Yesterday Princess Diana would have become 46 years of age but for the tragic events of 31st August 1997, which brought speechlessness to usually stoic BBC newsreaders, a lump to the throat of the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, a silent response from the Royal Family and a mass outpouring of grief from the general public. Ordinary people flew around the world to be at her funeral, world leaders sat among charity workers and hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets in an unprecedented (and unrepeatable) act of togetherness which made London the temporary epicentre of the world.
I was there too. All night. How could I miss such an event if I was only half an hour away by train?
I remember it well, and I don't regret one sleepless second of it. I met two friends of mine, Marketa from the Czech Republic and Anne from France and together we had a hot drink at one of the plethora of cafés which stayed open to feed the world the night before. It was one of the only times in history where London was crimeless, apart from the odd pickpocket and shameless flower peddlar. By midnight the streets looked like Disney had recreated a life-size sellout car-free London themepark - in London itself. We walked around bewondering the immensity of it all, the sheer numbers camping out along the streets, in the parks, in doorways of offices.
A little after, we found ourselves outside the HQ itself: Buckingham Palace. It was here that we chose to spend the remainder of the night. When we arrived there were relatively few people, and we chose to sit beside a musician strumming ballads on his guitar. Let us not forget, that week had been a week where most people in the city had not really gone to work. They mostly couldn't face it. But there were more people in the capital that night than at any time of the working week. But here we were quite alone at the Victoria Memorial. As the playing went on, more and more people came to join, sing along, sway, hold hands or simply listen. By about 2, we must have numbered sixty or more. The pagans celebrate the circle as a symbol of protection, a forcefield against the outside evil forces. And there we were on the greatest circle of them all, emotionally vulnerable but as a group indestructable. We all shared our food and drink together like some new form of communion. I brought a bottle of Becherovka to keep the chill away, Marketa had some sandwiches with her and Anne had a neat little picnic. I had some tortilla española, Polish vodka, North African unleavened bread and Hungarian salami from the assorted members of the human race who, just for that night, were together as they would never be again.
We sang "Candle In The Wind" and other soulful songs when the music stopped for a second. Someone (it might even have been me) recommended singing the National Anthem. If I remember rightly, there was no hesitation. Someone started us off and then the lot of us rose to our feet and belted it out twice. I was impressed how many foreigners knew the words. As we were nearing the end of the Anthem, a light came on in the Palace. I will never forget that moment. It felt as if Her Majesty the Queen herself were saying, "Don't worry, I'm here." Of course, it might have just been a security guard checking the rooms or the Queen Mother getting up to adjust her colostomy bag, or the Duke of Edinburgh looking for his shotgun, but at the time it felt like She was giving us her blessing.
The time passed quickly and the sun soon started to make its arrival imminent. It was going to be a glorious high summer morning. The puddles from recent rain had vanished and the constant sound of all of London's humanity murmuring had reduced to a dawn lull. It was then that we headed off to Hyde Park, where we wanted to watch the funeral on the large screens the BBC had, in her time-honoured fashion, selflessly placed in various open spaces around the city. I have so much to thank the BBC for over the years, but that is for a future article. The three of us, who had been unusually quiet overnight, headed off hurriedly to acquire a good position somewhere near the biggest screen in London.
I thought we would be too late, but we alloted ourselves a prime place a hundred metres back from the screen, and BBC News had already started broadcasting there to keep us occupied while we awaited what I would quite rationally and realistically call the world's greatest funeral since Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi. And maybe including his too. People from the sixties talk about the Kennedy Moment (that everyone knows what they were doing when they heard JFK was assassinated), well I'm sure the Diana Moment surpassed even that. This was a woman who was even known by some remote tribes of the rain forests, who even got airtime on North Korean television (North Korean TV is well known for providing news rather belatedly, and showed a thirty-minute highlights programme of the Football World Cup in 1998 two months after the event - if the BBC did that there would be a lot of letters!).
We sat there around the other people sharing more food out watching coverage of the early morning events, pundits and correspondents telling us what others were doing around the world, famous people reminiscing about their moments with Diana, or charity workers talking about her visits, presenters informing us of the schedule. We watched as the gentry filed into Westminster Abbey and the world's leaders arrived with their escorts and bodyguards. At exactly the right time, the soldiers opened the gates and out came the gun carriage, normally associated with great war leaders, like Churchill, Nelson or Wellington, this time paradoxically for a princess of peace.
Behind her came the royal accompaniment. Brave boys William and Harry looking like men far before their time, bemused, bewildered, betrayed; her brother Earl Spencer hardly able to walk, dignified with his head held high; Prince Charles looking like a startled fish out of water; the Duke of Edinburgh completing the lineup. It was like an identification parade at a police station. Which one of these three men was the perpetrator? Apparently Prince Charles had spent the week roaming around the hills of Scotland feeling full of guilt and self-recrimination. The two boys had been obviously protected from the press because they had not been seen all week. Earl Spencer had occupied himself with the banalities of the administration.
