A Wave Of Grief Washes Up Against Buckingham Palace Britons Pile Emotions, Flowers, Prayers At Palace Gates

Princess Diana liked to think of herself as the queen of people’s hearts. Sunday, she broke them.

Her sudden death threw Great Britain into a paroxysm of sadness and shock. By the thousands, Londoners began streaming, stunned, toward Buckingham Palace, the official royal residence, and to Kensington Palace, where Diana had lived.

They carried thousands of bouquets - fancy displays tied with ribbons or drooping roses pulled hastily from garden bushes and wrapped in sheets of newsprint or foil. They kneeled or stood silently, many weeping openly, in a spontaneous outpouring of shared public grief expressed under a cloudy sky whipped by strong gusts of wind.

Many of the mourners were London’s youngest residents. The tragic, beautiful, flawed and yet ultimately heroic Diana seemed to represent their own struggling lives.

“She was young, she was so fun,” said Stefan Robinson, 16, with shaved head and gold ring earring, who left an all-night rock club with six other young friends to bring five red roses, purchased for $3, to Buckingham Palace’s gates an hour before dawn.

“As a woman, I can understand very deeply what she suffered from,” said another young mourner, Jun Ma, a 25-year-old woman with a round face and straight black hair who wiped her streaming eyes continuously as she stood in front of the palace’s imposing black iron gates topped with shiny golden spears.

“I never saw her as an icon,” Ma said, “a beauty queen. I saw her as a human being.”

BBC Radio and BBC-TV broadcasts began some of their hourly news reports with somber renditions of “God Save the Queen,” the national anthem. Union Jacks flew at half-staff on nearly every building, including Harrods department store, owned by the father of the boyfriend who died with Diana in Paris, Dodi Fayed. Flowers were heaped in front of Harrods as well.

Ordinary Sunday life in a country that normally would be frantically preparing for the start of school classes this week ground to a near-halt. A mileslong line of cars and taxis drove slowly past the Kensington Palace entrance on Kensington High Street, creating a traffic jam.

In a scene reminiscent of the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, millions of Britons tuned in to nonstop television news broadcasts. They watched as the surviving royal family - Prince Charles, young sons William and Harry, Queen Elizabeth and the queen’s mother, who recently turned 97 - left as usual for Sunday morning church services outside the royal summer retreat at Balmoral in Scotland. On this Sunday, the family wore black.

Later, TV viewers saw a grim-faced Prince Charles departing in a plane for Paris and returning with his former-wife’s body in a coffin draped with the royal family’s standard. Her two sisters stood silently beside him as the coffin was carried to a waiting hearse by air force pallbearers in pale gray uniforms.

Sunday evening, hundreds of Britons crowded a somber evening memorial service in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, where Diana and Charles had been wed in a joyous and lavish ceremony 16 years ago. As worshipers bowed their heads, the late Princess of Wales was hailed for “her work, her vitality, her concern for those in deep distress,” as someone whose life had “a dimension of tragedy which reached its terrible conclusion in the early hours of this morning.”

The Diana of temper tantrums and bulimia and scandalous love affairs was all but forgotten. In the cleansing tragedy of death, she was remembered Sunday as a selfless giver who worked tirelessly on the behalf of AIDS victims, drug addicts, poor children and those maimed by land mines.

She was compared to Mother Teresa, and the aged Mother Teresa was shown on the BBC praising Diana as someone who “helped me to help the poor, and that’s the most beautiful thing. She was a very great friend, in love with the poor.”

In a moving speech, interrupted frequently by long sad pauses, British Prime Minister Tony Blair hailed the princess as “a wonderful human being. Though her own life was often sadly touched by tragedy, she touched the lives of so many others in Britain and throughout the world with joy and with comfort.”

“How many times,” he said, “shall we remember her and in so many different ways, with the sick, with children, with the dying, with the needy? With just a look or a gesture that spoke so much more than words, she would reveal to all of us the depth of her compassion and her humanity.”

The nation is “in a state of shock,” Blair said. “In mourning and grief that is so deeply painful for us.”

Into the evening, the offerings of flowers continued to grow at Kensington and Buckingham Palaces, reaching several feet in depth. Most carried cards with scribbled words of condolence.

There was surprisingly little anger expressed by mourners about the cause of the crash that killed her - reportedly reckless paparazzi on motorcycles.

Instead, ordinary Britons mourned the loss of a princess who, more than any member of the royal family, was considered uniquely theirs.

“I’ve never been a royal watcher, a royal lover,” said Tony Rubin, a taxi driver. “But in my opinion, she was the only one worth anything out of the whole lot of ‘em.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Condolences Messages of condolence can be left at the royal web site: http:/ /www.royal.gov.uk