The Way We Were by Paul Burrell

Author:Paul Burrell [Burrell, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-204631-4
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

The princess could disappear from KP to spend whole days in his one-bedroom flat, and the joy she derived from those occasions was immeasurable. Diana, Princess of Wales, would return to the luxury of Apartments 8 and 9, sit down with a glass of carrot juice and start to talk, as if she was an ordinary woman from middle England, about how she had spent the day in a poky, sparsely decorated flat, vacumming, polishing, dusting, doing the dishes, ironing piles of laundry, stripping and re-making his bed. She craved such normality, such ordinariness, such self-sufficiency away from the trappings of royalty that had both defined and stifled her.

“I don’t mind ironing shirts,” she said. “It reminds me of when I used to look after an American family and washed and ironed all theirs.”

It transported her back to the days when, as an agency nanny, she had found work with Americans living in London — a job she juggled with her role at the Young England kindergarten in Pimlico, a private pre-school where she was a nursery assistant and drove around the capital in her Volkswagen Golf GTi. Then she dated her ‘officer and a gentleman’ boyfriend Rory Scott and, every weekend, ironed his shirts. A life so ordinary was repeating itself with Hasnat.

She mentioned how she had gone to his ‘bachelor pad’ and found days’ worth of pots, pans, plates and cups stacked in the kitchen sink, not to mention empty KFC boxes on the counter-tops. I asked her how she had reacted to that, expecting her to frown, but she told me how she had put on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and set about tackling the crockery mountain. Once more, history repeated itself.

Friends have recalled how in those days at the kindergarten she donned rubber gloves to help out in the kitchen there. Even at Balmoral she was known to find a pair of rubber gloves and muck in with someone else not averse to washing-up — Her Majesty the Queen. The princess would join her mother-in-law at the sink in the log cabin in the estate’s grounds to wash up after a summer barbecue.

Whether she was at the kitchen sink or in front of an ironing-board, the boss embraced domesticity with gusto — in much the same way that she embraced Hasnat’s family. In the summer of 1996, his grandmother was invited to tea at KP, and presented with a silver dish engraved ‘With much love, from Diana x’. She sent me out to Mothercare in Oxford Street to buy the latest double-buggy for his uncle, whose wife had given birth to twins; I had to root out all the boss’s maternity clothes, worn when she was pregnant with Harry, so that they could be lent. Both that year and in 1997, the boss took time out of her schedule to spend time with his family at their home in Pakistan — she went out of her way to gain their acceptance and met them all: mother, grandmother, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews.

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