“You must go visit Princess Diana’s palace,” implored Zahra, while giving me a cup of tea in morning. She has a unique way to convey a suggestion. A stranger unfamiliar with cultural ways and with Zahra’s eccentricities would misconstrue her request as an order or command.
When I was in Paris in 1998 for the World Cup, I had visited a memorial just outside a round about leading to long tunnel where Princess Diana’s Mercedes, escaping at high speed chase from the pursuing paparattzis, had entered a tunnel and had its fatal crash. Then the memory of the crash among visiting fans was still raw and vivid. Their expressions spoke of solemnity and loss.
Wilted wreaths, dusty postcards, and hastily written notes from scrapes of paper, attached to bouquet of fresh flowers, were laid about in a makeshift memorial.
Not far from here at the end of the Gloucester Rd where it merges into Palace Gate is Kensington Gardens. Inside the vast gardens is the late Princess Diana’s palace, now a memorial, where she had lived. There too visitors come, but for different reasons now, and their expressions reveal curiosity more than a sense of loss. May be in their private moments they offer prayers to the departed couple. There are no flowers left at the black-and-golden palace gates; instead, in her memory, a small field of flower structure, designed by Sofie Layton, is installed. “It echoes the thousands of flowers left by mourners at the palace gates ten years ago,” reads the plaque in front of the field.
I acquiesced to Zahra’s suggestion. On my long walk to Kensington High Street and Shepherd Bush Gardens I visited the Kensington Palace.
The following day new footage of Diana and Dodi’s last moments, never before released to the press, showed the couple laughing, hugging, and kissing—tender moments before their heavenly departure—just before their escape through the revolving glass door of the Ritz Hotel. One tabloid headlined screamed: “Laughter before Death” and the other declared “A Kiss before Dying.”
The next day the sun broke through and it felt like San Francisco, and I had to seize the moment to visit Kilburn on a clear day in search of my character: Lorraine.
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