'Sarah Ferguson enjoyed a childhood which, in retrospect, seems idyllic in its comfort and Englishness,” begins Ingrid Seward’s 1991 biography of Sarah, Duchess of York. Twenty years on, a very different – and infinitely more lurid – version of that childhood is emerging from a series of television interviews that the Duchess has given to the Oprah Winfrey Network in the US. Unloved, beaten and callously treated by both her parents, not to mention the emotionally inept Royal family, it is little wonder, she says, that she now feels “ludicrous”, “pointless” and “worthless”.
We already know that the Duchess loves nothing better than a tearful confessional, especially when it brings her an audience of millions and an appearance fee of, in this instance, reportedly £200,000. Over the past 20 years she has repeatedly, and publicly, wallowed in regret over lovers, debts and misjudgments. Only last year, she had to grovel on screen after she was filmed, fuelled by red wine, attempting to sell access to her ex-husband for £500,000. But the first programme in Finding Sarah, a six-part series, to be broadcast on Sunday, breaks new ground.
Most startling of the latest revelations is that her mother was incapable of showing love, and beat her as a toddler. “When she used to hit me because I didn’t sit on my potty or wouldn’t eat, a little vein would come up on the centre of my head near my red hair,” a preview reveals. Her mother called it the “sign of the devil” and would lay about her daughter saying, “I’m going to beat that devil out!”
Sorry, what year are we in? This satanic talk takes us back to the bad old days of the Rochdale and Orkney child abuse scandals in 1990 and 1991, when hordes of children were taken from their families after what turned out to be wild allegations prompted by overzealous social workers and therapists. But now, courtesy of the world’s most garrulous rogue royal, we are already revisiting the minefield of recovered memory and its destructive sibling, false memory syndrome.
“People think false memory syndrome is done and dusted, but it has never gone away,” according to Madeline Greenhalgh, director of the British False Memory Society. “In the early-Nineties, we were getting 250 cases a year; now we get around 50 cases a year. Each one has terrible effects on a whole family with grandparents no longer allowed to see their grandchildren and siblings torn apart.

“The cases we are currently seeing often involve hypnotherapists, who are unregulated, unlike psychologists and psychiatrists who have guidelines on recovered memory. What happens is that people buy a course of hypnosis for something like an eating problem or smoking. The therapists want to find explanations for what is wrong with their lives so they push them further and further back into their childhoods, and therapists who believe in suppressed trauma are likely to find it.”
No such catalyst need be involved in the Duchess of York’s devastating memories. To justify the huge payment she has received, she must provide headline-grabbing material. Lights, cameras, confessions, are the order of the day even though she has more chance of finding Nemo than finding Sarah through the public humiliation of being grilled by Dr Phil McGraw, Oprah’s favourite psychologist – famous for bursting into hospital to interview Britney Spears – and financial expert, Suze Orman. But real-life agony is guaranteed from the Duchess whose life has been not so much a car crash as one long pile-up since 1992 when, while still married, she was photographed having her toes sucked by financial adviser, John Bryan.
“No wonder I am so flawed,” she concludes on Oprah, having described the sufferings she endured at the hands of her parents. As well as accusing her mother of violence, she describes how her father, Major Ronald Ferguson, heartlessly sold her pony immediately after her mother abandoned the family for Hector Barrantes, an Argentine polo player. “Every time I got upset, he would call me a sheep’s ass,” she says, using language that sounds more America 2011 than Hampshire, circa 1970. Red-eyed, she carries on to tell the world that he also told her that she “looked like a clown and to grow up and stop being so silly. So I did. I shut up and never said a word. I cried every night, all the time. I was inconsolable.”
Neither of her parents are alive to defend themselves, but the Duchess’s account leaves her biographer, Ingrid Seward, aghast. “I have a soft spot for her,” she says, “because she had every opportunity to have a wonderful life. Instead, she has dug a hole for herself deeper than the Grand Canyon. Here, she seems to be sensationalising the past.”
Seward interviewed not only the Duchess but also the Ferguson family – mother, father and elder sister, Jane – many times before writing her biography, The Duchess of York. The impression she received was that, until the Ferguson marriage fell apart, Sarah’s childhood had been exceptionally jolly – as the Duchess herself had been when she first met and married the Duke of York. “I remember her insisting on her mother coming to see me in hospital after I’d just had a baby. Susan was charming and clearly loved her children, although she left them because she was in an impossible situation.
“Major Ronald adored Sarah, too. She was this cheeky, bubbly child and terribly brave. But this was a military family in the Sixties and, when children didn’t behave, they got a little smack. She should be glad they gave her boundaries; nowadays we are so wet about being strict. It’s important to judge by the standards of that time.”
Psychologists are more sympathetic to the Duchess’s torment. “You can’t dismiss her account,” says Dorothy Rowe. “Parents have always used beating as a way of venting emotions that have nothing to do with the child. Those children are likely to become depressed, if they are girls, or anti-social if they are boys.”
Nor does the fact that so many details of her memories are implausible destroy her credibility in the eyes of Dr Peter Glaish who advises the British False Memory Society. “The cut-off point for credible childhood memories is generally thought to be three years old and she was probably two when she used the potty. Some of her memories may indeed be erroneous, but that doesn’t mean none of it is true. We assemble memories over time, putting them in an order which makes sense. ”
Even the “devil” talk may have some truth in it. Many a parent has called a child such names when they scream and scream in a way that makes them appear possessed by some kind of demon. What is beyond doubt is that the woman who is bearing her soul is deeply troubled. She needs to find Sarah, as well as fund her. But in all this airing of her own difficulties, she may be in danger of forgetting how hard she is making it for her own two children to find the happiness that eludes their mother.