“Adversity can be your friend”

Sarah, Duchess of York confesses that as a child growing up in rural England she was “a dreamer” with “an incredibly active imagination”. When the going got tough – which it did when her mother, Susan, left the marital home for Argentina to live with her polo player lover, Héctor Barrantes – Sarah, age 12, would escape into the surrounding countryside and conjure fantastical worlds in her head.

“From a young age I figured out that the only way I was going to survive was to retreat into other places and stories,” she explains. “I loved nature – especially oak trees and flowers and ponies. I’m so lucky that I was able to go into a world of make-believe. The extraordinary sense of loss and loneliness that I felt when my mother left, which I can never really describe properly to anyone, was so petrifying that I made up my own world to compensate, and that’s how I got through it.”

Looking back, it was a pretty shocking day in the Ferguson household, and one that still haunts Sarah. Her mum literally turned her back on her family and walked out of the front door, leaving her two girls to cope with the fallout and soothe their