In the days before Diana became accustomed to daily hairdressers, high fashion and expertly applied makeup, she looked her best when she was wearing her least. No frilly blouses concealed her elegant neck, carefully cut skirts her long legs, or bulky sweaters her wellrounded figure. She was young and not fully aware of just how attractive she could be. But if she wanted to impress a young man, any young man, she always made it a point to go swimming or sailing or, at the very least, play a game of tennis.
When Prince Charles saw her aboard Britannia at Cowes in the late summer of 1980, he wasn’t however particularly interested. She belonged to his younger brother Andrew’s set, and had come aboard, not at Charles’s invitation, but with Lady Sarah Armstrong Jones, his cousin and sixteen years his junior.
Diana was three years older than Sarah, but still almost a generation away. And besides, Charles had his mind on other things most particularly the breakup of his romance with the beautiful but self-willed Anna Wallace. There was also the fact that if he noticed Diana in anything more than passing, he thought about her as the sister of one of his former girlfriends —Lady Sarah Spencer —who had recently married (he hadn’t attended), and whatever others might have been plotting he most certainly was not thinking of renewing his romantic links with the Spencer girls.
But if Charles was not instantly enchanted by the fresh, gambolling nineteen-year-old who spent some days aboard the Royal Yacht, his staff were. "She was so unassuming and so natural," one recalls. And in the manner of all servants, particularly ones who are in the employ of the bachelor Prince, they inevitably started speculating amongst themselves if she was the one for what they called "the job".
So, it seems, did Diana. At the age of sixteen she had jokingly told a friend that She was "out to get" Charles. But that may have been just romantic fantasizing on the part of a young girl whose main eating was the soapy romances penned by her stepgrandmother, the redoubtable Barbara Cartland. The Prince’s late valet, Stephen Barry, insisted however: "She went after the Prince with single-minded determination. She wanted him —and she got him!"
She had, of course, met him many times before in the years of her childhood spent as a near-neighbour of the Windsors at Sandringham when Charles used to pop his head round the nursery door where she was having tea with Andrew and Edward, or during a shooting party on Sandringham Estate where at the age of sixteen she was reintroduced to him by her sister Sarah. More recently she had encountered him at polo. But then he had always been busy or with a girlfriend in tow. This time he was alone.
She made sure Charles was watching when she bravely followed his example and went windsurfing in the choppy and not-too-warm waters of the Solent. Naturally flirtations, she made sure he noticed her long slim legs and trim figure. And he could not fail but start to take an interest —if only a comparative one —in the beautiful younger sister of a former girlfriend. To impress a young man, Diana might choose to play a game of tennis, because ______.
A. she was a highly skilled tennis player
B. she looked attractive in her tennis outfit
C. she preferred tennis to swimming
D. her hair-style was fashionably designed