Last week, I took my two youngest sons to the Diana Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park. It is quite unlike other memorials or fountains. It forms a circular river which changes every couple of metres: shallow to deep, rushing to calm, springs to waves. Dozens of children were playing in the water; bare feet clambering, little limbs lying down in the pools, small voices raised in laughter and excitement. A fitting tribute to an extraordinary human being.
Today, 20 years after her death, Diana continues to divide the country. A great many people still cannot work out what the fuss was, and still is, about. Yes, she was a good woman who did not deserve to die. But isn't that true about lots of women, every day? Surely she was just another celebrity?
But this logic misunderstands the point and appeal of the Royal family. It is popular because millions of people feel that they have a connection with its members and an affinity towards them. Those who are mystified by the Diana phenomenon tend not to wonder why, when the Queen celebrated her jubilee, millions celebrate with her. The link people felt with Diana was similar, but she offered a new kind of kinship. Her life was messy, as are so many of our own lives. She portrayed motherhood – even single motherhood – as a joy, not just a duty. She came along at the same time as a shift in the public mood, as people changed their minds about decorum and emotion.
The television schedules and papers are again awash with photos and articles, her face staring out at us from the newsagents, much like it used to. She had too much love, and not enough. Not enough from her husband, but too much from the world. We felt we knew her and we couldn’t get enough. The press who hounded her were after all giving us what we wanted: Diana pictures, Diana stories - more, more, more.
When she died my mother and I spent much of the week weeping in front of the television. We later added a bouquet to the vast floral ocean in front of Kensington Palace. I barely recognised my own country – the stiff upper lip was nowhere in sight. It seemed as if people were crying everywhere. On the day of the funeral, I stood on Birdcage Walk and watched the hearse pass slowly by. Then, encouraged by a new-found friend from the crowd, I ran round and came out by the corner of Buckingham Palace and jumped up to look over the crowd’s heads and see her coffin pass in front of the Queen and Royal family. It was surreal. I felt ashamed of myself at that moment. I had chased her and felt the thrill of it just as the paparazzi did who fed our obsession and whom we condemned.
And yes, I had loved her; if it’s possible to love someone you haven’t met. I’d grown up a decade behind her, and as a young girl I utterly idolised this beautiful, shy teenager who had been revealed to the nation. I was just young enough to still buy into the fairytale. My hair was cut short like hers and every morning before school my mother painstakingly used heated tongs to give me Lady Di ‘flicks’. I hoovered up Diana books, mugs and stamps with whatever money I could muster.
Almost 20 years later I was grown up but still mesmerised. The fairytale was over and had in fact never existed at all, except in the world’s wishful thinking. No matter. The day of their engagement Charles had mused ‘Whatever love means’. Diana understood what love meant and gave it in spades. People saw this, and appreciated it. This love was new from a royal, and many will have been appalled. But more weren't. She gave love, and we saw her give love, to her boys, and to countless ordinary people who were vulnerable or in need. She understood suffering too, making her all the more attuned to that of others. Her HRH title was gone, but as Tony Blair declared, she was indeed ‘the people’s princess’.
Diana was also an icon for women, as Nigella Lawson pointed out at the time. She epitomised the 'modern, self-invented woman' who managed to 'forge an identity of her own, very distinct from her husband's, and pointedly so'. Nigella was right to suggest that 'for many women, this showed that times really had changed, and that a wife, even one as traditionally brought up as Diana, was no longer prepared to play a subservient role, or even pretend to do so.'
Today, two of my sons are 15 and 12, the same age as William and Harry when Diana died. This makes the horror of her death particularly poignant for me. The fortunate majority of us can barely begin to imagine the agony of losing a mother. Our loss was nothing, nothing at all, next to theirs. Plus my sadness when I think about Diana isn’t solely about her, but linked to growing up and older, putting away childish things like fairytales, and discovering that most dreams die, and that life is complicated, sometimes confusing and often disappointing.
The Royal Parks sign at her fountain states ‘We ask visitors not to walk on the Memorial’. Nobody pays a blind bit of notice. There was no quiet reverence and reflection. My boys, who’d been dragged along reluctantly, shed socks and shoes in a second and stepped into the water. I sat and watched and thought about Diana, feeling grateful and also guilty to be there playing with my sons when she could not.
My feet dangled in the water, as the sign permitted. Having always been a goody two-shoes, rule-breaking does not come easily to me. But Diana had lived life with her whole heart. Her sense of mischief and humour was summed up by Harry’s story of how she’d stuffed sweets into their socks at school. So I stood in the water and started to walk. My boys laughed, and so did I.