From PEOPLE Magazine
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Diana (returning a serve at Park House) was more sport than scholar. While away at school, she sent home a news clip about famous adults who had been academic flops.
As a child, Diana slept in a creamy bedroom overlooking pastures and park-lands, took her dolls on daily pram outings and raised a guinea pig named Peanuts.
"I remember my mother crying. Daddy never spoke to us about it"
She was a rather large girl," says sister Sarah's friend Lucinda Craig Harvey of Diana (beneath a facial mask). "Terribly unsophisticated, and she certainly wasn't anything to look at."
While young Diana worshiped her eldest sister, Sarah, she later forged a closer bond with Jane (right), who married Robert Fellowes, the Queen's private secretary.
In 1977, Diana's father married Barbara Cartland's daughter, Raine (flanked by Diana and a friend), over the fierce objections of his children.
She still sometimes feels guilty that she wasn't born a boy
As a pianist, Diana remained in the shadow of her grandmother Ruth, Ladg Fermoy (the Queen Mum's lady-in-waiting), who once performed at Royal Albert Hall.
On a school trip to Paris, not-so-shy Di (with classmate Caroline Harbord-Hammohd), showed an early affinity for dazzling smiles and decorative hats.
Though her teen tastes leaned toward sugary romances and British soaps, Diana skimmed The Illustrated London News before a 1979 ball at Althorp.
It was a childhood where she wanted for nothing materially but everything emotionally
"We had no idea that we were privileged," says Charles, Earl Spencer (at Park House with Jane and Diana). "As children we accepted our circumstances as normal."
In 1975, on her grandfather's death, Diana's father became the eighth Earl Spencer and moved his children to the more forbidding family seat, Althorp House, in Northamptonshire.
Diana's dreams of becoming a ballerina were dashed when she sprouted to a rangy 5' 10½", yet even today she practices her pirouettes in private sessions.
"The insignificant ugly duckling was obviously going to be a swan"
Shortly before her royal romance, Diana served as nanny to family friends Major Jeremy and Philippa Whitaker, whose daughter, Alexandra, was her first charge.
"She was great fun, charming and kind," says one friend who knew the future Princess (with pal Mary-Ann Stewart-Richardson at the Althorp pool) in her pre-London days.
After a ski accident in 1979, Diana was confined to a cast on which one chum scrawled, "You've been skating on thin ice lately," Di's pet taunt on the slopes.
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