As they entered into the London streets, a small group of hysterical individuals started wailing and throwing rose petals at the coffin. We started to wonder if that was going to be the precedent, but fortunately the rest passed off with dignity. As they progressed along towards Hyde Park, the thousands of people in the vicinity of the southern side of the space rushed towards the roadside to catch a glimpse of her passing. We three followed the wave towards the road barriers, the only empty area of streetside barricades until we arrived
en masse. This was the only, rarest and strangest moment of excitement we had had in the fifteen hours we had been in London. We were all, without exception, there to see
her. The only time I saw the Princess of Wales was in a coffin. I barely looked at the others, transfixed by her alone, even after death. The feeling of seeing her was enough fulfillment and we all processed back to our abandoned picnic places, rucksacks and foldable chairs, which were, of course, all still there, untouched. That was a day when even the thieves took a day off.
As she approached the final part of her journey to the Abbey, the bell of the tower was rung a pre-calculated number of times. Precisely upon the final stroke of the bell, the military stopped at the entrance. It was one of a string of impressive events of that day. Not least what was to happen next. The music which accompanied her up the aisle of the Abbey was so impressive, repressive, oppressive, that it was the moment even the stoniest of hearts let their tears flow. I was losing litres through my eyes and was not ashamed. Most of the funeral was a blur of hypocritical religious mumbo-jumbo which the princess would have had to accept simply because it was her funeral.
Then Sir Elton John stepped up to the piano and sang "Candle In The Wind", a song originally dedicated to Marilyn Monroe but rather controversially re-worded for Diana. Most people thought "Your Song" to be more appropriate, including the proxy-assassins at the tabloid newspapers, as that was genuinely one of her favourite songs and the reason why Sir Elton was there at all.
Earl Spencer climbed the stairs of the pulpit and began his eulogy, perhaps in time seen as the defining moment of the day and which made the shortlist of the Guardian's Great Speeches of the Twentieth Century, where he joins a line-up of great men and women like Sir Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King and Jawaharlal Nehru.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/greatspeeches/story/0,,2060134,00.htmlAs his pained words flowed out, rising above his shaken voice, the world sat transfixed at the eloquence, simplicity and raw power of his speech. He did not hold in his grief. He spoke for everyone and did not revert to hidden messages. And then people were no longer sitting. They were standing all over London, applauding. The growing applause dopplered its way towards the doors of the Abbey and then inside that formal, stuffy sanctum where it brought dignitaries out of protocol, also clapping probably embarrassed to be seen not to, just how Diana would have liked it. Although the rest of the funeral was a typical royal ceremony, those moments were unforgettable. As the service finished, people drifted back to normality, back to the pubs, cafés and railway stations. Reality set in, paradoxically bringing the solidarity shown before crashing to the ground as cars, buses, even white vans, reclaimed their positions as the city's chief noisemakers.
By early afternoon, reality had hit hardest on my own energy levels, artificially pumped up for that most surreal night and saddest of mornings. We three went our separate ways and I took one of the extra trains provided to carry British citizens out of London, dawdled aimlessly in a homeward direction and collapsed in my bed, despite the raging sunshine outside. I slept in a way I had not been able to all week - finally in the most peaceful of circumstances.
You are now wondering why I chose that title. It was playing on my mind yesterday while watching the concert for Diana at Wembley Stadium, the home of modern folklore. Despite the film "The Queen", which did no favours to Diana and virtually turned her into a manic depressive, manipulative little maid, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. She surely became depressed and fairly unpopular in The House due to how she was treated, although I don't think she did herself many favours. I am sure she was tricked into marrying Charles, whom she loved dearly despite his lack of amorous advances. Once she had produced an heir, a handsome successor, she was surplus to requirements, although she could have been a much more admired figure in the royal household if she had Played The Game. But that wasn't her style. She hated all the formalities and protocols. When she went on holiday to Klosters with Sarah Ferguson and the four children once, the tabloid press lambasted her and especially "Fergie" for "giggling like schoolgirls" and behaving like ordinary people, not super-royals. What did they expect? That they would ski in golden boots and go to bed at nine?
And for this reason I believe we have seen exactly how a Messiah could have been manufactured for us 2000 years ago. When you see the photos of Diana shaking hands with leprosy sufferers, AIDS patients, terminally ill children; when she walks in landmine clearance zones, visits youth theatres, takes her boys to a theme park and makes them queue up with the rest, this rings a very familiar bell. It is now, in her death, that she is the humble member of the royalty who was one of the people. All the television documentary witnesses, like the parents of terminally ill patients, right up to ex-presidents, queued up to tell of how she touched their lives so readily, how she was the true divinity which saved their hospital from closing, or which got crucial publicity for their plight in the media, or which lit up the face of a dying boy. Didn't some Jewish man do similar things two thousand years before?
For People's Princess read King of the Jews, for Queen of Hearts, read Lamb of God. We are getting ourselves a secular saint. Would this be the example of how the story of Jesus Christ was purveyed, embellished with a few miracles and urban myths? Don't forget, in those days, in order to Big Someone Up, they had to have performed some mighty things. That meant even if they were bending reality, like being able to walk on water, knowing where a huge shoal of fish was and performing life-saving surgery on your friend's daughter, this meant the person was great.
I see nothing wrong in making legends out of mere mortals, but I see a great moral corruption in turning the tabloid press (who never gave her a moment's peace) into the pharisees, the royal biographers as the Gospel writers, Britain into Judea, and the individuals she met into the Lazaruses, lepers and disciples. But this seems to be what is happening. A new phase in the rehabilitation, a beatification from the masses. I truly believe there are individuals who deserve special status in our respect, who we should try to emulate, but we are also in danger of allowing ourselves to be thrust back into a new religion just as we are finally rejecting them.
