The truth about Di

For the Princess of Wales, it was a rare moment - she was ecstatically happy. She was in Italy on a secret, snatched break away from the claustrophobic palace life she had hated almost since the day she married Prince Charles. And, best of all, she was with her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, the woman whose company she loved and to whom she turned in times of crisis.

They heard Pavarotti sing Verdi's Requiem in the arena at Verona and when that was interrupted by torrential rain, on impulse they drove the 70 miles to Venice at breakneck speed, to see the canals by moonlight.

There, Frances looked on as her daughter went splashing through the puddle-filled streets like an excited child. 'I thought it was only we Italians who are crazy,' joked one local policeman.

In the early hours of the morning, they sauntered through a deserted St Mark's Square, munching on hot croissants and freshly-cooked bread.

Diana drank wine straight from a bottle and whispered wistfully: 'If only I could have this freedom once a month, it would make the job worth it.'

It was a pivotal moment. There in Venice with her mother, and a few other friends she could totally trust, Diana was having fun. It made her realise just how much she had lost, how miserable her life had become as a member of the Royal Family.

Shortly after returning home she read a sympathetic article about her by a journalist named Andrew Morton, and made the momentous decision to contact him and clandestinely tell her story - triggering off a chain of events that would change her life for ever.

It is significant that Diana had insisted on her mother's presence during that crucial break. Few people realise the closeness of their bond, and the huge influence Frances had over her life.

Some, indeed, have tried to paint Frances as a distant and unloving mother. During the trial of Diana's butler Paul Burrell, it was suggested that the pair had become permanently estranged.

Burrell's counsel, Lord Carlile QC, cross-examined Frances about when she had last spoken to Diana - suggesting that it might have been as long as six months before the Princess's death.

It was an easy blow, intended to inflict maximum embarrassment on a key prosecution witness. Frances admitted that it had been four months since they had spoken.

'There were sometimes ups and downs,' she said, while stressing 'it was normal family behaviour'.

Burrell, however, claimed the rift was deeper, and that Diana had vowed never to speak to her mother again, after Frances had supposedly criticised her choice of Muslim boyfriends such as Dodi Fayed and surgeon Dr Hasnat Khan.

Since the trial, this allegation of an irreconcilable split has been widely accepted as fact - with many assuming the relationship was never that close in the first place. The truth could not be more different.

Frances still vividly remembers the moment of Diana's birth in the master bedroom at Park House, Sandringham, where her family then lived. She was a handsome baby, long-limbed and saucer-eyed, and slipped easily into the world.

'She was everything I wanted, hoped and prayed for,' Frances recalls. 'She arrived in the evening just as a great cheer resounded around Sandringham Cricket Club because the local speed cop had scored a century.

'I thought that was really rather nice - that she came into the world with a clap of hands.'

Sadly, she had also arrived into a family beset by marital tensions. Frances and her husband, Johnnie Spencer, separated when Diana was only six, following Frances's affair with her future second husband, Peter Shand Kydd.

The extraordinary terms of the divorce passed custody of Diana, her brother and two sisters to their father, a pillar of the Establishment. As a result, Frances's contact with Diana was sadly diminished.

However, she made great efforts to maintain a constant presence in all her children's lives, keeping contact by phone and letter, and welcoming them as often as possible to her new home in Scotland.

She and Peter Shand Kydd had settled on a farm on the Isle of Seil on Scotland's rugged west coast. The place is a picture of wild beauty, with heather-covered hills and steep rocks rising from the Atlantic.

In the holidays, the Spencer children made the long journey there, where they would go sailing, fishing or lobster-potting, and indulge themselves at Frances's beach barbecues. The peace and remoteness helped heal some of the damage the divorce had left in its wake.

Diana kept a Shetland pony called Souffle at the farm, and fell in love with the freedom her mother's new home allowed her, compared with the stuffiness of life in the Spencer household. At her boarding school, she tried to counter her homesickness by keeping a poster of the island above her bed.

She resembled her mother in many ways - not least in her sense of fun. Both loved to laugh, and the sound of Diana's giggles mixed with Frances's throaty laughter, once heard, could never be forgotten.

They even shared a friendship over two generations. In her teenage years, Frances had been a friend of Susie Barrantes; a decade later, Diana introduced Susie's daughter, Sarah Ferguson, to Prince Andrew.

Both sets of friends enjoyed getting up to mischief. 'Mum and Frances had some legendary burping competitions,' according to the Duchess of York.

When Diana left school, her mother was able to play an increasing role in her life. It was she who found Diana her first job, working for Betty Vacani, a dance teacher who had taught ballet to three generations of royal children.

