It’s Christmastime in 1967. A six-year-old Lady Diana Spencer sits on the cold steps of Park House—her childhood home, located in the royal family’s Sandringham Estate in Norfolk. She is waiting for her mother, Frances, to come back home. It is a present she will never receive.
“Christmas was always the worst of times for Diana,” faith healer Simone Simmons writes in Diana: The Last Word. “The season reminded her of her mother’s departure.”
Born into immense privilege, Princess Diana’s early holidays were outwardly joyful and magical. But the holidays were also a time of immense family strife. In Diana: Story of a Princess, Phil Craig and Tim Clayton recall the Christmas of 1967, when Diana’s separated parents put on a united front for their four children—Diana, Sarah, Jane, and Charles. Frances had left John for Peter Shand Kydd (whom she later married in 1969), embarrassing her powerful ex-husband. She had moved to London and planned to take the younger children, Diana and Charles, with her after the holidays, when John took away her custody of them.
“He refused to let [Diana and Charles] return to me and applied to the court for their permanent return to Norfolk, and this was granted,” Frances recalled, per Diana in Search of Herself by Sally Bedell Smith. “The courts were closed for Christmas, and I could do nothing…. I was devastated.”
Princess Diana watched as the heartbreaking scene unfolded.
Her six-year-old self “sat quietly at the bottom of the cold stone stairs at her Norfolk home, clutching the wrought iron banisters while all around her there was a determined bustle,” Andrew Morton writes in Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words. “She could hear her father loading suitcases into the trunk of the car, then Frances, crunching across the gravel forecourt, the clunk of the car door being shut and the sound of a car engine revving and then slowly fading as her mother drove through the gates of Park House and out of her life.”
From then on, the children primarily lived with their father, and spent some weekends with her mother. John tried to overcompensate by showering the children with expensive gifts at the holidays.
“Before the big day, Charles and Diana were given the catalogue for Hamleys, a large toy shop in London’s West End, and told to tick what presents they wanted Father Christmas to bring,” Morton writes. “Lo and behold, on Christmas Day their wishes came true, the stockings on the end of their beds bulging with goodies.”
Diana’s father often packed her and Charles off to Sandringham, where they spent the holiday season. “We were always shunted over to Sandringham for holidays,” Diana recalled, per Morton. “Used to go and see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the film. We hated it so much. I hated going over there. The atmosphere was always very strange when we went there, and I used to kick and fight anyone who tried to make us go over there, and Daddy was most insistent because it was rude.”
