people’s princess CHAPTER 15
SEA OF EMOTION Grief and shock brought people together in unprecedented scenes of public mourning
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t was a week of sheer disbelief, almost unbearable sadness and pain. But it was also a week of momentous, inspirational unity, when the British people came together and by so doing realised their country had forever changed. The stiff upper lip had quivered, ordinary people felt empowered by their grief and a new, more caring and compassionate Britain had emerged from the despair. “The massive outpouring around her death has really changed the British psyche for the better,” Prince William recently told GQ magazine. It started out with individual tears, the tears of millions, who had for 16 years felt as their own the joys and heartbreaks of their People’s Princess. Brokenhearted, they wept for the nightmare end of the fairytale. Then, as they gathered in their hundreds of thousands, their tears became a sea of emotion, whose tides washed over the candlelit streets and parks of London, lapping at the gates of Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace and leaving in their wake mountains of bouquets, teddy bears, heartfelt poems, messages, and most movingly, children’s crayon drawings. Amid the sobs of those who could not bear to face their grief alone, strangers embraced and clustered before makeshift shrines, where they sat on the grass, sharing their sorrow in a quiet but comforting murmur. They came from all walks of life, black and Asian faces alongside white, the old crying alongside the young. Having touched the lives of so many, having reached out to society’s forgotten and outcast, having suffered herself, Diana belonged to them all and over the next few, extraordinary days, there was a public outpouring of grief the likes of which Britain had never seen before. Faced with this unstoppable tide, the royal family broke protocol and abandoned tradition, as they were
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