Lady Diana was, in fact, the first English girl to marry an heir to the British throne since Anne Hyde, the daughter of the Earl of Clarendon, wed the future James II in 1660: the last Princess of Wales, who became Queen Mary, was of German descent and the one before her, the consort of Edward VII, was the Danish Princess Alexandra. The Queen Mother, who married King George V's younger son without expecting him to occupy the throne, comes from the Scottish nobility.

Despite her aristocratic antecedents, Diana Spencer was very much a girl of her time: she was the  first Princess of Wales and queen consort to have lived a normal life-as part time cook, children's nanny and kindergarten teacher-and to have shared an apartment, done the household chores and had parking problems with her mini Metro car like any other London working girl.

She has also know the trauma of a parental divorce, something that in earlier times would have barred her from consideration as a potential royal consort. A family like the Spencer, sprung from generations of courtiers and royal aides, naturally imposes its own kind of discipline and diplomatic flair. Diana's father, the eighth Earl Spencer, was equerry to king George VI from 1950 until the king's death in 1952 and moved on to fill the same role for the new queen. In 1954 he married Frances Roche, daughter of the fourth Baron Fermoy; as with Charles and Diana, there was a twelve-year gap between them.

Their first child, Sarah, was born in 1955, their second, Jane, followed in 1957.  Diana Frances was born four years later on July 1, 1961, in a house rented from the Queen just across a low wall from the royal residence at Sandringham, Norfolk. The fourth in the family, Charles, arrived in 1964.

There was never any question of Diana or her siblings being awed by royalty or unsure how to behave with them. Diana was sixteen months younger than Prince Andrew, the Queen's second son, and the two were constant companions as children. To a tiny Diana the Queen was "Aunt Lilibet." Both the Queen and the Queen Mother encouraged the friendship between the royal children and the Spencer girls, and all four of Diana's grandparents served on the Queen Mother's personal staff.

Diana attended two schools in Norfolk before enrolling at fashionable West Heath boarding school in Sevenoaks, Kent, where she is remembered as academically average, good at swimming and useful hand at tennis and lacrosse. The one thing that impressed all her teachers was her cheerful temperament and affection for young children. Her equable disposition helped her trough the upheaval of her parent's divorce when she was eight, but friends say it had a deep effect on her and believe that it partly explains her caring attitude toward young children.

Her mother had been named in the the divorce between Peter Shand Kydd, heir to wallpaper fortune, and his wife Janet; she later married Shand Kydd and went to live on a Scottish estate. In 1975, when Diana was fifteen, another bombshell exploded in the already split family: Earl Spencer, then fifty-two, took a second wife, the forceful and glamorous Raine, Countess of Dartmouth. Lady Dartmouth, formerly married to a friend of Lord Spencer, was a well-known public speaker and committee organizer.

She had an even more formidable mother in the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, one of the world's famous authors, a health food crusader and colorful figure who at eighty invariably dressed for interviews in jewels and furs as if about attend a grand society ball. The Spencer girls did not attend their father's wedding and relations are said to have remained uneasy with their stepmother although they have improved since Earl Spencer suffered a brain hemorrhage in 1979 that has left his speech partly slurred: it is thought that he would have died but for Raine's devoted nursing.

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