Is This The Real Life? Read Free Page A

claims, the Bulsaras did not move as a family to India. Instead, Freddie alone made the voyage to Bombay (now Mumbai), where his maternal and paternal aunts lived.
    Once in India, Freddie travelled by train 168 miles north to his new school in the Maharashtrian province. According to itsrecords, Bulsara began his new life at St Peter’s Boys School in Panchgani in 1955. St Peter’s was founded in 1902. It ran on traditional disciplinarian lines, with a school motto of ‘Ut Prosim’ (‘I may profit’), and had an outstanding academic record, priding itself on educating its pupils to English university standard. While welcoming pupils of many faiths, including Parsees, St Peter’s was essentially a Church of England school. It also adopted many of the traits of the English public school system. Boys roomed together in dormitories, and Freddie became part of Ashlin House, one of four schoolhouses. In a letter from 1958, Bulsara wrote: ‘My friends at the Ashlin House are like a second family.’ It was a fortunate arrangement, given his physical distance from the real thing.
    Another pupil, in the year above Freddie, remembered him as ‘a shy, timid boy, who had to wear a very painful brace on his teeth’, and who could sometimes be the victim of cruel comments from his schoolmates. ‘Of course there were feelings of being sent away from my parents and sister – feelings of loneliness, feelings of rejection – but you had to do what you told,’ Mercury said later. ‘So the sensible thing was to make the most of it. One thing boarding school taught me was to fend for myself.’
    At St Peter’s, Fred became friends with Subash Shah, the school’s only other pupil from Zanzibar. ‘We were born on the same day and in the same year, my parents knew his father, but we had never seen each other in Stone Town,’ says Shah now. During some school holidays, the two would make the long trip back home together. ‘We were together on that ship twice. It would stop in the Seychelles, Mombassa, Zanzibar and then on to South Africa.’ To pass the time, the boys played endless games of table tennis, at which Freddie became an expert. ‘On one trip the captain realised that there were a few of us from the same school travelling together,’ says Shah. It was here that the future Freddie Mercury experienced his first upgrade. ‘Most of us were travelling third class, but the captain made an exception and let us join the second-and first-class customers, which meant we had special privileges and much better games.’
    During other school holidays, when he couldn’t take the ship, Freddie would remain at St Peter’s or stay at his maternalgrandmother and aunt’s house in Bombay or with friends from school. It was his Aunt Sheroo who noticed he was becoming a good artist, and she bought him a set of oil paints. She also spotted his growing interest in music and suggested to his parents that they sign him up for piano lessons at the school. With the encouragement of his teachers, Freddie studied with an elderly Irish pianist, who, according to one former pupil, ‘absolutely doted on him’.
    During his first few terms, Freddie became close friends with four other pupils in Ashlin House: Bruce Murray, Farang Irani, Derrick Branche and Victory Rana. ‘We used to listen to the pop charts on the radio,’ recalls Bruce Murray now. ‘It was a programme sponsored by a toothpaste company. We’d hear these songs, and then Freddie would go to the piano and play them note-perfect, only after hearing them once. His passion was for Little Richard, Fats Domino, Cliff Richard …’ Subash Shah adds, ‘His knowledge of Hindi was limited but he could also listen to Indian songs and somehow capture the same rhythm on the piano. When he wanted to, he could be incredibly focused.’ Freddie joined most of his friends in the school choir, which gave them a rare opportunity to mix with pupils from the affiliated girls’ school. ‘Hindu,