Читать книгу Somebody to Love - Matt Richards - Страница 11
3 Seek your happiness in the happiness of all. Zoroaster
ОглавлениеOn 14th December 1908, the same year that the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which would go on to become HIV, passed from chimp to hunter in the Congo, a woman gave birth to a 6lb 4oz baby boy in a small Indian city to the north of Bombay. The child was named Bomi by his parents and was given the surname of Bulsara after the name of the city of his birth, Bulsar.
Bomi was born into a family of Parsees, a group of religious followers of the Iranian prophet Zoroaster. Meaning ‘Persians’, the Parsees emigrated to India from Iran to avoid brutal religious persecution by the Muslims in the eighth century and settled predominantly in Bombay and towns and villages to the north of the city.
Developing a flair for commerce, the Parsees were receptive of European influence in India and during the 19th century had become a wealthy community, thanks to Bombay’s railway and shipbuilding industries. The Bulsars, however, were not from prosperous Bombay, but lived 120 miles to the north in the state of Gujarat. Here, for many locals, the only realistic source of income was harvesting mangos from the many orchards that dotted the landscape. Consequently, the Parsee community in Gujarat were far from wealthy and many young men from the region were forced to seek work elsewhere, not only in India, but further afield too.
Bomi, one of eight brothers, was no exception. Out of necessity and financial hardship, one by one he and his brothers left India and sailed almost 3,000 miles across the Indian Ocean to the exotically named Zanzibar seeking work.
Upon arrival, Bomi was fortunate and found work almost immediately with the British Government as a high court cashier in Stone Town, settling into life on the island quickly and comfortably, dedicating himself to his work and diligently and slowly building himself a privileged lifestyle. However, he desired a family to share his high standard of living, having arrived in Zanzibar unmarried and alone. Part of Bomi’s job meant that he frequently had to travel throughout Zanzibar as well as returning often to India. During one of those return trips to his homeland he met Jer, a bespectacled and dainty young girl, 14 years his junior. It was love at first sight and they married shortly after in Bombay, whereupon Jer left her own family behind to follow her new husband westwards across the Indian Ocean back to Zanzibar, where they hoped to raise a family of their own.
The newlyweds lived in a two-storey apartment that was accessed by a flight of stairs from the busy Shangani Street in Stone Town on the western side of the island. Compared to other Zanzibaris, the Bulsaras enjoyed a high standard of living, with Bomi’s salary enabling them to employ a domestic servant and even affording a small family car. Almost 60 years later, Jer Bulsara recalled it as being ‘a comfortable life’.1
It was on Thursday, 5th September 1946, the Parsee New Year’s Day, when the Bulsaras’ first child was born at the Government Hospital in Stone Town. The boy, weighing almost seven pounds at birth, was given the name Farrokh Bulsara. One of Farrokh’s cousins, Perviz Darukhanawalla, recalled her memories of him years later: ‘When he was very young, a small child, very young, that is about three to four years old, when his mother used to go to work, she used to leave him with my mother because my mother was a housewife and because both his parents were working.’2 Speaking to author Lesley-Ann Jones, Perviz remembered: ‘He was so small, like a little pet. Even when he was a very young baby, he used to come to my home with his parents. They used to leave him with my mother and go out. When he was a bit older he would play about in our house. He was such a naughty little one. I was much older than him, and I liked taking care of him. He was such a small boy, a very nice child.’3
From the age of five, Farrokh attended the Zanzibar Missionary School, an establishment run by British nuns in Stone Town. Already, according to his mother, Jer, the young boy was showing an interest in music and performing: ‘He used to love playing records all the time, and then sing – any sort of music, folk, classical, or Indian music.’4 When his parents attended various functions or parties, it was always with little Farrokh in tow. It became an accepted routine that, at these parties, he would be asked to sing. Always eager to oblige, perhaps show off even, the small boy would burst into song eagerly and would feel so proud at being able to make everybody feel happy through his singing, even at that young age.
