Sarah Ferguson was branded a “sheep’s a***” by her dad and had “the devi”l beaten out of her by her mom.
The Duchess of York, 63, added her mother was a “child” who didn’t know “how to be a mummy”.
Her traumatic upbringing saw her abandoned at 13 when her mom, 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.
She told the “Sunday Times”: “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.
“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, Ferguson’s mom 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 Barrantes was not wearing a seat belt and was decapitated and killed.
Her then-25-year-old nephew, Raphael, was in her car and hospitalised with minor injuries.
Ferguson was also in a road crash the year before her death, when her car flipped an estimated seven times.
In 1976, Ferguson’s dad, Major Ronald Ferguson, married for the second time. He wed Susan Rosemary Deptford and they had three children.
He died at 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.