It was Frances, too, who bought Diana the flat in Coleherne Court in Earls Court which was where she was living when she caught the eye of Prince Charles.

As I revealed in the first part of this series, Frances had deep feelings of unease about the engagement - sometimes rising to panic - but knew any words of caution she uttered would fall on deaf ears.

She did her best to try to keep her teenage daughter - in love with the idea of being a princess as much as she was with the man himself - in firm contact with reality.

But as she later put it: 'At the end of the day, everyone marries because they've made up their mind to marry. I was only in the position of accepting the situation.'

In difficult times throughout the marriage, Frances was always on hand to support her daughter. During her tear-filled pregnancy with William, Diana - unwell, bulimic and increasingly at odds with Charles and his family - sent for her mother to help choose the interior design at Highgrove.

The project helped take Diana out of herself, while allowing Frances to offer reassuring motherly advice about the impending birth.

All her good work was undone, however, when Charles disapproved of the results, sending Diana into another spiral of despair that she could do nothing right in his eyes. Frances clung to the hope that he would soften over time.

After the birth, however, Diana needed her mother more than ever. Far from her husband providing stability in her life, she sought and found it in Frances. The mother who had not been able to share in her daughter's life while she was growing up was now at the centre of it.

For Diana, the peace and normality of Seil became a treasured refuge. She would return to her mother's home whenever she needed to flee the glare of publicity and a disaffected husband who apparently had no interest in repairing their marriage.

'When Diana was at her most troubled, it was to her mother that she would always turn,' says Diana's former bodyguard, Ken Wharfe. 'We would decamp en masse for Scotland for a healthy dose of normality.

'People tended to assume that because the Princess and her mother lived so far apart, contact between them must have been limited. In reality, they kept very much in touch.'

From bitter experience, Frances knew the damage that in-fighting between husband and wife could cause, especially to their children.

She was also acutely aware that Diana could not just uproot her children and leave her husband, as she herself had tried to do almost 20 years before. The Royal Family would never let the Princes go.

Ken Wharfe says Frances made every effort to support Diana, 'but also to save her marriage, if only for the sake of William and Harry. Her wisdom, her experience, her kindness were at Diana's disposal and the Princess was glad of it'.

This understanding was especially evident over Diana's affair with James Hewitt. Frances knew about the frustration and heartache that went with being in love with someone other than your husband.

For her to have judged Diana about her extra-marital relationships would have been hypocritical, and she did not do so. 'I believe you have to accept people the way they are,' she says. 'Who are we to criticise, even though we have deep feelings that they are hurting rather than healing themselves?'

In some ways, the situation helped the two women work through unfinished business. Diana as a child had found it hard to come to terms with her parents' divorce. Now, as an adult caught in a loveless marriage, she gained a different perspective.

What worried Frances most was that her daughter was taking on the Establishment, a battle she herself had lost disastrously following her own marital breakdown. She feared a backlash when Diana's problems and her behaviour became known.

She preached caution. Keep up the illusion and live your life as best you can, she urged. Don't rock the boat; steer a course into calmer waters.

Her mother's wise philosophy was not what Diana wanted to hear, but she took one important lesson from her. Frances had been isolated when she left Johnnie Spencer, and lost her children as a result.

Diana played Charles at a public relations game. More streetwise than her mother, she created her own camp of supporters and sympathetic journalists to promote her cause.

Such marital in-fighting placed great strain on her two young sons, but for them, too, Frances was a key source of support.

'Whenever Frances came to Highgrove, or when we went to her home in Scotland, William and Harry were ecstatic,' says Ken Wharfe. 'They loved these visits.'

Yet all Frances's efforts were at a high personal cost. Indeed, the ultimate proof of the closeness of her bond with Diana is the cruel fact that her attempts to rescue her daughter's marriage led to her sacrificing her own. She devoted so much time to Diana's problems that the closeness that had once typified her bond to Peter Shand Kydd was slowly dying.

Peter hated the limelight, but now found himself married to one of the most prominent and sought-after mothers in the land. The seclusion they had once had in Seil was increasingly disturbed.

As the pressure mounted, Peter became moody and withdrawn. Frances begged him for time to rekindle what they had once had. But it was too late.

Soon there was a new interest in his life - a Frenchwoman, Marie-Pierre Becret Palmer, who ran a champagne-importing business in London. She was younger than Frances, voluptuous and chic, and she gave Peter the attention he was missing.

Frances did not recognise what was happening until it was too late. With 'great sadness', they eventually announced their separation.

