Diana was very affected by her parents' divorce, as her brother said. As a girl, she waited for her mother to return.
As a little girl, Princess Diana (1961-1997) is said to have suffered greatly from the separation of her parents and waited on the doorstep for her mother to return. Her younger brother, Charles Spencer (56), revealed this in an interview with the Sunday Times, according to media reports. In it he described a "painful and torn" childhood.
In the late 1960s, her mother Frances Spencer (1936-2004) left the family for another man. She is said to have promised her youngest daughter that she would "come back to visit her". Diana was waiting for her on the doorstep, "but she never came," Charles Spencer is quoted as saying.
Parents married in 1954
Charles, who was two years old when his parents separated, said Diana often heard him cry in his room at night but was "too scared of the dark" to go down the hall to comfort him . The older sisters of the two, Sarah (65) and Jane (63), were therefore in boarding school when their mother left the family estate in Althorp.
Frances had married John Spencer (1924-1992), the 8th Earl of Spencer, in 1954 when she was 18 and he was 30. The couple officially divorced in 1969. She later married Peter Shand Kydd (1925-2006). John Spencer's second wife, Raine McCorquodale (1929-2016), was "unpopular" with Diana and her siblings, as Charles Spencer also said.
"She couldn't"
"Our father was a calm, constant source of love, but our mother was not suitable for motherhood," he told the newspaper about his parents. "She couldn't. She was in love with someone else, really in love."
As is well known, the divorce from Princess Diana later made global headlines. In 1981 she married the British heir to the throne Prince Charles (71), the parents of Prince William (38) and Prince Harry (35) separated in 1992, and the divorce followed in 1996.