Diana, My Bestest Friend

My first sight of Diana was when she came to the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers when she was nineteen. I was seventeen at the time.

She had come because the Queen Mother wanted her to be examined to make sure that her hymen was still intact. The whole operation was in total confidence--only the select few knew.

Princess Diana: Redcross Landmines Campaign (Luanda, Angola, January 15, 1997)

I remember Dion was waiting for me outside the hospital. There was a war going on and my boss, Chief Accountant Johnson, came into my office and asked if I knew who the young man was loitering near the building. Mr. Johnson thought that there was an Arab assassin waiting outside, and he was terrified. I giggled, and explained that Dion was an Afro-Indian from Trinidad, and my boyfriend.

After Diana had been examined, she came to my office to give a donation towards the staff fund. The Matron’s secretary, Lindsey, introduced us and curtsied as she left. I smiled; almost laughing, Diana was not Queen yet.

Diana was indeed a pretty girl and only two years older than I. It was hard to imagine that she was going to marry the old fart.

“I’ve come to give a donation towards the Staff Christmas Fund,” she said. I could tell that she had been coached into doing so. She asked how much she should give. I told her that the Queen always gives £25 per stay. She smiled, a cheeky smile, and said, “I’ll give £50 then.”

We both laughed.

“You have a lovely smile; she said.
I questioned it. “With this big gap--I don’t think so.”
“It’s supposed to bring you good luck.”
“Yeah, I know, I guess it has been so far, lucky.”

She commented on my hair. I had it braided, long plaits, down my back. She asked how I did it. It was too complicated to explain so I just made a joke and said, “My sister held the ends while I ran round the block and it stretched.” We both laughed again.

“So what’s it like?” I asked her.
“What’s what like?”
“Marrying the future King of England, and all that goes with it, Queenie?”

She looked down and shrugged her shoulders. Her smile dropped. I could see that she felt uncomfortable with not only the question but also with the situation, so I changed the subject.

“Look,” I called her to the window facing the street. “That’s my boyfriend over there. His name is Dion Khan. His Dad’s a Diplomat.”
“He’s gorgeous,” she said. “I wish I could marry a black man.” At that, she placed her hand over her mouth, as if to swallow the sentence.
“Really?” I said, in disbelief.
“I should not have said that,” she went on.
“No, that’s all right. The place isn’t bugged. And I won’t tell anyone.”
“Yes,” she said. “Ever since I saw a picture of Bob Marley with Mick Jagger, I said, ‘That’s the man for me.’”

I was just twelve months out of pigtails and white socks. A church girl who, honestly, knew nothing about what Bob Marley looked like; I just knew that he was a Rasta man who sang a song called Jamming. It was not until later--years later--that I came to know the true Bob Marley and all that he stood for. And it wasn’t until then that I realised Diana’s fatal attraction.

It was time Diana went -- the bodyguards seemed to be getting restless. I signed and gave her the receipt for the staff fund. As I handed it to her she said, “Jac.” I was surprised, as she had shortened my name.

“Jac,” she said, “can we be friends, close friends?”
“Friends?” I said. “That’s impossible, isn’t it?”
“No, we’ll find a way.”

And at that, she smiled and turned to leave. As she was going I shouted:

“Keep that signature, Miss Spencer, it will be famous one day.”
“As famous as I?” she replied with a quick flash of steely-blue eyes.

IT WAS TWO MONTHS before I heard from Diana again. I was at my desk when the phone rang.

“Hello, is that Jacqui?”
The voice sounded muffled as if she was talking from a pit.
“It’s me, Diana.”
“Hi Queenie,” I said, “How’s life at the Palace?”
She told me to “Shh,” so I did. “I’m in the West End shopping later, can we do lunch or something?”
“Lunch or something--that’s a bit OTT--what will Charlie say?”
“True,” she said.
“I tell you what…I just live around the corner, maybe we can pop into mine for something light to eat and a chat?”

I gave her the address and we arranged to meet at one o’clock. As I turned the corner, I half expected to see a big black stretched limo with bodyguards surrounding it, but there was none. As I got closer to the apartment, there she was, sitting in the driver’s seat of a Mini looking in the rear view mirror. She didn’t see me approach. As I knocked on the window, she jumped. We both grinned.

Diana, being Diana, did not take the conventional exit from the car; she climbed across the passenger seat, legs spread eagle, and came out onto the pavement in a ruffled state.

“Future Queen of England, eh,” I said, jokingly.

We did the cheek kisses and fell about laughing. We linked arms as we went inside, all the way upstairs, just like we had been bosom-buddies since birth. All the way up, we laughed; anyone seeing us would have thought we were drunk.

