Chatting in hushed tones in their dorm after lights out, the other girls must have giggled when it came to Diana’s turn to say what she wanted to be when she grew up.
“I would love to be a dancer,” she told them, “…or Princess of Wales.”
Even as a shy teenager Diana couldn’t hide her dream of one day marrying the country’s most eligible bachelor, even reportedly keeping a picture of the dapper Prince Charles above her bed at boarding school.
So when the fairy tale finally came true, the whole world was transfixed, while Diana’s natural warmth and charm turned her into a global icon whose legacy still inspires people today.
As the day approaches when she would have turned 60 – July 1 – she is still the “People’s Princess”, missed and mourned by millions.
That Diana never stopped believing in true love is all the remarkable given how her story began, when, aged six, her mother Frances ran off to live with another man.
Her father, John Spencer, who would later marry Raine, Countess of Dartmouth, the daughter of romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, won custody of Diana and elder sisters Jane and Sarah, and her younger brother Charles.
They continued to live at Park House, on the Queen’s Sandringham estate, which Diana’s grandparents had rented from King George V and where her father was an equerry to the Queen.
But Diana’s displeasure at losing her mother was often evident, especially by her behaviour towards a succession of nannies.
Her last nanny, Mary Clarke, remembers: “Diana’s father told me that out of all the children she had been the most disturbed at the break-up.
“There had been quite a number of changes of help within the house. Diana would lock the nannies in the toilet and throw away the key, or she would go into their rooms, which she wasn’t meant to do, and get their clothes and throw them up on to the roof.”
Mary, in an interview for a documentary released this week, Diana At Sixty, remembers how Diana loved the countryside and wasn’t interested in glitz and glamour.
“She was happiest in trousers and an old top,” Mary recalls. “She wasn’t in the least bit interested in clothes. She absolutely hated dressing up.
“On the few occasions I had to struggle to get her into a dress or skirt, she would go, ‘do I really have to do this? I don’t see what it matters what I’m wearing, no one’s going to look at me’.”
Diana was tutored at home until the age of nine before being sent to boarding schools, first Riddlesworth Hall in Norfolk, then West Heath Girls School in Kent, from the age of 12.
While she didn’t excel academically, failing her O-levels, she excelled at sport.
Her former music teacher at West Heath, Penny Walker, remembers: “She was just one of the others with a tatty pullover and long skirt.
"She was often slightly in the background with a smile on her face, as though she was just going to be very naughty, which she usually was.”
Aged 16, Diana was introduced to Prince Charles for the first time, during a grouse hunt at Althorp.
Afterwards, she excitedly told friends that one day they would be man and wife – even though Charles was dating Diana’s older sister Sarah McCorquodale at the time.
In July 1980, she met Charles again at a friend’s barbecue and was later invited to spend a weekend as the prince’s guest at Balmoral, where she is said to have especially charmed the Queen.
On February 24, 1981, Buckingham Palace announced the news of a royal engagement, followed by the couple’s uncomfortable engagement interview during which a reporter cheerfully asked them whether they were in love.
Clearly enthralled in her romantic story, Diana replied “of course”, before looking on as Charles added: “Whatever ‘in love’ means”. It was the first sign that the seemingly perfect fairy tale was not destined to have a storybook ending.
