IN LIVING MEMORY

Diana lives on. She resides in the memory of friends and enemies, in the recollection of her touch by those who felt her presence as the self-appointed angel to the downtrodden; she echoes on videotape, outlining for the BBC a tell-all autobiography that will never be written. Some of the stories repeat themselves: how she listened, how she placed strangers at ease, how she embraced, how she remembered, how she was kind. Others, even in their triteness, resonate with intriguing new meanings now that the arc of her life is completed. TIME has collected some of these fragments, personal reliquaries of encounters with Diana, to form an oral history, a profile of the people's princess in her own words and in the words of the people whose paths she crossed in her brief life.

"Her own childhood was hell," says PETER JANSON, an international socialite and a friend of Diana's. "Her parents hated, despised each other. She grew up under that."

But somehow, "she always had this incredible concern for others," says HARRY HERBERT, whose father manages the Queen's stables and who, as a teenager, hung out with the young Diana and her friends. "She'd be the first one around to see if you were all right. I remember when my brother was ill once with a bad flu, and she cooked up some soup and brought it to him. I think she was around 16 at the time."

"She never dated; she used to go out with friends in groups," says Herbert. "At parties," says Janson, "she liked Pimm's [a gin-based specialty drink], and she'd stand in the corner with all the rest of the girls, and all the boys would stand at the other end of the room." It was at about this time that she met her future husband. "Prince Charles was the first man she dated," says Herbert. "She was very much head over heels in love."

"I remember thinking," said Charles, with a 19-year-old Diana at his side during a television interview in 1981 after their courtship began, "what a very jolly and amusing and attractive 16-year-old she was, and I mean great fun and bouncy and full of life and everything. And I don't know what she thought of me."

"Pretty amazing," came Diana's reply.

Before the engagement, Diana held a job. "It was through friends," she said, that she found work at the Young England kindergarten in central London. "I wanted to teach children, and they said, 'Well, why not come along.' So I first started off doing afternoons, and then I took over the mornings and did whole days."

ALEXANDER STEAVENSON was four when he was taught by "Miss Diana." "One day," he says, "me and my friend Charlie were in the toilets at school. I think we were messing around, trying to see who could pee the farthest. She came in and startled us, so we turned around--in panic or something--and got her across the shins. She was very nice about it all, I think. We didn't get into too much trouble. But she rang my mother to tell her we'd been naughty but that she'd had words with us and she thought that should be the end of the matter."

"I only worked three days a week at kindergarten," Diana told an interviewer. "The other two I looked after an American baby boy--which nobody seems to realize--who was very special to me."