As soon as I opened the door, Diana said;

“Have you got any music?”
“Now music is my thing. Every weekend I spend half my wages on records. I have done ever since I was a kid.”

There was a market stall on Marylebone High Street where two guys sold my type of music, “Lover’s Rock” and “Rare Groove.” I was a popular customer.

“What type of music do you like?” I asked her.
“Black music,” she said. “Do you have any Bob Marley?”
“Unfortunately not, but if you like Reggae, then you’ll love Lover’s Rock.”
“What’s Lover’s Rock?”
“Lover’s Rock is the most angelic form of Reggae that you will ever hear in your life--old soul songs sung by guys and girls our age--from the streets of Britain. Actually, it’s called “British Lover’s Rock,” I explained.

I put on a tape that I had recently made. We listened while we made corned beef sandwiches with hot pepper sauce.

“What do you think,” I asked.
“Of the music or the sandwiches?”
“Both,” I said.
“In a word – HOT!”

We both laughed. Come to think about it, we spent many a times during the next few years doing exactly that, laughing. We left the apartment about an hour and a half later. Diana jumped into her parked car, by the driver’s door this time, and as she rolled down the window to say goodbye, I whispered in her ear:

“Remember, always wear a slip under those see through skirts. We don’t want to see any more ex-rated front page pictures of your legs right up to the thighs.”
“Next time I will only be wearing a see through bikini,” she joked.

We did our cheek kisses as I rolled my eyes just before she sped off at about 70 miles per hour in a 30 mile an hour zone.

That was Diana for you!

THE PHONE RANG, “Hi Jacs.”

“Hello, you.” I never mentioned her name again on the telephone, just in case the operator was listening, or worse.
“What are you doing?” she asked.

That was the thing with Diana, she never asked how I was doing, always what. It was good to hear from her. I hadn’t heard from her since before William was born. She did however send me a lovely picture of William, in his christening gown, and on the back, she wrote, “To his Spiritual Godmother,” I was chuffed.

“Not much,” I replied.

Dion had been away in New York for the past four months, so for me it had been just home and work, work and home. Diana asked if I wanted to meet. She said she needed to talk, something about post-natal blues. I agreed, and we met two hours later at the Blythe, the park that backed on to my new house in southeast London.

She arrived wearing a baseball cap, a denim jacket, torn jeans and trainers. When she opened her jacket, her T-shirt had a razor slash right across the chest so that her cleavage showed. She flashed it as soon as she was close enough for me to see:

“Diana, you’re such a slut,” I said to her, jokingly.
“So sue me,” she fired back, and as usual, we laughed – LOUD.

We were so loud that it was a good job the park was always empty, but I’m sure that they could hear us in the valley below.

We went and lay down on the roundabout. It had been a warm summer’s day--but at almost eight o’clock in the evening now--the sky was darkening. The clouds moved slowly across the heavens as the moon began to come out. For a while, we span in silence, laying there looking up at the darkened sky, deep in our own thoughts, but glad to be in each other’s company.

“So what’s new?” Diana eventually asked.
“Motherhood,” I replied.
“Not me, you, everybody knows my business,” she said, grudgingly.
“Well, the only thing new in my life is that I’ve found a new best friend.”

She sat up with a start.

“Who is it? What-is–her–name?” She asked the question slowly as if to spell out each word.
“C-A-N-N-A-B-I-S” I spelt.
“Dope!” she squealed.
“Yeap,” I said grinning.
“Oh, let me try some,” she reached out her hand.
“I haven’t got any on me, it’s over North London,” I said.
“Can we go and get some, please?” she cried.
“If you want, but there is no guarantee.”

She quickly dragged me off the roundabout and started pulling me home towards the cars.

“Come on, we’ll catch up in the car on the way to North London.”
“I’m driving,” I ordered. “You are too wild behind the wheel.”

We got in the car, and as soon as the ignition was on, Diana pushed the cassette into the player.

“Who are we listening to?”
“Gregory Isaacs,” I told her.
“This isn’t Lovers Rock. This is ‘I’m missing you Dion’ music,” I explained.

Diana talked non-stop all the way to Stanford Hill. I felt that I had given birth to William by the time she had finished giving me all the details. But as always, I could tell that Diana was not happy being Princess.

“So, who are we going to see?” she asked.
“My friend Lance…I call him ‘King of the Jews,’ because he lives in a big house in Stanford Hill, amongst all those Jew boys.”
“So what is he like -- you know?”
“Tall -- six foot four,” I said.
“Nice,” she whispered.
“Behave,” I said, hitting her arm, “Dark,” I said, knowing her preference.
“How dark?” she asked.
“As dark as it gets,” was my reply. “Handsome, too; and he has the body of a God,” I added.
“I cannot wait to meet this friend of yours,” she said, smiling.
“Well, here we.”

