BRITAIN: The Sport of Charlie Watching

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The press has hounded Charles' dates ever since his late teens. The Prince has always taken the gossipy accounts of his amorous adventures, whether fanciful or real, in good-natured stride. The pressure has been rather more trying for his girl friends. A few years ago, for example, Lady Jane Wellesley, a self-assured brunet, was discovered to have spent a weekend at one of the royal residences. The press descended en masse on the Chelsea travel agency where she worked. "Get rid of them and don't come back at all if you can't," warned her angry boss. Said a relative afterward: "It was as if she had been found guilty of some ghastly sexual crime or murder or robbery."

Ever since Charles passed 30, an age that he once said would be a good time to marry, speculation has intensified. Britons, obviously, are curious to know who will be their future Queen; they are also concerned that the Prince produce a royal heir. The field is narrowing as eligible girls are married off. Religion also poses a problem in Britain. A constitutional change would be needed before Charles could marry a Catholic, like Princess Marie-Astrid of Luxembourg. The Princess has repeatedly been mentioned as a possible royal match, but quite apart from the religious bar, the two barely know each other.

One of the things that makes Lady Diana a credible bride for Prince Charles is the fact that their families are old friends. The youngest daughter of Earl Spencer, a former equerry to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, she grew up on her father's estate, which is located on the royal family's 20,000-acre Sandringham property near the Norfolk coast. As it happened, it was the Spencers, and not the royal family, who had the heated swimming pool. Charles, his sister Anne and brothers Andrew and Edward were frequently invited over. The Prince helped Diana learn to swim when he was in his late teens and she was a little girl of five or six. Still athletic, Diana likes to bike and ski. She dresses casually and exudes a born-to-the-country-life look. Recently, when asked how she sees herself, she replied: "Well, I'm a normal person, hopefully, who loves life." Friends say she takes her kindergarten teaching job seriously.

One of her main worries about having become a focus of inordinate public attention is that the cameramen who hound her every move might upset the children at her school.

For a time, Charles dated Diana's older sister, Sarah; though she said later that the Prince was "a romantic who falls in love easily," he seems to have just as easily fallen out of it. Diana, on the other hand, is said to have had an adolescent crush on Charles that has now blossomed into serious mutual adulation. But with Charles off to India for a two-week official visit, and no announcement of an engagement yet in sight, Britain seemed to be in store for a long and piquant season of Charlie and Diana watching, the frothier the merrier.

Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/London