Strange Meeting, Part 2

Diana: The Secret Years
by Simone Simmons

(Page 2 of 3)

But then I left school and had to get a job. Firstly, and very brie y, I worked in one of those couture dress shops where sales assistants attered 'Madam' into expensive and unwise purchases because their commission depended upon it. After two or three days of informing potential customers that their favoured out ts didn't suit them at all, I was sacked. I then thought I'd try being a secretary, reasoning that, as I could play the piano, typewriter keys would be a doddle. I was proved right, and enjoyed my year working for a children's charity for 10 a week, even though it took me a little while to get the hang of carriage return and carbon copies.

Other of ce jobs followed and then there was a spell at my father's Old Street factory where we made clothes for big, big women. Even so, I learned a lot about the fashion business and despite the fact that, ironically, as the boss's daughter I was granted no favours and had to work like a skivvy, I really enjoyed it. Indeed, I think I could have made a career in that world. But then, just as I had landed a job with the distinguished designer Polly Peck as a fashion sketcher - something which would have combined my new skills with my frustrated artistic abilities - I tore the tendons in my hand and had to have surgery followed by three months' physiotherapy. By the time I was able to draw again the job had gone to someone else.

Circumstance had taken me to a place of healing, and after my recovery I began to work where I had been mended, as a secretarial temp at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. At first I simply led X-ray cards, then I learned something about radiography, and eventually I became a fully edged medical secretary for a specialist in endocrinology. I now began to feel like a frustrated doctor, particularly as I had by then read widely about the influence of our glands, the whole complicated glandular system which affects our physical and emotional health so much. But I didn't seriously consider plunging into a formal medical training because by then, thanks to a wonderful and influential friend and my experience with Rachel, I was much more attuned to alternative methods of healing. Seven or eight years had passed and although Rachel had short-term memory problems, and always will have, I had seen how much better she was. I was certain that my silent willing for her recovery helped, and I tentatively trusted my powers enough to offer informal advice to friends.

Accident-prone as ever, I fractured my coccyx in 1990, having slipped on some spilled milk in a supermarket. Hardly the most profoundly mystic of conversions, but that's what it turned out to be. After several years of pain and mind-numbing paperwork, legal aid and persistence, I was awarded some money in compensation. In the meantime, however, I had been forced to give up full-time work. As it happened, though, knowledge of my abilities as a healer had spread by word of mouth, and I was able to scrape a living by seeing people at home. By now I was particularly interested in working with clients' auras, the extraordinary waves of colour that can be seen to surround a human body, colours which will alter with mood and with the state of an individual's health. These auras are no less than a map of the psyche and the well-being, or otherwise, of each of us. (For an explanation of some of my methods, and of Diana's interest in becoming a healer, see Appendix.)

Only a few decades ago many people found it hard to accept the idea that physical and emotional chemistry can influence human behaviour. Today, however, most people understand that although such matters can't always be logically explained, their intuitions and impulses are often correct, however mysterious they may seem. I do appear to have an acute understanding of individuals' auras, and as a result I can see how and why some of the situations into which they have got themselves may be harmful or, conversely, for the best. This understanding is the basis from which some of my work stems. And my pre-eminent skill seems to be dealing with stress and offering healing in those circumstances.

From 1990, therefore, after my accident, I was working as a part-time healer. Of course I endured criticism and dismissive remarks from some members of the conventional medical establishment and occasionally this hurt - but I had faith in my work, and my results, so I continued. Nor did I always charge if I felt that my client would be further stressed and counter-productively strained by worrying about a bill.

My association with Diana began in 1993, the chance result of her well-known interest in alternative medicine. I have rarely met anyone so greatly in need of physical and emotional repair.

Her trust in me was rooted in the very fact that she was reassured that I was not on the same social circuit as other friends. There was no danger of me blurting out things to people to whom she might have been sending out different messages from her complicated private agenda. I was to learn that Diana was a great compartmentalizer, and she carved out a very precise box for me in her life. Few other people ever entered it. This didn't offend me, in fact it suited me well: I had no wish to be part of her society life. I just hoped that our friendship would enable her to cope with the darker facets of her life with greater confidence and assurance.

I don't think that she had a loving, accepting and understanding circle of friends when she was a little girl, or even as a young woman. Later, when she was Princess of Wales and so many people were making demands upon her, or courting her attention, or flattering her, she had even fewer opportunities to make real friends. That is why, I believe, she responded to me, and why we gradually came first to trust each other, and then to become friends. The fact that I was several years older than she, and came from a suburban Jewish background which could scarcely have contrasted more with her privileged, patrician one, made no difference. True communication recognizes no formal boundaries or obstacles.

As with some of my clients, I knew that I could send healing energies to Diana through touch and presence, and even simply down the telephone. Nor did I take a judgemental line with her as a conventional psychotherapist might have done. The very fact that Diana trusted me, a friend and informal adviser, more than some of the specialists towards whom her family, and her husband's, tried to lead her suggests that, in talking over her problems with me, she was expressing a little rebellion of her own. I don't think she ever quite forgave some of Prince Charles's relations or influential friends for suggesting, when she and Charles were still together, albeit very unhappily so, that she be consigned to some residential clinic for treatment. (Diana mentioned to me that they had wanted her to go to 'a nut house' or a 'loony bin' but that she had refused to go. She always seemed completely compos mentis to me.) My methods are considerably more gentle.

© 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.