During this very special occasion, Charles Spencer is providing Princess Diana with an insight inside his boyhood.
Saturday, the 9th Earl Spencer, who is 59 years old, posted a black-and-white photograph of himself and Diana laughing together in the late 1960s on Instagram. The photograph was taken in the late 1960s.
In the photograph, a young Charles is seen smiling on a swing next to Diana as his mother, Frances Shand Kydd, is holding onto him from behind.
In the caption, Charles wrote, “My mother, Diana, and I, around the year 1967.” Charles is the author of a new book titled A Very Private School, which begins publication on March 12 and is about his youth and his time attending boarding school. “I would have been three years old, and Diana would have been five or six.”
Regarding the adorable photograph of the family, he said, “I adore how happy each of us appears.”
Additionally, Charles included a hint about his boyhood moniker in the description at the same time.
According to what he said, “At this stage of my life, my mother nicknamed me ‘Buzz’ because she saw me as having the endless energy of a rather happy – and busy – bee.” He also included various hashtags, such as “#Family” and “#SpencerFamily.”
Frances and John Spencer had a total of five children, two of whom were named Diana and Charles for short. During their childhood, they were raised by two elder sisters named Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes. Additionally, they had an older brother named John Spencer, who passed away very immediately after his birth in 1960.
While Charles, an author, historian, and podcast producer, has been a vocal guardian of Diana’s legacy, Sarah and Jane have led very secluded lives since Diana’s loss in 1997. Charles has been pursuing a career in podcast hosting.
He disclosed this information in an interview with PEOPLE in 2017, which took place twenty years after Diana’s passing. He said that there are “many myths” about his childhood and the upbringing of his siblings, including the fact that they never referred to his sister as “Di” and that the queen was never especially bashful.
At home, none of us ever referred to her as “Di,” so let’s begin with that. In point of fact, there are a great number of beliefs that we have from our infancy that are really absurd. At the time, he said to PEOPLE he said, “That is one of them.”
“I just think she was never shy, but she was canny about people and she was reserved to start with,” said the psychologist. To add insult to injury, she would form an opinion on someone before responding to them. Therefore, it is not a timid thing to do; in fact, that is pretty intelligent.
Additionally, Charles said to PEOPLE in the same interview that he has always felt “intensely protective” about Diana and that he wishes he could have prevented her from being involved in the horrific tragedy that she was involved in.
“At the time, I was not just angry; I was furious,” he recalls thinking to himself. I pondered the question, “What could I have done?” To put it simply, it was a horrible experience.
