Strange Meeting

Diana: The Secret Years
by Simone Simmons

Though many have written about Diana, Princess of Wales, few have known her as intimately as Simone Simmons, the woman who became Diana's close friend and confidante following her painful separation and divorce.

A beautiful tribute to the remarkable woman behind the image, here is Diana as we have never seen her before - the secret forays she took, often hiding in plain sight in various disguises, to Hampstead Heath and the jazz clubs of Soho; her deepest feelings about Prince Charles, Camilla Parker Bowles, and the royal family; the shocking truth about Diana's one true love and how losing him led her into the arms of playboy millionaire Dodi Fayed. Full of penetrating insight and startling new revelations, Diana: The Secret Years brings the People's Princess vividly to life for the people who love her - and who continue to celebrate her enduring memory and lasting legacy.

Chapter 1

I had watched the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer through a haze of anaesthetic and pain, recovering from minor surgery in a London clinic. Seeing her that day, I felt that we were connected in a very powerful way, and that at some time in the future this connection would be proved. There was nothing logical about this premonition, and later I put it down to my drug-altered state of mind. Truthfully, I had taken no more interest in Diana before the marriage than had the average person enchanted by the heady idea of it all. To this day I still don't understand why I felt such certainty, but some insights defy analysis. Years later, however, when Diana and I knew each other very well, we were to agree that in some past life we might have been cousins, sisters, perhaps even mother and daughter. It seemed to be the only way to explain the depth of the rapport between us.

But like most people on that peerless July day in 1981 I merely thought that the marriage of Prince Charles to Lady Diana was a glorious piece of royal theatre. I wished them both well, shared in something of the world's romantic optimism about them, and returned to dealing with my own life.

Sixteen years later, in the early hours of 31 August 1997, I was in bed at home when I sleepily took a call from a friend who gave me the news of the car accident in Paris, after which I turned on the television. Astonishingly, I can't remember who rang, although I do remember my young nephew calling soon afterwards to ask if I needed him to come over. And I recall trying to reach the journalist Richard Kay, a true friend to the Princess, and to me.

I have very little recollection of the days after her death. I went into suspended animation, my emotions frozen. Although this might seem to be in chilly contrast to the massive nationwide - indeed, worldwide - flood of grief for Diana, it was nevertheless an expression of the same terrible sense of shock. Most of the millions who laid flowers down or signed condolence books were marking a genuine and deeply felt sadness for the waste of a woman who, although they had never met her, had somehow managed to touch human nerves and chords with her extraordinary magic and inherent goodness. It was not quite the same for me, however.

I'm not saying that Diana's death affected those of us who really knew her in a more important way, but that the grief, being personal, was differently powerful. Now, as I look back on my friendship with her, I see a thousand shimmering glimpses of the complex, caring, sometimes capricious, but always human princess. I feel privileged to have those memories. When someone you really care for dies there is often a frustrating sense of unfinished business. There is not a single day when I do not want to complete old, interrupted conversations, or share a funny anecdote with her, or simply give her a hug. I have to remind myself that love is not buried with the cof n any more than friendship is always begun with a formal handshake.

Ours had begun, it seems, with my premonition on her wedding day, although neither of us knew of it at the time. Only a month later, something else was to have a much more immediately profound effect on me. Yet this family crisis was to draw me inexorably and, perhaps inevitably, towards Diana.

When, in a hospital in August 1981, I saw a rainbow aura emanating from the motionless body of my nineteen-year-old sister Rachel, who had been severely injured in a road accident days before, I found that I could communicate with her, despite the coma that she would remain in for many months. I began to wonder if I had some real healing gift beyond vague instincts which I'd been aware of for some time. Over countless visits I saw how if I placed my hands near - not on - Rachel and concentrated whilst quietly speaking loving, encouraging words, the needle on the machine monitoring her heart would flicker and then jump. Intuitively, I somehow saw that her aura and spirit were floating above her physical body, and in some way I knew that I could help Rachel to pull the two forces together. Much later, I learned that hearing is the strongest of the senses, and that it continues to work however comatose a person might seem to be. Without considering my gift very much at the time, and certainly without quite yet believing that I could truly be a healer, my bond with my desperately ill sister nevertheless shaped me.

Indeed, to a significant extent I owe the rest of my life to Rachel, for through her survival I was made to confront the reality of my abilities: no longer could I imagine that they were accidents, coincidences or just some slight talent that could not be developed. Don't mistake me - the credit for Rachel's recovery is due to the care she received, but I do know that when the hospital had all but given up on her I had absolute belief that through love a great part of her could be saved. There is much truth in the old cliché about life being sustained by hope.

Years later, I found out that Rachel had met Diana - long before I did - when the young Princess of Wales visited the small unit in the Northamptonshire hospital where a crucial stage of Rachel's long recovery was accomplished. Some of Rachel's very first, newly relearned words might well have been to Diana.

Little in my background could have steered me towards, far less prepared me for, anything so unconventional as working as a professional healer. We lived in a large house in a North London suburb and my father, Harold, was a successful clothing manufacturer with a factory in the East End. He had happy memories of playing with Ronnie Scott and his band at jazz clubs before he acquired all his domestic and professional responsibilities, and was capable at times of reverting to an earlier wildness and unconventionality. My mother, Frances, was beautiful and, like Dad, artistic and poetic, so I suppose I inherited a little talent and some reckless instincts from both of them. But we were far from bohemian as a family. For my two younger sisters and me, life was fairly ordered, and my teenaged rebellions were stifled rather than encouraged.

Lots of teenaged girls avidly read their horoscopes but this all seemed far too tame for me. My best friend at school, Julia, was interested in palmistry and I fancied myself as something of a seer, so when we were about fourteen we formed an occult group and placed an advertisement in the Jewish Chronicle for members. My parents maintained an amused, detached tolerance about this: certainly I was never mocked or admonished. Meetings were held at Julia's parents' house near by. It was all perfectly innocent and harmless, and rooted mainly in a fascination with what the future might hold. At some level, however, I must have been seriously driven, because when I was seventeen I joined the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain.

© 1998 by Simone Simmons.

About the Author

Simone Simmons was born in 1955 and has always lived in London where she still resides with her three cats. She works from home as an energy healer. She has also worked voluntarily for a cancer unit and shared Diana's interest in the land-mine cause, visiting Bosnia with a friend from the Red Cross.