Princess Diana: Chilhood And Teenage Years

Childhood and teenage years
Diana, Princess of Wales, formerly Lady Diana Frances Spencer, was born on 1 July 1961 at Park House near Sandringham, Norfolk. She wasthe youngest daughter of the then Viscount and Viscountess Althorp. Diana's childhood had been overshadowed by her parents' broken marriage. She was only six, livingwith two sisters and a brother on the royal family's Sandringham estate in eastern England when her mother Frances left home in a society scandal involving a messycustody battle. Earl Spencer later married Raine, Countess of Dartmouth in 1976. Together with her two elder sisters Sarah (born 1955), Jane (born 1957) and her youngerbrother Charles (born 1964), Lady Diana continued to live with her father at Park House, Sandringham, until the death of her grandfather, the 7th Earl Spencer. In1975, the family moved to the Spencer family house at Althorp, in Northamptonshire, in the English Midlands. Lady Diana was educated first at a preparatory school,Riddlesworth Hall at Diss, Norfolk, and then in 1974 went as a boarder to West Heath, near Sevenoaks, Kent. At school she showed a particular talent for music, dancingand domestic science, and gained the school's award for the girl giving maximum help to the school and her schoolfellows. She left West Heath in 1977 and went tofinishing school at the Institute Alpine Videmanette in Rougemont, Switzerland, which she left after the Easter term of 1978. The following year she moved to a flat inColeherne Court, London. For a while she looked after the child of an American couple, and she worked as a kindergarten teacher at Young England School in Pimlico.