THE NAUGHTY GIRL NEXT DOOR

Dia

na Spencer was nothing like as gifted as Judy Garland, nowhere near as sexy as Marilyn Monroe, but like those equally doomed young women, she had the power to touch us--that is to say, if one examines the response dispassionately, to make us feel sorry for her. She was a terribly mixed-up kid. We felt close to her (when we were not infuriated by her) because she represented in herself so many of the worries our own children are likely to foist upon us--disappointing school grades, anorexia and bulimia, unsuitable young men, a tendency to show off, a preoccupation with clothes and publicity, a rotten marriage, single motherhood and trouble with the in-laws.

Sometimes she went too far, as children do, and we were fed up with her. Sometimes we felt that she was deceiving us. She doth protest too much, we occasionally thought, when she complained about the attentions of the paparazzi. When, after so many years of burning extravagant candles at both ends, she died at last so squalidly in that underpass, some of us for a moment thought, as the Friar thought about Romeo and Juliet, "These violent delights have violent ends..."

But she touched us--that's the thing. As the Friar went on to remark, "So light a foot will ne'er wear out the everlasting flint." She was so lovely to look at. She appeared to be so shy. Like all our children, she seemed to float above the drab and everlasting flintiness of our ordinary lives. Time and again we found ourselves ready to forgive her, just as in the end we always give in and send our wayward offspring another check to pay the telephone bill; and we did it as always with a shrug of the shoulders that was part affection, part exasperation, part amusement, part forgiveness--and part pity. Even a doubter like me, when the news arrived from Paris that Sunday morning, felt the tears come to my eyes.

But then we saw in her too some larger allegory. She mirrored our personal anxieties, and the perennial anxieties of the young--for it is hard to believe she was 36 years old. She was truly a cliche of the age itself. Much of the angst of this troubled fin de siecle was indexed in her brief life. Wars and poverty, sickness and prejudice, uncertainty and despair--this daughter of an earl, this mother of a putative King of England was paradoxically familiar with them all: and when the end came, it was a properly symbolic end as, with her playboy lover, she was driven at midnight by a drunken driver much too fast in a Mercedes through a city underpass, pursued by photographers on motorbikes.

How sad! What a pathetic life, after all, enlarged for us all by unrelenting advertisement, blown up like a fictional drama so that it is already entering, before our eyes, the realm of myth--an apotheosis that in previous ages took centuries to happen. In the world at large, she is already on the way to join Elvis and Marilyn on a flying saucer somewhere: in Britain she is mourned with a hysterical intensity that seems pathological, ordinary people standing in line for seven or eight hours to sign a memorial book nobody is ever going to read, or preparing to camp out all night long to see the funeral cortege pass by.

Of course, this is partly a tabloid mourning, just as Diana herself had become a tabloid star--almost a fictional star. Since the days of Thomas Hardy at least, people have been moved to passionate sorrow by the death of public personalities they have never met, and who sometimes never existed. No doubt thousands wept over the fate of Tess of the d'Urbervilles when her story appeared week by week in the Graphic in 1890, just as truly as they wept for Diana when they read of her death in the Sun in 1997. They have been deluded into thinking they actually knew her by the tireless machines of the media, and they have cried for her as for one of their own children.

Then again it is doubtless partly mass hysteria--groupies genuinely mean it too, when they swoon in the presence of their idols, one scream leading to another, one pair of panties thrown onstage soon leading to a storm of votive lingerie. It is partly resentment against the in-laws. Despite late damage limitation from the palace, many Britons see the British royal family as villains in this soap opera, stuffy and reactionary guardians of an old order into which Diana came as a lovely catalyst, only to be spurned as young heroines so often are.

But perhaps, I like to think, the death of Diana has acted as a kind of catharsis for her nation. This has not been a happy half-century for the British. It has been a time of frustration and febrile self-doubt. Most of the national institutions, from the monarchy itself to the BBC, have lost their old sense of confident authority. In an age when no island is an island anymore, the very national identity, once apparently so unassailable, has been whittled away. British traditions have been discarded, British values have lost their meaning. A great people seems to be in moral limbo.

With the death of a lovely if maddening princess, out it has all poured. Something, as the old song said, had to give, and perhaps this fantastic display of public grief, so vulgar in many ways, so unconvincing in others, has to it some spiritual element after all. Perhaps in their hearts--or so I hope--the British people see Diana as a fellow victim of degraded times, and have instinctively seized upon her death as the moment for a fresh start.

Jan Morris is the author of several travel books and the forthcoming Fifty Years of Europe: An Album. She lives in Wales