IN LIVING MEMORY

Diana lives on. She resides in the memory of friends and enemies, in the recollection of her touch by those who felt her presence as the self-appointed angel to the downtrodden; she echoes on videotape, outlining for the BBC a tell-all autobiography that will never be written. Some of the stories repeat themselves: how she listened, how she placed strangers at ease, how she embraced, how she remembered, how she was kind. Others, even in their triteness, resonate with intriguing new meanings now that the arc of her life is completed. TIME has collected some of these fragments, personal reliquaries of encounters with Diana, to form an oral history, a profile of the people's princess in her own words and in the words of the people whose paths she crossed in her brief life.

"Her own childhood was hell," says PETER JANSON, an international socialite and a friend of Diana's. "Her parents hated, despised each other. She grew up under that."

But somehow, "she always had this incredible concern for others," says HARRY HERBERT, whose father manages the Queen's stables and who, as a teenager, hung out with the young Diana and her friends. "She'd be the first one around to see if you were all right. I remember when my brother was ill once with a bad flu, and she cooked up some soup and brought it to him. I think she was around 16 at the time."

"She never dated; she used to go out with friends in groups," says Herbert. "At parties," says Janson, "she liked Pimm's [a gin-based specialty drink], and she'd stand in the corner with all the rest of the girls, and all the boys would stand at the other end of the room." It was at about this time that she met her future husband. "Prince Charles was the first man she dated," says Herbert. "She was very much head over heels in love."

"I remember thinking," said Charles, with a 19-year-old Diana at his side during a television interview in 1981 after their courtship began, "what a very jolly and amusing and attractive 16-year-old she was, and I mean great fun and bouncy and full of life and everything. And I don't know what she thought of me."

"Pretty amazing," came Diana's reply.

Before the engagement, Diana held a job. "It was through friends," she said, that she found work at the Young England kindergarten in central London. "I wanted to teach children, and they said, 'Well, why not come along.' So I first started off doing afternoons, and then I took over the mornings and did whole days."

ALEXANDER STEAVENSON was four when he was taught by "Miss Diana." "One day," he says, "me and my friend Charlie were in the toilets at school. I think we were messing around, trying to see who could pee the farthest. She came in and startled us, so we turned around--in panic or something--and got her across the shins. She was very nice about it all, I think. We didn't get into too much trouble. But she rang my mother to tell her we'd been naughty but that she'd had words with us and she thought that should be the end of the matter."

"I only worked three days a week at kindergarten," Diana told an interviewer. "The other two I looked after an American baby boy--which nobody seems to realize--who was very special to me."

"Diana was a nanny for my son Patrick for a year, in 1980, when he was one year old," says MARY ROBERTSON, now of Morristown, N.J., but then resident in London, where her husband worked as an executive of an oil company. "I called an agency a friend had recommended. She came to us just as Diana Spencer. She did not tell me that she was seeing Charles. When she returned from vacation in September 1980, she talked with me one morning as I was getting dressed to go to work. We'd chat often; she'd stand in the doorway as I blow-dried my hair and put on makeup. That morning there were a lot of photographers and reporters outside our house. She stood in the doorway of the bedroom and asked for my full attention and said photographers were waiting for her--it was because she had been at Balmoral. She said she had been to see Charles. But she specified that he had not invited her up there--his mother had. Then she added a cute line: 'Gee, he's 32. I'm only 19. I never thought he'd ever look twice at me.' That was in early September, and then the baby sitting got a little spotty."

"In February 1981, Diana went to Australia to visit her mother," says Janson, who is based in Melbourne. "She was never out of Mummy's sight. She didn't have a chance to see anything of the world before she got married." Before she left for Australia, Prince Charles had proposed. "I wanted to give her a chance to think about it," he said. "To think if it was all going to be too awful."

Diana pondered, then made her decision. "I learned about the engagement when a friend from London called me when the news broke over there," says Robertson, who had moved back to the U.S. by then. "And her only message was, 'Your girl made it!'"

"She was absolutely as happy as anyone could be," says Herbert. "But it was dawning on her just what she was getting into. The penny was very much dropping, and it daunted her." "The press were dreadful," says KAY KING, headmistress of the Young England kindergarten. "From the moment the first picture of her appeared at Balmoral until the time of her engagement, it was nonstop. She had no guidance from the palace, because they were trying to pretend it didn't exist."

There were other adjustments. "She hated the name Di," says BONNIE ANGELO, TIME's London bureau chief in the early '80s. "She was never called that by family or friends. I remember being present on a day, shortly after the engagement, when a group crowded around her on a pedestrian shopping street in Mayfair. Someone called out, 'Di!' She replied with obvious annoyance, 'Please don't call me that--I've never been called Di. I really don't like it.'"

