Earlier this year I found myself walking back into the past. I had returned to Coleherne Court, a block of mansion flats in Earl’s Court where at the turn of the 1980s I had lived directly above the 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer as she embarked on her romance with Prince Charles.
As I opened the main door, vivid memories came rushing through, like I was walking backwards through mirrors – Diana shimmering with naivety and wide-eyed innocence as my children tore up and down the stairs, trying to make friends with the pretty young blonde woman before anyone knew who she was.
It would have been the late princess’s 60th birthday two days ago, and on Thursday ITV will begin a three-part series on the life and death of the girl who became one of the most famous women in the world.
Called Diana’s Decades, it aims to show how Diana influenced all of us – and how society influenced her.
ITV is set to mark what would’ve been Princess Diana’s 60th birthday with a three-part series about her life and death. Pictured: Diana leaving her flat in 1980
The producers approached me because I was the first journalist ever to interview her. They wanted me to go back 40 years to the winter of 1980, when Diana was a naive teenager madly in love with our future king and I was raising three small sons in the flat above hers.
Diana was fresh out of finishing school in Switzerland when her mother bought her the flat in Coleherne Court as an 18th birthday present, and she came to live there with three girlfriends. We lived feet from each other for months without me knowing she was dating the heir to the throne. That was how discreet she was.
I imagined the place would have changed, but there it is still, a triumph of turn-of-the-century architecture, a horseshoe of high-ceilinged flats with enormous windows overlooking hidden gardens.
In the days I lived there the fireplace in the hall would have been ablaze, warming the whole building, while Eric the porter stood guard, helping with parcels, opening doors, checking out visitors. Little did he know what was coming.
It was on the staircase that I first met Diana, long-legged and athletic as she rushed past me. She was pretty, but not startlingly so.
Apart from her eyes. They were a heart-stopping violet and she knew exactly how to use them – flirtatious, expressive, hardly any make-up – a gaze that would soon mesmerise the world.
She wanted what other girls of her age and class usually want when they leave school, to share a flat in London with girlfriends from her own circle for her first taste of urban life.
She took a job as a teaching assistant at the Young England Kindergarten in Pimlico, working during the week before going back at weekends to Althorp or staying with friends in the country.
Danae Brook lived above 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer at a block of mansion flats in Earl’s Court at the turn of the 1980s. Pictured: Danae with her children
She had known the Queen as a child growing up in the rarefied aristocratic atmosphere at Park House on the edge of the Queen’s Sandringham estate in Norfolk. That was her social context and in many ways it was what she ended up running away from, but when I first met her she was running towards life.
Despite her crippling shyness she was looking forward to the glamour that marrying a prince would offer. She had first met Charles at Althorp and developed a crush on him while he was dating her older sister Sarah.
Almost her first words to me when we spoke about Charles were a not entirely discreet reference to Sarah. I remember her laughter when she told me her sister had made the mistake of telling a magazine she’d had thousands of boyfriends.
‘That didn’t go down too well with the boss,’ she remarked, giggling and blushing as she always did when she talked about Charles.
Diana once told me she was as thick as a plank, but I never thought she was. She was just painfully shy and self-deprecating. After work she would slip into the lift carrying an orange and a Crunchie bar with the Evening Standard tucked under her arm.
She knew what I did, and I soon knew what she did, but to begin with she was just one of the noisy posh girls who lived below.
It was the unforgettable picture of her in a newspaper, carrying a toddler on her hip and with sunlight shining through her muslin skirt showing an outline of long legs, that alerted the world to the fact she was Charles’s latest squeeze.
Danae said their building (pictured) attracted reporters, fans and visitors in the middle of the night who wanted to know about Princess Diana’s romance with Prince Charles
Lying in a pile on my kitchen table one sunny Sunday, the paper was pounced on by my two younger sons, screeching, ‘We know her, she’s called Diana, she lives here!’ They told me she often met them coming back from school as she was returning from the nursery (my elder son was at a different school and rarely saw her).
‘We meet her when she goes to Mr Barnsley’s shop for her Crunchie bars,’ they said. ‘She’s really nice. She got us one each!’
I realised immediately she was the timid blonde girl who I often raced up the stairs with, and after this bombshell revelation the whole world knew. Suddenly the entire building was under siege.
There were visitors in the middle of the night, motorbikes revving up outside, reporters with notebooks and microphones queuing round the block, camera crews and fans jostling for position as she ran from the front door, skirts flying, to her scarlet Mini Metro.
Lady Di, as she became known within days, soon transformed into a global phenomenon in front of our eyes but she never stopped apologising to us, always more worried about the disruption to other residents than to herself.
