At the age of five Princess Diana would wait on the doorstep in vain for her mum to come home but she never returned, her brother has revealed.
Frances Shand Kydd walked out on her family for wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd after 15 years of marriage to Johnnie Spencer, the 8th Earl Spencer.
She told her young daughter she'd "come back to see her" but never returned, Diana's younger brother Charles told today’s Sunday Times.
Diana would "mother him as a baby" and make every effort to replace their absent mum, he told mourners at his sister's 1997 funeral.
Now the 9th Earl Spencer has revealed the “damage” caused during an “agonising and ruptured” childhood has seen him spend the last 20 years receiving therapy.
He told the paper he would cry at night after his parents separated when he was just two, but Diana was too scared of the dark to walk down the corridor of their home on the family estate of Althorp, Northamptonshire, and comfort him.
He said: “She and I were very much in it together and I did talk to her about it. While she was packing her stuff to leave, she promised Diana she’d come back to see her. Diana used to wait on the doorstep for her, but she never came.”
Frances, then 18, and Johnnie, 30, married in 1954 and divorced in 1969, with Frances going to live with her new husband in Scotland.
A custody battle followed after which Frances, dubbed "the bolter", lost the care of her children.
Frances, who died aged 68 in 2004, previously expressed remorse and regret for what happened but said "repetitive apologies are a form of self-pity".
Johnnie remarried to Raine McCorquodale but she was unpopular with her four stepchildren who nicknamed her Acid Raine.
Spencer, who is the Queen's godson, said: “Our father was a quiet, constant source of love, but our mother wasn’t cut out for maternity ... she couldn’t do it. She was in love with someone else, infatuated really.”
Father-of-seven Spencer, now 56, is now married to third wife Karen, 47, a Canadian philanthropist with whom he has an eight-year-old daughter. He is step-father to her two daughters from her first marriage.
