The day before the funeral he is driven to Westminster Abbey for a run-through, carrying two copies of his speech in case he loses one. He is sent up to the pulpit for a voice level. Halfway up the steps he notices figures he had not seen before moving out of the building’s shadows with an air of purpose, and understands that whatever he reads now can be corrected, or refused. So he pats his pockets, says cheerfully that he has left the thing at home, opens a prayer book at random and reads from it instead. Swan Song – Diana, My Sister by Charles Spencer is a book about grief, and just as much a book about who is allowed to speak for the dead.
The Week Somebody Had to Organise
The most absorbing thread is not the speech but the administration beneath it. Somebody had to decide where a body went. The family wanted a small private burial and were overruled by a palace and a prime minister’s office, which correctly judged that the public would not accept being shut out.
So he chose an island in a lake on the estate, because water is a moat, and because his job now was to make her grave unattractive to anyone determined to reach it. The family crypt was ruled out for a reason so bleak it stops the page. A bishop was rowed over to consecrate the ground. Army engineers put up a pontoon bridge, removable afterwards. Two foresters dug the grave by hand.
What Swan Song – Diana, My Sister by Charles Spencer Does With a Childhood
The early chapters are the best writing here, and least interested in royalty. The house is a large rented place on a royal estate in Norfolk, where the two youngest children live in the old servants’ half with the nannies while their father occupies the other half alone.
Two of those nannies were violent. He states it once, without emphasis, and moves on: a wooden spoon brought down hard on open palms by one, and by the other their heads put against a wall, or against each other. Their parents were never told, and he assumes they took the silence for permission.
Against that sits the detail a reading group will keep returning to. Every evening, from about the age of five, his sister worked round the ground floor shutting the house up for the night, in a fixed order, taking it entirely seriously. Their mother had recently gone. He declines to draw the line between those two facts, and need not.
How Swan Song – Diana, My Sister by Charles Spencer Anatomises a Lie
He is exact about how a falsehood gets built. In December 1993 he wrote his sister a supportive letter after she withdrew from public life. Three months later a reporter rang claiming to have seen it, and to know that it rebuked her for appearing in public too often since. He explained that his letter predated every event she cited by months, so she was describing something impossible. She could not quote a line of it. She ran it anyway, and two other papers amplified it inside a week.
He also remembers two journalists arriving at his flat to propose that he feed them material about himself, since his character had already been assigned and he might as well be paid. He was twenty, and he declined.
Swan Song – Diana, My Sister by Charles Spencer and the Choreography of a Funeral
Outside the palace that morning her former husband sets out the formation he has settled on, with himself at the centre and a son on each side. His own father overrules him in a voice that closes the subject: the brother goes in the middle, representing his sister and her family, the boys beside him, father and grandfather on the flanks. The portrait of the older man here is unexpectedly warm, all quiet competence and kindness.
Then the walk, which he calls the worst experience of his life, worse than the speech, and has dreamt of since. They were told to march in step and keep their eyes front, partly for dignity and partly to avoid what the horses left. He could not turn to check on the younger boy, who kept getting a stride ahead. Passing under an arch and briefly out of view, he bent down, hugged him and told him he was doing brilliantly, then they carried on in silence before the world.
Where the Book Strains
The organising conceit works against the life. Every chapter is titled with a phrase from the eulogy, so the biography leaps decades to keep pace with a speech.
Reprinting the oration in full at the end is ceremony, since almost every line has already been taken apart.
The worst of what he reports about the present King has no corroboration and can have none.
He says on page one that this is not a complete picture, which is honest, and leaves the book unable to settle what it stirs.
Groups wanting more in this line should try London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, a family chasing the truth about a death among the very rich, or How to Lose Your Mother by Molly Jong-Fast on the difficulty of loving a famous relative in public. The Last Emperor of China by Paul French suits anyone who came to Swan Song – Diana, My Sister by Charles Spencer for what an institution does to a person inside it, and Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden is the companion on a private life lived before an audience.
For the Group
Start with the title he turned down. On the train home after the burial a courtier relayed the Queen’s offer to restore his sister’s royal title posthumously. He refused on the spot, because it should never have been taken away while she lived. He admits he has wondered since whether her sons might have wanted it. Was that his call?
Then the question Swan Song – Diana, My Sister by Charles Spencer cannot answer for you. His authority rests on an archive, and he has kept a startling amount of it: letters, internal notes, a full run of a child’s termly reports, conditions written in his own hand into his agreements. Yet the most damaging things he reports are remarks made privately, with nobody else in the room. Does a man who keeps everything earn the benefit of the doubt where he has nothing?
Then his nephews. He writes that on the journey home the younger boy was left to come apart with nobody steadying him, and that a kinder hand then would have helped him for years. It is a serious charge against the adults in that carriage, from one of them.
One practical warning. This is heavier than it looks. It records without flinching that he and his sister had each at times wanted to die, and what each held on to instead. There are eating disorders throughout, a newborn’s death and a mother not permitted to hold him, two small children beaten by paid carers, an assault his sister described to him, photographers working at a fatal crash, and a false public accusation against his late father.
What It Leaves Behind
In November 2002 Nelson Mandela came to the estate, planted an oak in the rain, and asked to be taken to the grave. Too frail for the boat, he crossed a bridge put up a second time, holding the author’s hand while a bodyguard kept an umbrella over him. The two stood at the graveside in silence, and then Mandela said his sister had been a very great lady. The verdict of Swan Song – Diana, My Sister by Charles Spencer is that this was a better tribute than anything he had managed to compose, and you believe he means it.
That is the register that lasts. Not the famous accusations, which will fill a fortnight of newspapers and then sit unresolved, but the small administered kindnesses of a terrible week: four black swans turning up as a stranger’s gift, by a coincidence he could not have arranged; a young army officer who later named that bridge the proudest thing he had done; a whole regiment assembling so every last man could volunteer for the burial party. Swan Song – Diana, My Sister by Charles Spencer is partisan, baggy in the middle and unable to prove its sharpest claims. It is also the only account of that week from inside the family, and on the song that followed, the logistics, the childhood and the lies, it is exact, self-accusing and hard to put down.