Dressed as policemen, with toy helmets and walkie-talkies, or onboard the royal yacht, Britannia, these photographs of Prince William and Prince Harry are from the personal album belonging to their mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, published for the first time to mark a documentary on her life to be broadcast on Monday.
The now Duke of Cambridge and Harry have opened up publicly to speak candidly about their grief, their loss, and coping without their mother, who died after a car crash in Paris on 31 August 1997.
Twenty years on, they reveal their deep regret that their last conversation was a brief phone call from her in Paris that was cut short because they were playing with their cousins at Balmoral, the Queen’s Scottish estate.
“Harry and I were in a desperate rush to say ‘goodbye’, ‘see you later’ and ‘we’re going to go off’ ... if I’d known what would happen I wouldn’t have been so blase about it. But that phone call sticks in my mind quite heavily,” says William, who was 15 when his mother died.
Harry, who was 12, reveals he grew up thinking ‘not having a mother was normal’, and says he has cried only twice since, the first time when Diana was buried on an island at Althorp, her family’s ancestral home.
They remember the “best mother ever” who “brought a breath of fresh air to everything she did”. They laugh over how she once surprised William, then 12 or 13, by inviting three models to meet him at home, leaving him tongue-tied and blushing. Her motto, according to Harry, was “you can be as naughty as you want – just don’t get caught”.
Then there was her penchant for dressing them up in bizarre costumes. Harry said: “One thing I would love to ask her now, because I genuinely think that she got satisfaction out of dressing myself and William up in the most bizarre outfits, normally matching.
“It was weird shorts and, you know, little sort of shiny shoes with the old clip on. Looking back at the photos it just makes me laugh – I just think: ‘How could you do that to us?’”
Speaking openly about his mother for the ITV documentary had been “daunting” at first, but a “healing” process, William told journalists. He said he hoped it would remind the public, especially generations too young to remember, of his mother’s warmth and humour and also her achievements.
The programme chronicles Diana’s personal story, including her campaigns supporting the homeless and people with Aids, and against land mines.
William said: “We won’t be doing this again – we won’t speak as openly or publicly about her again, because we feel hopefully this film will provide the other side from close family friends you might not have heard before, from those who knew her best and from those who want to protect her memory, and want to remind people of the person that she was.”
- The documentary, Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy is broadcast on ITV on Monday at 9pm.
