After four days it took a seven-year-old child to ask the question millions would like answered.
As the Prince of Wales continued his tightly scheduled tour of Australia on Thursday he was confronted by Pamela Kenneally-Murphy at a primary school in Melbourne.
Wrapping her arms around the heir to the throne she said: ”I hope you are in love with the woman you are marrying.”
The prince replied: ”Yes, very much.”
It was a question that British journalists had been forbidden to raise during his six-day tour of Australia, the first for 11 years. Clarence House said the prince would not be referring in any speeches to his forthcoming wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles on April 8, a union which has descended into a fiasco.
But Pamela knew nothing of protocol, she simply asked what everyone wanted to know. After meeting him the schoolgirl was so overwhelmed she burst into tears.
She told a Melbourne newspaper: ”I hope he’ll have a great time at the wedding. I’m just wishing him luck. He seems like a very nice man.”
Earlier in the day the prince visited Geelong grammar school and reminisced in front of 1 000 pupils about the time in 1966 when he spent two terms at an outpost of the school in the bush outside Melbourne.
He described how he was called ”a bloody pom” and how the physical demands of the regime there left his back dripping with blood after 112km hikes.
He met an old friend, Stuart McGregor, who had been chosen by the school back in 1966 to be his room-mate. McGregor said the men were still close friends and saw each other often.
Recalling the moment they met at Timbertops he said: ”He was a shy person who was looking forward to a new adventure.”
The prince joked in a speech at the school about the new prospectus which described the education in terms more often used for consumer products.
He said: ”Whoever wrote this has never been near Mount Buggery.”
The prince flies out of Australia on Friday to continue his official tour in New Zealand and Fiji. He returns next week to face the continuing controversy over his marriage to Mrs Parker Bowles in a civil ceremony, the legality of which is still being questioned. – Guardian Unlimited Â