BACK PAGES:ON THE eve of the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer in 1981, Maeve Binchy analysed the mood in London:
It would be impossible for you to know the amount of goodwill there is directed towards the royal couple unless you were here in London. For a month, the shops and buildings all along the wedding route have been smartening themselves up.
There isn’t a space that doesn’t have the faces of the young couple decorated with flags and coats of arms and loyal greetings.
Men and women who had sparse and drab weddings themselves, people who had no honeymoons, even those who don’t have a proper home to live in – let alone a palace – are out on the streets cheering and laughing and wishing Charles and Diana a happy wedding day.
It’s a combination of a lot of things. It’s going to be a great spectacle; everyone feels like a festival; it’s a day off but, most important, people think they know Charles and Diana now and what they know, they like. The couple are very very popular.
Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in Britain have been feeling a real concern for Prince Charles and worrying about his lonely life. They read endless descriptions of the evenings he spent alone and how he is secretly a family man at heart. Now, they are overjoyed that he has fallen in love and is having a fairytale wedding to a beautiful girl.
Hundreds and thousands of girls all over the country are identifying like mad with Lady Diana whom they see as one of themselves but a bit posher. They will never marry a prince and have carriages and horses and fanfares and the works, but she is doing it for them in a way.
In fact, it is touching to see how little envy and how much genuine enthusiasm there is around the palace.
Charles has always been very well liked in England . . . He is always courteous and able to send himself up. When he went through that stage of falling off every horse he sat on, he laughed at himself, and he even asked one of his aides to buy the disrespectful mug which has his ears sticking out as handles.
He doesn’t yawn and look at his watch as his father does, nor does he look as tense and strained as his mother sometimes does. Very few people envy him his wealth or his estates. Hardly anyone envies him his job. He is a Good Guy.
Lady Diana is considered a very good girl indeed and, because she was such a good girl she got the prize. Mothers can wag their fingers at erring daughters forever over this bit of fairytale come true.
Lady Diana is the living proof that men don’t respect you if you give in to them and that princes certainly won’t marry you if there’s even a question that you might have given in to anyone at any stage.
Lady Diana Spencer has had a hard few months and if she can stand up to this, she is thought to be able for whatever else is in store. After all, very few brides have to go through the embarrassment of having their uncle announce proudly that they are virgins. Lord Fermoy, the brother of Lady Diana’s mother, made this statement: “My niece has no past.”
She has had to have a gynaecological examination to ensure that she is capable of bearing children, she has had to move in with her husband’s grandmother in order to get a crash course on how to behave like a royal. She has been instructed to keep her mouth shut, to say nothing in public. She has been asked to lose weight and to lose some of her old friends because they are not suitable any more.
To be the future Queen Diana is exciting but there are a lot of hard things to be done on the way.
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