It was a harrowing time. Left by the man she trusted and adored for a younger woman, Frances was inconsolable. It took her more than four years to recover, yet she refuses to apportion blame.

She says philosophically: 'Peter and I drifted apart. I thought if I tried hard enough we'd find calmer waters. Well, we didn't.

'I had become Di's mum and not Peter's wife. The pressure of it all was overwhelming and finally impossible for him. To say that is not self-pity or excuses, it is fact.'

The Princess, who was by now leading a life separate from Charles, sympathised with her mother's situation, and they spoke regularly on the telephone.

Diana had always had a deep affection for Peter and she was extremely upset. She felt it was her fault for having placed her mother and stepfather in such a highly conspicuous position simply by her choice of husband.

She pressed Frances to come and be with her at Kensington Palace, but her mother declined. Typically, she knew she had to search for solutions to her problems rather than run away from them.

How then did it come about that such a devoted mother and daughter seemed estranged before Diana's death?

To understand, it is necessary to appreciate the Princess's character - and the enormous strain she was under following her agreement to a divorce from Charles. However much Diana's own actions may have made the end of her marriage inevitable, it was an outcome that caused her enormous grief.

'Divorce was the last thing that Diana wanted and she was devastated by it,' explains a close friend, Vivienne Parry. 'I remember she was sobbing her heart out. She was utterly desperate about it, because she felt that she had failed.'

She also felt publicly humiliated by the loss of the courtesy title 'Her Royal Highness'. Under the force of these twin hammer blows, she seemed to lose perspective.

Paranoid and cornered, and behaving increasingly strangely, she became convinced that her rooms at Kensington Palace were bugged and that her staff were working against her.

Her temper flared, and she took out her frustrations on those around her. No one, she believed, could understand her situation, and she would explode with rage at any perceived insult.

'There wasn't one friend she hadn't fallen out with at one time or another,' says Parry. 'What she didn't understand was that sometimes people criticise you because they love you, not because they don't.'

Once, Rosa Monckton, another close friend, found herself cast into the wilderness for four months after suggesting some changes that Diana might make in her life. 'Then, as usually happens, she just picked up the phone one day, said: "Rosa, how are you?" and off we went again.'

It was a similar situation with Frances. And the problem was not any aspersions she had cast on Diana's choice of boyfriends - as Paul Burrell alleged - but a rare interview she had given to Hello! magazine, in which she put a typically positive gloss on Diana's loss of her 'HRH'.

Frances's opinion was that this was no bad thing. In fact it was ' wonderful' that her daughter would be able at last 'to be herself, use her own name and find her own identity'.

Diana was furious. She interpreted the well-intentioned words as a slight, and responded petulantly and quite disproportionately by immediately cutting off all contact with her mother. It was May 1997.

Frances attempted to resolve the impasse by writing a letter to explain her actions. It was returned unopened. She telephoned but was unable to get through.

Temporarily left out in the cold, she waited, sure that one day the telephone would ring and it would be Diana, laughing as if nothing had happened.

There had been hiccups like this in the past and they had always been resolved. They would pick up the strands of their relationship where they had left off, without a mention of what had gone before.

Frances was happy to give her daughter time, knowing that she was in the throes of a new romance. Deeply in love with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, the Princess could think of no one else but him.

Diana would also have guessed that, if she spoke to her mother, Frances would counsel her against becoming too involved with another man so soon after her marital breakup. These were words Diana would not have wanted to hear.

That summer, with Khan playing impossible to get, Diana took up with Dodi Fayed in the south of France. Frances saw the pictures in the papers of them kissing, and she smiled, pleased that her daughter was having fun at last.

She still had no doubt that it would not be long before Diana called her. But of course, the call never came. Frances would never speak to her daughter again.

Yet the will the Princess left, naming her mother as one of her executors, is proof that the rift was neither permanent nor deep. They had just had the sort of row common between volatile, busy and headstrong women who are related.

Neither woman had ever been afraid to speak her mind to the other, or 'spit it out' as Frances puts it. 'Well, of course one has arguments,' she says. 'Who on earth wants a wishy-washy mother?'

Ken Wharfe, who had seen the reality of their relationship, ridicules the idea that it had broken down beyond repair. 'They had disagreements, as everyone does,' he says, 'but they were very much a united family. You don't entrust your estate to your family if you don't trust them.'

Frances refuses to make any comment about whether she and Diana would have been reconciled, except to say that 'she and I knew, and that's all that matters'.

It is the defiant voice of a woman who is all too accustomed to being misrepresented by her enemies - as we will see tomorrow, when I return to the astonishing story of her own broken marriage.