I pulled up outside Lance’s house and looked up at his bedroom window. His light was on. “He’s home, so it is not a wasted journey,” I told Diana.

“Jacs,” Diana said, as we got out of the car, her face contorted.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“He won’t say anything about me, will he?”
I knew what she meant--newspapers, television, photos, and blackmail. I took her arm, “Girl, he will not even know who you are,” I assured her. “Come we step.”

She laughed.

“I’ve taught you too much,” I said.

I pressed the intercom. A smooth dark voice said, “Hello, who is it?”

“It’s me Jacqui; I’ve brought my Best Friend with me. I hope you don’t mind.”

He buzzed us in. The house smelt as usual of ‘White Linen’ incense from the Body Shop. Soft candles were burning in the hallway and his tribal masks and statues seemed to come alive in their flickering glow. The place was silent and spiritual. “Come up,” Lance called down.

Diana took my hand and we climbed the spiral stairs. Lance as always was lying on his four-poster bed in his string vest and boxer shorts.

“Hi Lance,” I said.
“Hi, who is your friend?” he looked at Diana.

Even in the dim light, you could see Diana’s cheeks slowly turning scarlet as she began to blush.

“Hello my name is Di,” she said, shyly from under her baseball cap.

“Hello, I’m very pleased to meet you. Sit down,” Lance said. He pointed to a carved stool. “Would you like something to drink?”

“Not at the moment,” Diana replied.

Lance looked at me, I looked at him, and he looked at Diana. Now I knew that I was not supposed to bring no white woman to Lance’s house. Lance was a true Rasta man and didn’t ‘deal with pork,’ but I knew that this was someone special; otherwise, we would not have come.

“We come for de weed,” I said with a smirk. “Di would like to try some, but I’ve tried to tell her that she won’t be able to handle it.”

“Never smoked before, Di?” Lance asked.

Diana blushed again, “No,” she said under her cap.

“Well, there’s a first time for everything,” he announced. “Go on, Jac, you know where it is!”

I looked up at the suitcase on top of the six-foot high wardrobe.

“Ha-ha Lance, I will need to stand on your shoulders to get up there.”

At that, he jumped up, picked me up and lifted me above the wardrobe. Diana sat in amazement. Lance went to the kitchen to check on his cooking and left Diana and me with a ready-rolled spliff each.

“He’s gorgeous, and that voice,” she said.
“I told you! After that spliff, he’ll seem even more gorgeous--guaranteed.”

So we lit up. I had brought the tape from the car so I put it on the stereo. The atmosphere was heavenly. The smell of the cooking blended with the white musk, the Ganja smell blended with everything, and we were feeling irie--well chilled.

Lance came up with a plate of food for each of us. Diana had told me she was starving, so I knew that she was going to have some. She started eating, picking at first, but after seeing Lance and me with all fingers helping, she did the same.

It was nice to see how relaxed Diana could be. That was the thing about Lance, you always felt comfortable at his place, so calm. Food was eaten, hands were washed and after three loud burps, we were all chilled out.

Diana had at last stopped blushing, and although Lance knew exactly who she was, he didn’t let her know he knew. He just kept things pure and simple.

IT WAS DECEMBER 1992 when the shit really hit the fan. Diana rang me early in the morning; she was hysterical, crying, shouting and even laughing at times.

“I must see you, I need to talk. It’s about Him. I have to leave him.” By “Him,” I knew she meant Charles.

My love for Dion was now a thing of the past. And my husband, Mark, was not home at the time. I had married the blue-eyed soul boy, Mark, in February of that year. Mark never knew anything about my relationship with Diana; I never dared to tell him. Mark was a man who loved nothing above money. He would do anything for it, and that, I thought, would have included telling whomever about my friendship with Diana, or rather, Diana’s friendship with me.

I told Diana to come round; I could not go out because my daughter Kailey was still asleep. Diana arrived about an hour later. She was in a real state. She rang the intercom so frantically that she woke both Kailey and my Alsatian dog, Ben. You would have heard his barking all over town. He wasn’t called “Big Ben” for nothing.

I sat Diana down but she would not stay still. She was pacing up and down my living room just saying, “I hate him, I hate him.”

She then took out a bottle of pills.

“Have you any bottled water?” she asked.
“What are the pills for and where did you get them?” I wanted to know.
“I got them from my Consultant, Dr Maurice Lipsedge, they are just for my nerves,” she showed me the bottle; I read it--Clozaril, it said.
“Water,” she asked again.
“I haven’t got any bottled at the moment, but give me five minutes, and I’ll pop down to the shop and get some. The dog needs walking, anyway, and I don’t really want Kailey to see you in this state. Sit down,” I said, “we’ll be back in a minute.”

