DIANA’S LASTING LEGACY OF LOVE

THE SUNDAY ESSAY

- Jennifer Selway

ON THE Saturday evening I’d packed some junk in the VW for a boot sale the following day. The children had “helped” by vetoing attempts to include any of their belongings. “How many Buzz Lightyears does a nine-year-old actually need?” I grumbled to my husband when he went downstairs to make tea on Sunday morning.

I heard the radio chattering in the kitchen. He came upstairs.

“Diana’s dead”, he said and turned on the TV in the bedroom where the news teams were all doing a brilliant job, keeping the story going with only the barest details of the crash in Paris.

How did I feel then and in the days that followed? Twenty five years on it’s difficult to say.

Shock, I suppose, at such an unexpected tragedy.

But also a growing sense that the tectonic plates of national life had shifted in some peculiar way.

The Sunday boot sale was cancelled of course, the first sign that this was no ordinary celebrity death. In Sainsbury’s later that day there were people crying in the aisles which made me feel faintly embarrassed. They didn’t know Diana, did they?

During the week my children wanted to drive into central London to look at the crowds and I took them because this was history in the making. But I didn’t feel a sense of connection with this throng.

Though my younger son says that he remembers me crying when we watched the funeral and saw the two princes walking behind their mother’s coffin.

Young mothers identified with Diana. She made motherhood cool and visible. It was desperately sad she would not see her boys grow up.

It wasn’t all quiet, reflective sadness by any means.