FINALLY, having leafed through endless Diana tomes. Morton (interesting, but skewed) Burrel (insufferable hagiography) Colin Campbell (interesting) Brown (anti) I finally found one that appears to give a rounded account. Clayton & Craig, Diana: Story of a Princess. It's a very sad story. I think a lot of us felt sad with her. Not for, but with.When she died, the country went nuts. That week, Britain ran out of cut flowers and newsprint. The shops were almost empty ~ everywhere. Nobody wanted to buy anything. Newspapers reported on nothing else. Television played endless tributes, discussion etc etc.
Here from pp315-6, describing the last working trip Diana made, to Angola.
We went into one particular ward with children. And there was a little girl who was clearly in a terrible condition. She'd gone to fetch water and had stepped on a mine and basically had her entire insides blown out, and everything was sort of hanging out. It was horrific. And the hospital said that she wouldn't survive ~ they were just making her as comfortable as possible. You could see that she probably wouldn't last, maybe even that day.
After Diana moved on, I stayed and just asked the girl a few more questions, because I thought I would write about her. And she said to me, "Who was that?" And it was quite hard trying to explain Princess Diana to somebody who didn't know. And I said, "She's a princess from England, from far away." And she said to me, "Is she an angel?" And I found that really moving. This little girl probably died a few hours after that ~ I know she died ~ and it somehow seemed nice that that was the last thing that she saw, this beautiful lady that she thought was an angel.
DIANA: THE SECRET TAPES
The tapes in question were the audio tapes on which Andrew Morton based Diana: Her True Story. The tapes in these extracts are videos of Diana practising a speech on addiction. It doesn't start till 5 mins into the part 8; she is being coached by the actor Peter Settelen. William and Harry are in the background, (part 9) Diana keeps reprimanding them for laughing and not sitting still.