I kissed her cheek, and my daughter, Ben and I, headed for the shop.

It was just as we got to the Asian Deli that I heard someone call out my name. I looked around and saw two WPCs standing by an ambulance.

“Are you Jacqui Whittaker?” they asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you step inside? We want to ask you a few questions.”

My first thought was “Oh no, what has Mark done now?”

We, all three, went inside the ambulance, Ben included. It was unlike Ben to be so calm; he was trained to attack the Blue Uniform. As the doors closed, Kailey sat close to me, looking terrified. The ambulance began to move away.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked them.

The Officers ignored my question. They just wanted to know my dog’s name. I lied. As we drove past my home, I started screaming;

“You can’t take me away -- the Queen of England is in my house.”

By the Queen of England, I meant the future Queen of England, of course, HRH Princess Diana, but I did not repeat that.

The officers laughed, “Oh, The Queen of England is in your house, is she?”

I realised just, then, what I had said and how it must have sounded; I began to cry. The further we drove from the apartment was the more worried I became and the more I cried.

“What must Diana be thinking? Was she OK or was she in danger?”

I wanted to get to a telephone and call her to explain, but explain what, I didn’t have a clue what was happening. When the van stopped abruptly, the cops carted the dog and my daughter off somewhere, and that was the last thing I remembered.

IT WAS TWO WEEKS LATER when I regained consciousness. The news was saying that Charles and Diana were taking a break overseas somewhere and were talking of divorce.

My head was all over the place. My body was stiff and covered in plasters where I had been injected with potions. I was in an acute psychiatric ward at Guy’s Hospital. Brought there on that Saturday, two weeks prior; and placed on a Section Three, which meant that they could hold me for six months.

My god, what had I said, if anything, whilst I had been there drugged and unconscious? Had I said anything about Diana, unknowingly?

Mark came to see me later that afternoon but I had nothing to say to him. For somewhere in the back of my mind, I believed that he had something to do with all this.

It was another two days before I was introduced to my consultant, a Doctor Maurice Lipsedge. It was three more months before I was able to talk to Diana again--three more months of being in that loony bin. I was not in there continuously, because my husband Mark got me out when he wanted sex, money, or both. I felt like a blow up doll with a cash point card. I had to call Diana despite the security risk.

“Hi Diana, it’s me, Jacs. I am so sorry.”
“It’s OK,” she said, “I know all about it, Doctor Lipsedge told me. Listen, Jacs, we must be careful, they know, so we must communicate through Maurice.”

So that is what we did for the next three years.

IT WAS NOT UNTIL SPRING 1996 that I saw her again. We met at the Godden Green Clinic in Sevenoaks near where Diana went to school.

51GVJX841HL. SL160 Diana, My Bestest Friend

Maurice, I mean you, Doctor Lipsedge, had suggested I needed a rest. I was five months pregnant at the time and a rest sounded good.

I was unaware of your motive until I got to the clinic; Diana was already there. She looked different--not at all the same fresh-faced girl that I recalled from those years ago. She looked surprised to see me. The new prescription you had me on made me balloon out to thirteen stones from my usual one hundred and twenty pounds. I could tell that she was trying not to think about my weight; I could see it in her eyes. She looked tired, drained, but I wasn’t all compos mentis either. Was I?

The new drugs had sent my mind in a blur, and although she was trying to say something to me after you left us alone, I couldn’t quite get the gist of it.

“My ex-husband is planning ‘an accident’ in my car,” she said, “brake failure and serious head injury or something like that.”

But I couldn’t understand why the future king of England would want to kill the mother of his children. It didn’t make any sense to me.

“I’m trying to stay strong, Jacs, to protect the people I love,” she said. “You’ve got to stay strong and hold your head up high, too. You must listen to Maurice. Do as he says. We have to communicate through him from now on. There’s no telling what depths they’ll stoop to next, and whose life they might ruin, as they’ve tried to ruin mine.”

But who did she mean? I wasn’t sure who these “they” were, but that was the last time I saw Diana. Your ploy had worked just fine, you see, Doctor. She dumped me like a shitty nappy, and I became your model patience, after her little talk with me that morning. We both took your advice. But it didn’t do us much good, now, did it? She’s dead, and I’m still somewhere over the rainbow.

BUT I WAS MAKING LOVE TO JASON when the phone rang in the early hours of that Sunday morning. I rushed down stairs to answer it; it was Mrs. Seaward, Jason’s mum.

Her voice sounded cold and tearful.