"Well, you remember the famous picture of the see-through dress with a couple of children," says King. "We didn't know how to get rid of the press, so I suggested that if we allowed them to take one photograph, they might go away. She was very insistent that she take some of the children with her. I think she felt safer, as if they were her protection."

The preparations for the July 1981 wedding proceeded apace. "I had taken her name down wrong for an appointment," says ELIZABETH EMMANUEL, who, with her husband David, designed the wedding gown. "It wasn't until she was walking up our narrow, winding stairs that I realized who it was. Then I was really, really nervous. But she made us feel at ease. I think she was wearing something with a frilly neck, a full skirt, and she was rather plump, quite shy and seemed to look out from under her bangs. The first time I met her, she needed a formal dress for an evening engagement with Prince Charles, so we went through the rails. We found a black dress that she looked great in, but it was quite revealing and created quite a stir. For the first time, she was seen as a glamorous person. She looked more grownup. She pushed the announcement of the national budget to the second page of the papers."

As the wedding approached, Diana, with Charles beside her, spoke on TV. Describing a gift collage from her kindergarten students, she said, "Oh, well, it's the firework display that's going to happen on Tuesday, the one that I'm not going to... I'm going to be tucked up in bed, I think, early night."

"Not allowed," blurted Charles. "Not allowed to see me anyway the night before."

"We might quarrel," said Diana.

"Even," he said, "by the light of an exploding firework."

"The day of the wedding," says Emmanuel, "Diana was very nervous. We were sitting watching the TV, which showed the crowds outside our window. She couldn't believe they had all come to see her. She was so excited, and, you know, she was really in love."

"I remember when she got married," says Steavenson, now 21, "and I thought it was very strange, and my mother kept pointing at the TV and saying, 'That's Miss Diana,' and it was Miss Diana."

Miss Diana had become Her Royal Highness, the Princess of Wales.

The marriage has been so thoroughly dissected that it can be understood only in retrospect. "I think," said Diana in her riveting 1995 interview on BBC television, "like any marriage, especially when you've had divorced parents, like myself, you'd want to try even harder to make it work, and you don't want to fall back into a pattern that you've seen happen in your own family. I desperately wanted it to work. I desperately loved my husband, and I wanted to share everything together. I thought that we were a very good team... Here was a fairy story that everybody wanted to work. And it was isolating, but it was also a situation where you couldn't indulge in feeling sorry for yourself. You had to either sink or swim, and you had to learn that very fast... I swam."

She produced two sons and, even as she battled bulimia and depression, joined her husband in the service of his mother. She brought her own style to the stiff Windsor charm. In 1985 she and Charles visited the U.S. for the first time together. "At a White House dinner," says J. CARTER BROWN, who was director of the National Gallery of Art, "she was seated next to Mikhail Baryshnikov. It was customary to take the menu cards that were at each seat and pass them around to everyone at the table to autograph. When Baryshnikov got the set, he got shy about passing it on to her to autograph. So she teased him and said, 'Why? What's wrong? I have your autograph.'

"And he said in a shocked voice, 'What?'

"She said, 'As a teenager, I stood in the rain outside the stage door at Covent Garden when you were dancing because I was such an admirer and I wanted your autograph.'"

"That evening she danced with John Travolta," says Brown. "And she danced with the President. At the stroke of midnight they all disappeared. That night, after she left the White House, she went to St. Alban's School and got in her laps at the swimming pool. The buzz was the development officer was going to bottle the water and sell it. I teased her the next day: 'What do you do to get the chlorine smell out of your hair?' She looked at me with wide, unbelieving eyes. 'Haven't you heard of shampoo?'"

In India she and Charles were taken on a tour of the Mughal Gardens at the President's palace in New Delhi. "When we had covered about half the garden," recalls S.K. MATHUR, the chief horticulturalist, "she suddenly asked me, 'Do you talk to the plants?' I said, 'Of course.' She started laughing, and then she asked, 'Do they respond?' I told her that it had been scientifically proven that plants respond to tender human attention. I think she was glad to hear that. She was asking quite seriously because her husband had said on TV that he talked to his plants. She wanted to check."

The marriage, however, was failing. Even in 1985, there were hints that not all was well. In December she danced onstage at the Royal Opera House to the surprise of the audience--and Charles, for whom the performance was a Christmas gift. Says WAYNE SLEEP, who partnered her onstage: "We took eight curtain calls, and as we left the stage, Diana turned to me and laughingly said, 'Beats the wedding.'"

By about 1987, humor could do little to hide the estrangement. MAINHARDT GRAF NAYHAUSS, a German aristocrat, remembers a party in the Waleses' honor at the German embassy in London. "Diana wore a long red dress," Nayhauss said in a German tabloid. "Around midnight the Munich In crowd was rocking like crazy... Di [was] really with it. She seemed to like the informality of it all. Out of breath from the music, she asked the disc jockey to play something slower. She turned to go back out on the dance floor." But there was a "certain sadness about her," Nayhauss adds. "No wonder. Charles hadn't danced a single dance with her the whole night."