Danae said she watched Diana become more stressed as she was flung into an entirely new world. Pictured: Interior of Diana’s former flat in Coleherne Court
For weeks we would hear Charles’s favourite group The Three Degrees blaring out from the girls’ flat, and we noticed flowers left in the hall, a Rolls-Royce with a shiny-capped chauffeur pulling up outside our main entrance.
Diana’s decades in the limelight
Diana visiting Capital Radio in 1982
The new documentary series Diana’s Decades examines her development from her life in the 1970s before marrying Prince Charles to becoming the ‘People’s Princess’.
Rarely seen archive footage is shown alongside the major events of the time, from the Big Bang in the City of London in 1986 to the rise of the Spice Girls and Cool Britannia.
Each episode highlights how an era of her life encapsulated the spirit of the age, speaking to people whose lives, like Danae Brook’s, crossed hers.
Her family’s TV repairman, Ray Hunt, tells how he realised her sights were set high at her sister Jane’s wedding to Robert Fellowes in 1978 at the Guards Chapel, Wellington Barracks.
Diana at the Guards Polo Club in 1985
‘She said, ‘Nothing like this for me. It’s Westminster Abbey or nothing, Ray.’ I said, ‘You’re joking, Diana,’ and she said, ‘Not really.’
Andrew Morton, whose book Diana: Her True Story revealed the misery behind her marriage, says the attention became overwhelming.
‘She couldn’t cope. She said, ‘I worked in a kindergarten one minute, the next I was Marilyn Monroe, a pin-up for the ages.’ It was too much for one person to take.’
Diana visiting The Royal Brompton Hospital in London
Sometimes we wondered if Charles was actually visiting, especially when the Rolls was still there so late at night the chauffeur had nodded off. We paid little attention, but poor Eric bore the brunt.
Yet there was also the Diana the world didn’t see, but I did. The affectionate and fun Diana who had a way with children. We would sometimes go up in the old mahogany lift together, or walk up the road with the children.
She would talk about the nursery and ask me about my children’s schools. Nothing intimate, just neighbours getting to know each other.
But I watched as Diana became more stressed. I could see her life, this part of history, through her lens, that of a young girl flung into an entirely new world she had not chosen.
Then it became more dramatic, the roar of the motorbikes more threatening. Eventually she had to demand protection, and out of nowhere a blackbelt judo practitioner appeared who Diana told me had been assigned to shadow her.
Diana was not yet the elegant woman we saw later, trying to control her own destiny. This was a vulnerable girl under considerable, even dangerous, pressure.
So when she told me the Queen Mother wanted her to go and live at Clarence House, I wasn’t surprised when she decided she should make a statement. Several times in passing she had expressed her annoyance at being quoted when she had not spoken.
‘I need to say what I feel,’ she would say. ‘Not what somebody else thinks I feel. I’m sick of people quoting things I haven’t said.’
So I left her a note asking her to consider telling the story in her own words. I was offering to give her a voice.
She finally suggested a time for us to talk. I slipped downstairs and she greeted me in her hallway, girl paraphernalia everywhere. There were wellingtons and Gucci shoes – all the rage then – lined up under mackintoshes.
She leaned against the wall beside her bicycle. Even then a red blush rose in her cheeks when she talked about her prince.
As we walked through into the flat Diana smiled her dazzling smile. Will there be an announcement soon?, I wondered.
‘I don’t know what the future will hold,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to talk about it now.’ Clearly she had to have permission from Charles. ‘It’s maddening having things written about me that I haven’t said,’ she continued.
‘I think the media have got so excited about the whole thing they’re just bettering each other up to see who can get the most out of it. The whole thing’s got out of control.
‘It’s not so much boring for me but boring for the public seeing my face in the paper every day. Everywhere I go there’s someone there. I’m not so much bored as miserable.’
The eyelids lowered, smudged with blue, the blush crept higher. ‘It’s been going on for weeks now. It’s tiring and I’m sort of fed up, not just for me but it makes everyone else’s life so bloody, particularly the girls I share a flat with.’
She as good as told me she was still a virgin, and that was why ‘The Family’ had approved her as a bride for Charles. ‘I don’t really know why they like me,’ she said.
‘My sister Sarah talked to the Press and said too much and they murdered her. You see everyone is dying for Charles to get married and I was the one who was around, and I don’t have a ‘background’.
‘I mean leaping in and out of bed with people. I’m only 19, I haven’t had time to have a background like that! But people are longing to dig something up about me.
‘The trouble is,’ she said as I moved to leave, realising a cup of tea was not on the cards, ‘people believe what they read.’
Neither of us had any idea at that point how much worse the invasion of her life would become until she bid Coleherne Court goodbye, left us a massive bouquet to thank us for our patience, and headed for the lonely safety of Clarence House.
Diana’s Decades begins on Thursday at 9pm on ITV.