Books This article is more than 24 years oldReviewLove and War by James Hewitt
This article is more than 24 years oldToo busy to read the hot books? Let us read them for you. Love and War by James Hewitt (Blake Publishing Ltd, £16.99), digested in 400 wordsEvery time I open a tabloid newspaper, the words "cad" or "rat" are attached to my name. Serial killers get a better press than me. Now it is time for me to tell the truth.
In 1986 I was a dashing, single, young Guards captain. I met Diana and offered to give her riding lessons. When we had first met five years before, she had been fun, charming, flirtatious. She could make the sullen waters of the Serpentine sparkle just by riding past them. But now she was sad - except when she was riding Gary, the horse I gave her. She was a hurt, lonely married woman and I became obsessed with her.
The night our affair began, I went to Kensington Palace for dinner. She was tall, willowy, strikingly beautiful and utterly adorable. She smelled fresh and very English. I bought her a box of Benedicks Bitter Mints; she gave me a book which smelled like a rose. "I need you," she said. "I can't stand it when I'm away from you." She said she loved me, Verdi, Mozart and EastEnders, envying the freedom of the regulars at the Queen Vic to live their lives.
Our affair over the next five years was wonderful, exhilarating, passionate and intensely loving. It was Diana who initiated it. She could have been an SAS commander, such was her skill and ingenuity at managing our very secret affair.
I would never have dared. I looked up "treason" in the dictionary. It carried the death penalty. But I knew the punishment would be worse than death, and I wasn't far wrong.
When I went to the Gulf, Diana wrote me letters nearly every day. (Much later, these letters were snatched by my then fiancée, Italian beauty Anna Ferretti, who tried to sell them to a tabloid.) She sent sweets, copies of Playboy and Horse and Hound and a buff-coloured jersey.
She would have made a superb Army wife, but it was not to be. The tabloid rumours began.
I thought it would stop the bad press if I spoke to Anna Pasternak about my relationship with Diana. Diana seemed unconcerned, but it was the biggest mistake I have every made in my life. The tabloids accused me of kissing and telling and said I was a social leper. This was not true. I continued to hunt and go to dinner parties. But it did mark the end of our affair and my Army career. I even contemplated suicide.
I loved Diana. I love her still, but part of me wished it had never happened.
And if you really are pressed: The digested read, digested
A dashing Army captain meets an unhappy princess trapped in a palace and a loveless marriage. They have a secret passionate love affair. But public revelations end the union. The tabloids call the captain a "love-rat" and the princess goes back to being miserable.
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