

So what do you get for “The Complete Visit—£15” or “The Concise Visit—£12.50”? (The first words I heard on Althorp’s hallowed ground were from the lady in front of me in the ticket queue; “How much? I’ll take the Concise, thanks.”) You can also go upstairs for an extra £2.50 if you’re feeling flush/pervy, or mooch around the grounds for a trifling £3.50. Walking the five minutes from the gate to the main house, we passed scores of trees girdled with metal holders and barbed wire; it was probably to stop some quadruped snacking on them, but to us it seemed a warning of what lay ahead. Trees in cages!

Inside, you get lots of horse paintings, lots of chairs you can’t sit on, and so many sofas. In the Sunderland Room, paintings of cows abound—some as big as a man. Elsewhere the friends and family stare down at you, apparently mute with horror at their legacy. The one that caught my eye was of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, painted by Godfrey Kneller in 1702. Her eyes are red from weeping after a ducal dust-up and in her hand she holds her shorn hair, which she has cut off to spite her husband. And the quote: “I am confident I should have been the greatest hero that ever was known if I had been so happy as to have been born a man.”

It’s that chavistocrat thing again. We jeer at the shamelessness of single mums and deadbeat dads flaunting their nasty little sex wars on The Jeremy Kyle Show, but the D of M so hated her husband that she sat for her portrait after a domestic so that the evidence would survive for all time.

***

Whatever you think about old-time toffs, they were pretty honest; they hatched, matched, dispatched, like the beasts they loved paintings of; they didn’t think much of schooling, never pretended to be spiritual, openly mocked intelligence. The modern Althorp stuff is just weird—a testimony to a time when aristos started thinking they were sensitive, intelligent, all the stuff that proper people are. But you can’t have the responsibilities of a beast and the rights of a human being.

Outside, this “Quality Assured Visitor Attraction” had grubby windows which muttered “Keep your plebby noses out” and random bollards murmuring “Whatever chavvy thing you’re thinking about doing—don’t!” Urns were roped off—what did they think we punters were going to do, urinate in them? A bench bore the inscription: “Presented to Charles Spencer with the best wishes of those who work on his grandfather’s and father’s estates on the occasion of his christening.” Bloody hell, who’d be a serf? You don’t just have to break your back working the posho’s land, you have to chip in for the garden furniture they park their idle arses on, too.

At the Diana Memorial near the lake around the island where she is buried, it says for the nth time “Keep To The Path,” but people have ignored it and placed flowers there, staying true to the spirit of warm-hearted Diana rather than her cold-blooded brother turned ringmaster.

Over at ye old stable blocke, you’ve got the shop, the café and the two exhibitions—“Diana, The Work Continues” and “Diana, A Celebration.” The café was hung with the names of old horses long gone—The Swell, Scribble, Loving Cup. The shop boasted a gimcrack gift to suit every pocket, from a £10 keyring to a £100 Limoges Commemorative Heart—and of course, That Speech. I’m afraid I refused at the first jump when it came to “The Work Continues” because the first thing I saw was a quote from bloody Elton John: “The world has lost one of its most compassionate humanitarians, and I have lost one of my best friends.” Couldn’t he have written her a proper song then, instead of acting like one dead blonde icon was much the same as the last one? You’ll notice that he didn’t re-cobble that song when his precious Gianni Versace died—though it could have served just as well. Such as:

Goodbye designer man You made a lot of nice clothes But then a bad man killed you And now you’re dead, I suppose...

But viewing “A Celebration,” my mocking turned maudlin and I bottled it in room one which covered Diana’s lonely childhood. It was a combination of the flickering montage of home-movie moments projected onto the wall, the soundtrack of dissonant piano chords—like a sad child, whose father had wanted her to be a boy, perhaps, practising—and, just to squeeze out every last teardrop, the sound of a crackling old film reel dubbed over the top. It was the close-up of the tuck box bearing the name D SPENCER being loaded into the family Bentley in preparation for being taken to boarding school, a small Diana standing silently by, which finally had me out of that jumped-up burial chamber and pelting down the motorway to the solace of the soft south—like Diana before me.

On the eve of her wedding, stumbling upon details of the bracelet with intertwined initials which Charles was about to give his trollop, Diana told her sisters she couldn’t marry him. “Too late, Duch,” they sympathised, “your face is on the tea towels.” Now her face is on the Fine English Bone China Commemorative Pill Box (£17.50), Plate (£75) and Mug (£19) in the gift shop, and although we are assured that “Althorp pays profits from visitor activity to the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund,” the small print reveals “there is a minimum annual payment of £10,000.” That’s not a lot of £100 Limoges Commemorative Hearts.

I was glad to get out of there, that house of sorrow and secrets; the trees behind barbed wire, the speeches bound in silk and, away in the stable block, a little girl’s tuck box loaded forever into a funeral car on an endless loop. But Diana is nowhere to be found. Free at last, Althorp cannot hold her; it is instead a monument to familial treachery, sibling rivalry and the casual cruelty of the English upper classes.