The Duchess of York opens up about her difficult childhood as she grew up with abusive father and mother who later abandoned her to live their own lives.
- Apr 11, 2023
AceShowbiz - Sarah Ferguson was labeled a "sheep's a***" by her dad and had "the devil" beaten out of her by her mum. The Duchess of York, 63, claimed her mother was a "child" who didn't know "how to be a mummy" as she opened up about her traumatic upbringing, which saw her abandoned aged 13 when her mum Susan Barrantes, went to live in Argentina with her boyfriend, and her dad Ronald became obsessed with polo while her sister Jane moved to Australia.
"My mother was a beautiful woman but she was a child herself. She didn't know how to be a mummy. We would never dream now of using the language my parents used on us as children," she told the Sunday Times when asked if she was close to her parents.
"Dad used to call me a sheep's a***. If I refused to eat my semolina mum would hit me and say she needed to beat the devil out of me. Food became my best friend. At difficult times I've always turned to childhood foods like boiled egg and soldiers, baked potatoes and sausage rolls."
She added about her family breaking up, "When I was 14, my mother eloped to Argentina with a very good-looking polo player. She came back for my sister's wedding. Then my sister left to start her new married life in Australia and I lost them both on the same day."
"I never truly understood why my mother left me and it has taken me a long time to deal with my low self-esteem. When I was little I used to leave notes in her dressing room saying, 'Mummy, please don't die in a car crash.' "
Shockingly, Sarah's mum did die in a car accident, in Argentina in 1998, aged 61. She was returning to her country home on September 19, 1998 when the Rover 400 she was driving had a head-on collision with a Renault catering truck on a two-lane highway.
The driver of the truck, Jose Maria Rodriguez, suffered a broken ankle, but Sarah was not wearing a seat belt and was decapitated and killed. Her then-25-year-old nephew, Raphael, was in her car and hospitalized with minor injuries. Sarah was also in a road crash the year before her death, when her car flipped an estimated seven times.
In 1976, Sarah's dad Major Ronald Ferguson married for the second time to Susan Rosemary Deptford and they had three children. He died aged 71 after fighting prostate cancer, with which he was diagnosed in 1996, and skin cancer. Major Ferguson suffered a heart attack in November 2002 and died in March 2003 at the Hampshire Clinic in Hampshire, England, after another cardiac arrest.
