At Harrods: Day of Heartbreak and Communal Grief

Derrick Meaden stands in front of Harrods most days dispensing service with a smile. He helps lost tourists, opens taxicab doors for shoppers and, if he’s lucky, gets to usher some celebrity into Britain’s biggest department store.

But on Monday, the 30-year-old doorman in his pea-green uniform, white shirt and thin black tie looked like an undertaker at a wake. Solemn and almost motionless, he watched for hours as thousands of mourners filed to a book of condolences on a sidewalk table.

“Heartbreaking,” he muttered. “Can’t say much more than that. Just heartbreaking.”

Long a symbol of entrepreneurial spirit that drove an empire, Harrods is now a temple of mass grieving over the deaths of a troubled young princess and her last suitor. The scene Monday at the six-story gingerbread palace offered a microcosm of a nation’s people and their raw emotions at a time of sudden loss.

Britons young and old, rich and poor, white and nonwhite, laid flowers at the store’s shuttered Brompton Road entrance. By evening, the pile, which also contained poems, stuffed toy animals and a few lighted candles, was 40 feet across the doorway, 8 feet out into the sidewalk and 2 feet high.

Over the table of condolence books, in a store window displaying designer sunglasses, was a sign that said: “Diana, Princess of Wales, 1961-1997. Emad “Dodi” Al Fayed, 1955-1997.”

Some mourners wrote that Diana had touched their lives directly. Most simply admired her beauty, grace and charitable work. They expressed relief that, in their view, she had found love with Dodi, the son of Harrods’ billionaire Egyptian owner, a few weeks before the two died early Sunday in a Paris car crash.

In penned and verbal outbursts, a few railed against the royal family for slighting Diana before and after her divorce from Prince Charles, or against the photographers who chased her before her death.

“You’re animals, all of you!” shouted Maureen Reynolds, a 50-year-old catering company manager, glaring at a startled pair of photographers outside Harrods. “You never left her alone, and now you’ve killed her! I hope you’re satisfied.”

Then she turned and left, dabbing tears from her eyes. The crowd around her remained silent.

But many admitted being equally on edge--unable to eat or sleep much in the grieving hours that had blended into one long day. Bloodshot eyes and hollow expressions showed it. Diana’s death, they said, evoked the emotion of a death in the family.

Salimata Sesay, a bingo parlor employee, awoke to the news Sunday and told her boyfriend she wanted to be alone for the rest of the day.

“Just think of what she’d done for people--all over Africa, in Bosnia,” said Sesay, 30, a native Londoner who grew up in Sierra Leone. “No one on Earth can replace Diana.”

Lesley Backhouse, 32, a civil servant, said she thought immediately of a close friend who died two years ago--a young woman who, like Diana, left two children.

“I have been trying to imagine what Diana’s sons are going through, what she would have wanted, and thinking how bad it was for her at the last minute, when her children were hundreds of miles away and she couldn’t touch them before she died,” Backhouse said.

Harrods was one landmark on a circuit of grief that includes Diana’s home at Kensington Palace, Buckingham Palace and St. James’ Palace, where her body rests. Tens of thousands of Britons made the rounds Monday on a sunny day, many after long travel from distant homes.

Older people in the crowd at Harrods remembered flocking to London for Diana’s fairy tale wedding in 1981. As her marriage to Charles soured, many turned against the monarchy, and some mourners said Monday that the “unique funeral” announced for the princess fell short of the full state honors she deserved.

“It’s time to have a different kind of monarchy or just let the whole thing fizzle out,” said Sue Flynn, an accountant. “With Diana gone, the royal family has lost its mystique. It doesn’t measure up.”

“Diana was the only one of them who was really a role model,” said Imran Patni, 18, a Transit Authority worker of Indian descent. “She put a message across that AIDS is not wrong; it’s just a disease that cannot be cured. She put that idea forward by shaking the hand of an AIDS patient.”

Not far behind Patni in the condolence line was Caroline Fearon, a woman Diana’s age who had a life-changing encounter with the princess in a home for battered women nearly three years ago. Fearon and her four children had just fled a tormented relationship and might have gone back had Diana not spent half a day there speaking with her and a few other women undergoing therapy.

“She came in and sat down and was just like one of the girls,” Fearon recalled. “She had been through a lot herself--not violence but a lot of abuse--so she could relate to us. It was just so comforting. That day changed my life.”

Now living on her own and studying to become a counselor for troubled women, Fearon said she was so “devastated” by Diana’s death that she had not slept since.

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On the other side of the flowers and locked doors, Harrods opened for business Monday, with customers and staff using side entrances. Mohammed Fayed, who buried his son Sunday night, kept the Union Jack above the store at half-staff but wanted life at the store to go on, as if it were just another day.

For many inside, it wasn’t.

“I’m in shock. I read the papers and cannot stop crying,” said a salesclerk who left her post in the Food Court, passed through the Room of Luxury where perfume is sold and stood at the front entrance, looking at the pile of flowers from inside.

“I’d better get back to work now, or I’ll be in trouble,” she said.