The double set of divorces-Lord Spencer was himself cited in Dartmouth suit-proved how royal attitudes have softened over the years. Divorce was the factor in the abdication of King Edward VIII, who quit to marry the twice-wed American, Wallis Simpson, and in the breakup of Princess Margaret's romance in the 1950's with the previously married Group Captain Peter Townsend.

At sixteen, Diana went to finishing school in Switzerland, where she became fluent in French and an expert skier, a sporting skill she shared with Prince Charles. Music was another mutual  interest: Charles is a good cello player and Diana was a reasonably proficient pianist. Unlike members of the royal family, however, she had no particular affinity for horses-she once "fell off a horse and lost my nerve"

Neither Diana nor her sisters went trough the usual society debutante routine of "coming out" with lavish season of parties to launch them on the marriage market. Instead, growing bored with life at the family's Althorp Hall with its eight and a half thousand acres and seven hundred Old Master paintings. Diana decided to get a job in London. Lord Spencer set her up in an apartment which she shared with three friends, Virginia Pitman, Carolyn Pride and Anne Bolton, in a faded but elegant Edwardian apartment building off the old Brompton Road in London's South kensington.

She found a job with the Young England Kindergarten in Pimlico, South London, an establishment run by two former school friends. Her leisure time was spent going to movies with friends, watching TV, sharing a bottle of wine in a local pub or shopping for clothes. There were no late nights at trendy clubs, no romantic involvement at all. Diana's background made her a perfect   candidate for Princess of Wales: she had a history but no "past"

She also spent months looking after a handicapped two-year old boy, visiting him twice a week to take him out and patiently talking to him for hours. When his parents took him home to the United states, Diana found other children to look after as unpaid nanny or babysitter. Lord Spencer, a jovial man who was amused that the Prince of Wales, with old-world courtesy, had called to ask his permission to marry Diana ("I wonder what he'd have said if I' said no?"), praises his youngest daughter as "very practical" and " a good housekeeper." She is a skilled cook and kept the Kensington apartment neater than any of her roommates.

Lady Diana's two elder sisters made prestigious marriages, Sarah to Neil McCorquodale, son of a printing millionaires, and Jane to Robert Fellowes, assistant privates secretary to the Queen. Diana's life might well have followed a similar, conventional upper-class path to the altar had it not been for the fateful day in the summer of 1980 when Prince Charles , in the wake of a broken romance and recalling an attractive teenager who had struck him "great fun...full of life," picked up the phone and invited her to watch him play polo.

Soon after her first date with Prince Charles in July 1980, Diana was able to spend five days on the royal yacht Britannia for the annual Cowes Week Regatta off the Isle of Wight without a  single reporter or photographer spotting her. It was not until she turned up in September at Balmoral Castle, the royal family's Scottish summer home, that newshounds caught the scent. On February 4, 1981 Charles proposed after a candlelit dinner for two on the second floor of Buckingham Palace. On February 24 the announcement from Buckingham Palace flashed around the world: "It is with the greatest pleasure that the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh announce the betrothal of their beloved son, the Prince of Wales, to Lady Diana Spencer, Daughter of the Earl Spencer and the honorable Mrs. Shand Kydd."

Within minutes they were giving their first interview together, Diana flashing her huge sapphire engagement ring, circled by fourteen diamonds.  Diana Frances Spencer would never be a private person again.

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