Diana tried to preserve a clearly doomed match. "We both liked people," she would later say. "We both liked country life. Both loved children, work in the cancer field, work in hospices." But, says Peter Janson, who occasionally joins the Prince at hunts and last saw the princess earlier this year, "everything he liked, Diana didn't like. Horses and dogs sort of scared her. She couldn't stand the people he had around him, always hunting and shooting. She liked the lights. She liked fashion and music. But a five-mile trek around Balmoral..."

RICHARD BRANSON, founder of the Virgin music-and-airline empire, remembers that Diana could grow pointedly funny about symbols of royalty. "She would often take the mickey out of Charles and the royal family," he recalls. "Once at a dinner party, a guest said to Diana, 'I know you don't like dogs.' 'Oh, no,' said Diana. 'It's not dogs I don't like; it's corgis. They get the blame for all the farts.'" Corgis are the breed usually associated with Queen Elizabeth.

But she remained devoted to her children. "In June 1992," recalls Mary Robertson, for whom Diana was a nanny, "we were traveling through England, and we had lunch at Kensington Palace with Diana and Prince Harry. She had just been to see William playing in a soccer game, so she was a little bit late in coming to see us, but she was exuberant, greeted us with a big hug and seemed to be fine. It was very clear as we talked over lunch that her boys were the most important thing for her. She said to us, 'They are my life.'"

But there were others who intruded into her life. Around 1986, her husband revived his old liaison with Camilla Parker Bowles. "I wasn't in a position to do anything about it," said Diana. The bulimia increased. "It was already difficult, but it became increasingly difficult... Friends on my husband's side were indicating that I was, again, unstable, sick and should be put in a home of some sort in order to get better. I was almost an embarrassment."

"I do think those people who marry into my family find it increasingly difficult to do so because of all the added pressure," Charles said in an extraordinary interview in June 1994, "because of suddenly finding that they're put into positions for which they are simply not trained, and the strains and stresses of that become, in some cases, almost intolerable. And suddenly joining this organization in which I have been brought up, and my family in a particular way to see things, which are not the same as other people have, and it does add very real strains, and now much more than it did at the beginning of the century, for instance."

He did not name Diana, but his implications were clear. From 1986 to 1991 the princess herself would conduct an affair with her former riding instructor James Hewitt, who would help write a tell-all book about their relationship in 1994. "He was a great friend of mine at a very difficult--yet another difficult time. And he was always there to support me, and I was absolutely devastated when this book appeared because I had trusted him ... He'd rung me up 10 days before it arrived in the book shops and told me that there was nothing to worry about, and I believed him, stupidly."

Soon Charles and Diana would be dueling by way of anonymous leaks to the press. The decision to divorce came in 1996. "Well, I went to the school and put it to William," said Diana in the 1995 BBC interview, explaining how Camilla had come between her and Charles, "particularly, that if you find someone you love in life, you must hang on to it and look after it and you were very lucky to find, if you were lucky enough to find someone who loved you, then one must protect it. William asked me what had been going on and could I answer his questions, which I did. He said, Was that the reason why our marriage had broken up? And I said, 'Well, there were three of us in this marriage, and the pressure of the media was another factor, so the two together were very difficult,' that although I still loved Papa, I couldn't live under the same roof as him, and likewise with him ... I put it in gently, without resentment or any anger."

In August 1996 the divorce became final. The day after, JOANNA BULL, founder and executive director of Gilda's Club, a cancer-support community established in memory of comedian Gilda Radner, sat down to tea with the princess at her residence at Kensington Palace. Says Bull: "When I got there, I was surprised to see that it was just she and I who were present. I had thought as I approached the palace that there might be a group of women, her closest friends, who might have gathered to support her. But she told me that she had rearranged her schedule so that the two of us could talk. She had the air of a woman who was experiencing the ambivalence of the freedom and the sense of loss that comes with divorce. But she was fresh with hope that she would be allowed to help people."

Back in 1993, amid her separation from Charles and her hounding by the press, the princess had announced that she was cutting back on her charities. But that did not last long. By the time her divorce was final, she was already back into charity work, having expressed in one of her interviews the wish to be "a queen of people's hearts." ."I'm not a political animal, but I think the biggest disease this world suffers from in this day and age is the disease of people feeling unloved, and I know that I can give love for a minute, for a half an hour, for a day, for a month. But I can give, and I'm very happy to do that, and I want to do that."

