Britain still grieves for Diana

Now, an exhausted nation struggles for its breath after an extraordinary week during which outpourings of tears and heartache carried unanticipated - and quite unsettling - questions about what Diana's life, death and legacy mean for the fabric of Britain.

It was a week that rendered suddenly passe the phrase "stiff upper lip." A week that united commoners and aristocrats in royal London's crowded streets. A week when a big-hearted, insecure woman with an eating disorder, a penchant for controversy and two beautiful sons instantly was elevated toward sainthood by a nation hungry for a heroine who could never disappoint.

Finally, it was a week when the long-ruling House of Windsor, painfully out of step, learned just how much of a star its princess was - and how fervently the public looked to her as the prototype of a new, modern royal model.

Yesterday, the kingdom's elected leader acknowledged all this.

"As a result of what happened," said Prime Minister Tony Blair, "we have changed."

In so many ways, it seems he is right.

Anyone who said more than a week ago that a one-car accident in a Paris tunnel could sucker-punch all Britannia undoubtedly would have been laughed at.

Yet here is this nation, dealt a staggering blow by the death of a princess it had spent much of the last two decades trying to decide whether to adore, excoriate or just plain watch.

"We have all been trying in our different ways to cope," Queen Elizabeth II said Friday night in an unprecedented live public address from Palace.

Buckingham Palace.

Networks undoubtedly will produce souvenir montage videotapes of last week's memorable images, and - for this tale more than most - the format will be apt.

The first week of September 1997 in Britain is foremost a dizzying series of scenes that whizzed by in the way that only information-age high tragedy can.

First, the breaking news: Diana's new boyfriend, playboy Dodi Fayed, had been killed with his driver in a horrendous car crash in Paris. The princess was injured, but she managed to walk away. Wait - her injuries were actually serious, but she was alive. And then, hours later, she was dead, in a crash perhaps caused by the paparazzi who pursued her so obsessively for so long.

The revisionism kicked in before her body returned to England later that day.

Gone were the questions about whether Diana was embarrassing the crown with her Fayed fling and jet-set ways. Gone were the snipes about her anxiety, her manipulativeness, her I-gotta-be-me charity work.

How, Britons asked, could this be possible? She was our 36-year-old princess - the mother of our future king. Her eyes shone so bright and she was so alive. After a long, bumpy road, she had found happiness.

Each day brought new images: Prince Charles bringing her body home from France. Earl Spencer, Diana's brother, saying the media has "blood on its hands." Princes William and Harry, somber and empty-eyed, leaving their Balmoral Castle retreat. Revelations that the chauffeur, Henri Paul, was drunk. Paparazzi detained. Tears fell as far away as Indonesia.

And the building masses of flower-bearing mourners, clustering outside Buckingham Palace and forming seemingly endless lines to sign condolence books outside St. James's Palace, where Diana's body rested in a chapel.

Then, Saturday, the most memorable images of all:

The throngs of faithful silently watching her cortege pass. The card on her coffin: "Mummy." Her loved ones and loved causes in Westminster Abbey. Elton John's reworked version of "Candle in the Wind." Earl Spencer's piercing eulogy, a pointed screed against tradition and media. And her long, slow, inexorable ride north to a tiny island in a tiny lake on the grounds of an ancestral home.

That day alone, a crescendo to the week, perhaps changed things most of all.

"The idea that national pride and dignity may only be conveyed by cold obedience to precedent and protocol could not survive the week," Patrick Collins wrote in a column in The Mail yesterday.

"It had perished long before the close of the day."

The concerns of ordinary Brits were not buried with Diana on Saturday. Indeed, the past week's nascent changes may reach far into the country's future.

Last week has changed - for better and worse - the causes Diana supported. Left without a powerful living advocate, they nonetheless will benefit greatly from Diana in death.

It changes her sons, one of whom is destined to rule Britain. How will her death change the direction of his growth?

It could change the press: Britain's top journalists acknowledge the wrath of the Diana story might endure. Public opinion is sure to be squarely behind leaving William and Harry alone.

"Ever since her death, I've forbidden myself from buying magazines that feed on my appetite to know more about other people's private lives," said Deslyn Johnson of South London.

Most important, the week could change forever Britons' view of royalty itself: Did the princess, dutiful representative of a latter-day Age of Emotion, render the monarchy cold and obsolete?

Diana, of course, is forever transformed. In life an admired, coveted woman, in death she has become Britain's blank slate, a reflection of all causes, all personalities, all emotions. And she has inherited one trait of her Roman-goddess namesake - as mythical protector of humanity's downtrodden.

"As we look at it now," Blair said Sunday, "what we say is, 'Let there be some good that comes out of this. Let it not just be an event that has happened ... and does not have lasting significance.'"

He need not worry; it shows little sign of ebbing. At Kensington Palace, a gentle rain freshened the knee-deep field of bouquets that grew higher Sunday.

"My father died eight years ago," a taxi driver out picking up fares said quietly. "And I didn't feel about that the way I feel now."

Some people have left toys, some candles, some painstakingly lettered and laminated messages, from Dartmoor Prison inmates and Kent schoolchildren to "Moomina from the Maldives."

Asks one, written on a paper towel and tacked to a fence: "Did an angel walk among us?"

Before Aug. 31, 1997, the answer, in Diana's case, would have been no. Today, after the odd, epic events of one extraordinary week in time, a retrofitted angel may be exactly what Britain has created for itself.

SARA STILLMAN/Daily
Emma Campbell, who recently relocated to Ann Arbor from Britain, woke up at 5 a.m. to watch the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. Campbell, who is from Bath, received a phone call from her crying mother during the televised broadcast.

AP PHOTO
The casket containing the body of Diana, Princess of Wales, is carried into Westminster Abbey during funeral ceremonies in London on Saturday.

09-08-97