Word: royalities
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...born at Park House, part of the 20,000-acre royal estate at Sandringham, in Norfolk, which the Spencer family rented from the Crown. The Spencers had run with royalty for hundreds of years, and the Earl has been equerry to both George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Diana and Charles may have met a few times when she was a child and he already a young man, but everyone is fuzzy on the details. The Spencers had the only heated pool in the vicinity, and, by the one theory of suburban living that seems to cross barriers of class...
...showers in the morning, long runs in the often inclement weather before class-and Charles, despite a deficiency in mathematics shared with his future bride, did well. He went on to earn a degree in archaeology and anthropology at Trinity College, Cambridge, becoming the first university graduate in the royal family, and served as an officer in both the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy. But if his schooling and military training brought him outside the palace walls, they did not bring him outside his class, any more than Diana's upbringing...
Although Lady Diana is not much seen just now, what with all the royal tutorials and wedding preparations, she is already being widely imitated. Her haircut is copied. Her outfits are being knocked off. Her husband-to-be met a vanguard of Di clones in New Zealand on his trip, and commented, "Not as good as the real thing...
...real thing will find herself soon enough in an odd position with real life, a little exalted and, at the same time, perpetually risking compromise. Cautionary romances, like William Wyler's 1953 film Roman Holiday, have alerted us to the restrictive, hermetic and sometimes suffocating side of royal life. A princess is required to be both an ornament and an exemplar, a rarefied high-wire act that calls for a lot more skill than a good sense of balance. Everyone waits for a false step, and there are even some who will shake the wire. Diana's older...
...hard feelings but a sobering lesson. "You are always a bit on your guard," remarked Charles' sister, Princess Anne. "You know that because you're royal, anything you say might be given extra significance . . . There are very few people I know whom I would speak to with any degree of freedom." Freedom does not come with the royal territory, and if Princess Anne is not so well loved as her brother, it may be because she seems aware of this situation, not only more acutely but perhaps more poignantly...