At first she spoke on issues with which she had had experience. "Many would like to believe," she said, "that eating disorders are merely an expression of female vanity--not being able to get into a size-10 dress and the consequent frustrations. Eating disorders, whether it be anorexia or bulimia, show how individuals can turn the nourishment of the body into a painful attack on themselves, and they have at their core a far deeper problem than mere vanity."

In December 1995 she delivered a speech at her favorite homeless charity, saying, "It is truly tragic to see the total waste of so many young lives, of so much potential. Everyone needs to be valued. Everyone has the potential to give something back, if only they had the chance. Each time I visit, I am appalled at the dangers young people face on the streets and how vulnerable they are to exploitation." For that she was attacked by the Conservatives, eager to keep their hold on Parliament. Said Tory M.P. John Marshall: "It is quite wrong that a member of the royal family--however semidetached--should appear to lend credence to the view of one political party or another. It seems she wants all the benefits of being a member of the royal family without exercising the discretion that goes with it."

But Diana was done with discretion, both politically and emotionally. She said at one point, "I mean, once or twice I've had people say to me that, you know, that Diana's out to destroy the monarchy, which bewilders me, because why would I want to destroy something that is my children's future? I will fight for my children on any level in order for them to be happy and have peace of mind and carry out their duties."

She waded deep into politically charged--and physically dangerous--territory, for example, traveling to Bosnia to visit with victims of land mines in her campaign against the devices. "She wanted to know everything," says FRANJO KRESIC, who lost both legs and had his eyesight damaged by land mines. "How I survived, how my wife helped me survive, how we have coped with it. At first I was paralyzed--it was a big thing to have a princess in your home. But after a while, I felt as if we had known each other for a long time. She wanted to see my stumps, she looked at my eyes. I couldn't see her clearly, but it's much more telling what one feels than what one sees."

In 1996 she traveled to Pakistan. "She had watched a film of the hospital," says IMRAN KHAN, the cricket superstar turned politician, of the cancer center he established. "She called Annabel [Goldsmith, his mother-in-law] and said, 'I want to help.' There was a young boy who had a tumor on his face. That tumor was festering. It smelled, it really smelled. I was sitting 4 ft. away, and I could smell it. And she picked him up. She held him, completely oblivious to everything." Recalls the hospital's medical director, DR. G.M. SHAH: "The boy could not open his mouth; one eye was closed. It was not a happy scene. But she held that child on her lap throughout a party we had. She was happy to keep that child with her through the whole function. She remembered his case when she returned this year and asked for him. He had died shortly after her first visit. For a few moments after hearing this, she couldn't speak."

But even as she saw herself as an angel of mercy, Diana was also the world's most famous divorce. Everyone wanted to know, what she would do next. She recruited freelance photographer JAYNE FINCHER to advise her on how to handle photos and to deter intrusion by the photographers who stalked her. Says Fincher: "Several other photographers were in fact also helping Diana with this problem. It was getting out of control. The paparazzi would abuse Diana, physically and verbally. With no policeman on hand, they would push the lenses right up to her face and obstruct her as she tried to move about. I thought the press would push her over the edge to a mental breakdown."

Romance was therefore a dangerous pursuit. "Well," she said in 1995, "I mean, any gentleman that's been past my door, we've instantly been put together in the media, and all hell's broken loose, so that's been very tough on the male friends I've had and, obviously, from my point of view."

"At a dinner celebrating Katharine Graham's 80th birthday [last June]," says BARBARA WALTERS of ABC News, "she and I were teasing about the fact that there didn't seem to be any eligible men. We said, 'Well, there are no eligible men!' I mentioned somebody, and she said, 'He's much too old.' I said, 'Maybe he has a son.'"

Diana had married for love, for the sake of a monarch, for country. But she found love false, her prince unfeeling, herself confused and alone. The future would not be long in coming. "I could see an accident coming, but not one like that," says Fincher, her photographic consultant. "I heard it on the local news," says Kresic. "My daughters cried. It's terrible that she wasn't allowed to have some private life." "I can't believe that she was here, sitting next to me," says his daughter DIJANA, 13. "She always smiled at me. Conqueror of hearts." In Tokyo, RINKO YAMAZAKI, 78, once took the princess on a tour of a senior-care center. When the news broke, she stood by a photograph of herself and Diana and murmured, "Please sleep peacefully."

In an interview just before her wedding to Charles, Lady Diana Spencer, then 20, said she had one musical request for the ceremony. "[I've asked for] one hymn, 'I vow to thee, my country,' which has always been my favorite since schooldays." Today, through the prism of her whole life, the words of its two stanzas are possessed of the awful poignancy of half-fulfilled prophecy.

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above, Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love: The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test, That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best; The love that never falters, the love that pays the price, The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago, Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know; We may not count her armies, we may not see her King; Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering; And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase, And her ways are ways of gentle- ness and all her paths are peace.

The hymn was sung again at her funeral.