Farrokh’s journey to his new school would begin with a voyage by sea from Zanzibar to Bombay with his parents. The ship would stop in Mombassa and the Seychelles before landing in India from where they travelled on to Bombay and then to Panchgani. For the next few years the school, with its motto of ‘Ut Prosim’ (‘That I May Serve’) was to be Farrokh’s home.
‘I cried when we left him, but he just mingled with the other boys,’ remembers Jer Bulsara, before continuing, ‘He was quite happy and saw it as an adventure as some of our friends’ children had gone there.’6
Whether the young Farrokh was really happy and whether he actually saw his new life at boarding school as an adventure is hard to judge. Any eight-year-old child being sent to school 3,000 miles away from their family could well find it hard to adjust to their new surroundings, not only at the beginning but possibly in later life as well. In his book, The Making of Them: The British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System (Lone Arrow Press, 2000), author Nick Duffell claims that sending a child away to boarding school as young as eight is tantamount to child abuse. He says that he has received thousands of letters from people who ‘feel they have been damaged by the experience of being sent away to board as a child. They cannot form bonds with others. Children need to be brought up in the company of people who love them. Teachers, however good they may be, cannot supply that love. Children of this age do not have the emotional intelligence or maturity to deal with this sense of loss. They develop what I call a “strategic survival” personality. On the outside, they are competent and confident. Inside they are private and insecure. For many, the insecurity affects the rest of their lives.’7
In later years, when Farrokh Bulsara had become Freddie Mercury, he rarely talked about his schooling and his time boarding in India during interviews. One of Freddie’s best friends in his adult life was the singer and West End star Peter Straker, but even to him, Freddie rarely talked about his childhood. ‘I have a feeling he didn’t go into his childhood too much because he went to school in India and he didn’t want to be considered Indian,’ suggests Straker. ‘Now it wouldn’t matter, but at that time it was different. He used to say he was Persian. He liked the idea of being Persian, which I think is much more exotic whether you’re a rock and roll star or a wrestler.’8
One of the few times Freddie spoke publicly about his schooling was in a 1974 interview. When asked about his school years, he was adamant: ‘Have I got upper-class parents who put a lot of money into me? Was I spoilt? – No. My parents were very strict. I wasn’t the only one, I’ve got a sister, I was at boarding school for nine years so I didn’t see my parents that often. That background helped me a lot because it taught me to fend for myself.’9
In another interview on the subject of boarding school, also in 1974, Freddie would reinforce these views: ‘My parents thought boarding school would do me good so they sent me to one when I was seven, dear. I look back on it and I think it was marvellous. You learn to look after yourself and it taught me to have responsibility.’10
Naturally, a boarding school environment can sometimes be associated with bullying and sexual abuse, and such actions can often shape the individual in their adult life. Jungian analyst, psychotherapist and supervisor Joy Schaverien PhD suggests that the psychological damage suffered particularly by boys at boarding school, primarily as a result of loss when family is replaced by many same-sex strangers, can have a dramatic effect on sexual development too. She writes: ‘Warmth may be sought with the available other, as a new form of sibling group emerges. Sexual experiments may offer solace but may also lead to abuse. This may lead to confusion in development of sexual identity and some boys become uncertain of their primary sexual orientation. Whilst initiating the child into the pleasures of homosexuality the institution proclaims its dangers. This may set a person on a path of covert homosexuality or of proclaimed heterosexuality and emphatic disavowal of homosexuality.’11
Whether Farrokh experienced such sexual development at St Peter’s is impossible to know, and we’ll never know whether it influenced his sexual orientation. Freddie barely touched upon bullying and sexuality at boarding school in his interviews in later life, but he did comment very briefly upon abuse in school in an interview with NME in March 1974 when asked about brutish behaviour and homosexual goings-on: ‘It’s stupid to say there is no such thing in boarding school. All the things they say about them are more or less true. All the bullying and everything else. I’ve had the odd schoolmaster chasing me. It didn’t shock me because somehow, boarding schools, you’re not confronted by it, you are just slowly aware of it. It’s going through life.’ When asked if he was the pretty boy whom everyone wanted to lay, Freddie replied: ‘Funnily enough, yes. Anybody goes through that. I was considered the arch poof.’ And in response to the question, ‘So how about being bent?’ Freddie said: ‘You’re a crafty cow. Let’s put it this way, there were times when I was young and green. It’s a thing schoolboys go through. I’ve had my share of schoolboy pranks. I’m not going to elaborate further.’12
A former teacher at St Peter’s during Farrokh’s period there, Peter Patroa, who taught maths, recalls the signs of Freddie Mercury’s homosexuality were already well known within the establishment. ‘Homosexuality exists in any school,’ Patroa said in 2008, ‘And it certainly did in St Peter’s at the time that Freddie was a student here. When he moved to Mumbai, he was apparently close to a boyfriend there. His father would have been informed and I’m sure was very disappointed. The family had a very rigid background going back generations, and Zoroastrians completely forbid homosexuality.’13
A Panchgani schoolmistress, Janet Smith, who resided at St Peter’s because her mother taught Freddie art, was also convinced that signs of his homosexuality were evident early on: ‘It was obvious that Freddie was different from the other boys. He would run around calling everyone “darling” and he often got over-excited. At that time we didn’t understand being gay. I once asked my mother why he was like that and she just told me that some people are different.’14
During his early terms at the school, Farrokh was terribly shy, being especially self-conscious about his prominent upper teeth caused by four extra teeth at the back of his mouth that gave him a pronounced overbite. His fellow pupils gave him the nickname ‘Bucky’. However, soon he was to adopt another name when the teachers began calling him ‘Freddie’ as an affectionate term. He seized on this name instantly and from that moment on Farrokh Bulsara became Freddie Bulsara.
Despite being so far away from his parents, Freddie soon got over his homesickness and immersed himself in school activities, particularly sport. ‘The school had a very strong emphasis on sport and I ended up doing every single one of them. I did boxing, cricket and table tennis, which I was really good at,’ Mercury would later recall.15 He was also reasonably good at sprinting and hockey, sports of which his mother approved far more than boxing. ‘Freddie was excellent at all sports, but when I heard about the boxing, I wrote to him from Zanzibar, where we were living, and told him to stop that. I didn’t like the idea, it was too violent,’ she remembered.16
Eleven-year-old Freddie won the school sports trophy for Junior All Rounder in 1958. Incredibly proud of his achievements, he wrote home to inform his parents:
Dear Mum & Dad, I hope you are all well and Kashmira’s cold is better. Don’t worry, I’m fine. Me and my friends at the Ashleigh House are