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the dresses Diana had picked out over the decades. And of course there was the iconic wedding dress worn by her princess namesake.
    29 July 1981
    Diana Ashcroft was born on the day that Lady Diana Spencer married her prince. Diana’s mother, Susie, watched the wedding on a TV set wheeled into the delivery room by the midwife, who was determined not to miss a minute of this historic occasion for any birth, no matter how difficult. For a long time the procession of guests arriving at St Paul’s took Susie’s mind off her labour, which had been going on for twenty-two hours by the time the princess-to-be and her father appeared at the cathedral in their carriage. Unfortunately, Susie and the midwife missed most of the ceremony itself, as Baby Ashcroft chose that exact moment to make her appearance to a soundtrack of Kiri Te Kanawa singing Handel and her mother’s best collection of swear words. She was bald as an earthworm and bore an uncanny resemblance to her paternal grandfather, but Susie pronounced her new daughter at least as beautiful as the newly minted princess.
    ‘I’m calling her Diana,’ Susie told her husband when he finally came to pay his respects two whole hours later. Dave had been watching the wedding in a pub, or rather, he had been sitting at the back of a pub sinking lager and stuffing sausage rolls from the complimentary royal wedding buffet the pub’s landlady had put on for her regulars. He hadn’t seen a moment of the ceremony.
    ‘You can’t call her bloody Diana,’ he said, realising simultaneously that this name nonsense must mean he had a daughter and not a son. Bang went his plan to be allowed to buy a Southampton FC season ticket and an enormous Scalextric track.
    ‘I’ll call her what I bloody well like. You didn’t have to squeeze her out through your private parts. Where the hell were you, anyway? You were meant to be holding my hand. Ten minutes you said you’d be gone. Ten minutes! I bet you were in a bloody pub.’
    ‘It’s a day of national celebration, sugar.’ Dave tried to soften his wife up with her pet name. ‘I was toasting our future queen.’
    ‘How about toasting your first-born, you tosspot? It’s been two hours since she was born. Two bloody hours! I didn’t know where you were. You might have been run over by one of the floats in the royal wedding parade for all I knew. You had better make this up to me,’ said Susie.
    Dave promised that he would, and he did. As soon as the shops reopened after the national holiday, Dave bought his wife a new charm for her treasured bracelet: a little golden bootee studded with pink crystal to mark the birth of a girl. He bought his new daughter, his first-born, a charm bracelet of her own. In silver. Susie sent him back to the shop to change it for a gold one.
    ‘She’s your daughter, Dave, your only child.’
    ‘My first child.’
    ‘Your bloody only child if I have anything to do with it. And from now on your daughter wears gold.’
    It was the first hint of the long list of expenses to come: private school, a pony, a car . . .
    The fact that Dave would be bankrolling the whole project did not, however, mean that he would have much, if any, say over the wedding preparations. He certainly wouldn’t be allowed to join the first excursion to Bride on Time. Choosing a wedding dress was women’s work. Diana would be accompanied by her mother and by Nicole, her newly appointed maid of honour.
    In any case, by the time his darling Diana got engaged, Dave had been divorced from her mother for almost eleven years. They didn’t even speak. He had cited unreasonable behaviour. Susie promised she would never forgive him. Neither would she ever tire of making Dave’s life a misery. Thus Susie was right behind her daughter’s plan to have the biggest and the best of everything, especially if it meant that Dave couldn’t spend that money on Chelsea, his second wife.
    ‘I want you to have the dress I was never able to