The princes, who were 15 and 12 when their mother died in a Paris car crash in 1997, told filmmakers they “quickly got off the phone with their mother” as they wanted to return to playing with their cousins.
“Harry and I were in a desperate rush to say goodbye, you know, ‘See you later’… If I’d known now obviously what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have been so blasé about it and everything,” Prince William said. “But the phone call sticks in my mind, quite heavily.”
Harry added: “Looking back on it now, it’s incredibly hard. I’ll have to deal with that for the rest of my life.
“Not knowing that was the last time I was going to speak to my mum. How differently that conversation would have panned out if I’d had even the slightest inkling her life was going to be taken that night.”
Excerpts of the ITV documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, will air in Britain this week. The documentary itself chronicles Diana’s charitable dedication, including her history outreach to AIDs victims and campaign to ban land mines.
It’s the fun-loving side, however, that both Prince Williams and Prince Harry wish the public saw. “Our mother was a total kid through and through,” they said.
“When everybody says to me, ‘So she was fun, give us an example’, all I can hear is her laugh in my head.”
Prince William also added that he frequently tells his children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, about Diana. “She’d be a lovely grandmother. She’d absolutely love it, she’d love the children to bits,” he added.
Prince Harry added that the documentary was one of the first times both he and his brother had spoken out about Princess Diana as a mother. “Arguable, probably, it was a little bit too raw up until this point. It’s still raw.”