In 1952, Farrokh’s sister, Kashmira, was born. ‘He was six when I was born, so I only had a year of him, yet I was always aware of my proud older brother protecting me,’ she remembers.5 Why Kashmira only recalls a year of Farrokh is explained by the fact that, in February 1955, he was sent away to boarding school in India. On Valentine’s Day of that year, shortly after undergoing the Naojote ceremony or Parsee cleansing ritual, which indoctrinated him into the Zoroastrian faith, Farrokh was enrolled in St Peter’s School, an English-style boarding school in Panchgani, an educational facility that was founded in 1902 and established during the dying decades of the British Rule. The school was almost 3,000 miles from Zanzibar, and for the next few years, until 1963, Farrokh would only see his parents once a year, for a month-long period each summer when he returned home.
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 like a second family. The teachers are very strict and discipline is most important here at St. Peter’s. I’m very happy to tell you that I was awarded the big trophy, Best All Rounder Junior. I received a big trophy and they even took a photograph, which will appear in the annual school magazine. I’m very proud and I hope you are too. Send my love to Kash. I love my little sister as I love you all. Farrokh.17
Despite being good at sports, Freddie was increasingly attracted to subjects such as art and literature and, of course, music. He had already been introduced to music – predominantly opera – by his parents in Zanzibar but he had also developed a taste for Western pop, especially the piano-based rock’n’roll sounds of artists such as Little Richard and Fats Domino. While at St Peter’s, during which time he joined the school choir and took part in a number of theatrical productions, Freddie also encountered the recordings of Lata Mangeshkar, one of India’s best-known and most respected playback singers. Playback singers recorded songs for movie soundtracks for the actors and actress to lip-sync to and Freddie became fascinated with Mangeshkar, attending one of her concerts in Bombay in November 1959. Two years later, she visited St Peter’s School and performed at the summer fête in front of Freddie and the other pupils.
In terms of Freddie’s own singing, it was his maternal aunt, Sheroo Khory, who first became properly aware of his natural musical gift. ‘Once, when I think he was nine years old,’ she remembered, ‘Freddie used to come running up for breakfast and the radio was on and then, when the music was finished, he went to the [piano] stool and played the tune. I [thought I] must get him some music lessons. He’s got an ear for music.’18 She persuaded his parents to pay for private musical tuition and he subsequently managed to pass his Grade 5 exams in practical and theory, being presented with his Certificate on 7th November 1958 at St Peter’s School annual speech day and prize giving. ‘I took piano lessons at school,’ Freddie would later recall, ‘And really enjoyed it. That was my mother’s doing. She made sure I stuck at it.’19
In 1958, Freddie formed his first band. By then he had developed a close friendship with four other pupils at St Peter’s: Bruce Murray, Farang Irani, Derrick Branche and Victory Rana. All fans of Elvis Presley, the five of them decided to form a band and used the art room at St Peter’s as a rehearsal studio. Under the name of The Hectics they began thumping out their own rudimentary version of rock’n’roll. For someone who was later to become one of music’s most expressive and flamboyant performers, Freddie’s role in the fledging band was very much in the background, playing his style of boogie-woogie piano and providing backing vocals while Bruce Murray took on the role of lead singer.
‘All we really wanted to do was to impress the girls in the neighbouring girls’ school,’ Murray recalled. ‘We sang hits like “Tutti Frutti”, “Yakkety Yak” and “Whole Lotta Lovin”. Freddie was an amazing musician. He could play just about anything. And he had the knack of listening to a song on the radio once and being able to play it. The rest of us just made a godawful racket, with cheap guitars, a drum and an old tea chest that we’d converted into a bass with one string. But the band served its intended purpose: the girls really loved us.’20
The Hectics, dressed in their rock’n’roll uniform of white shirt, black tie, pleated trousers and perfectly greased hair, soon became star attractions at any school function and also became popular with Panchgani’s inhabitants, where they were known as ‘The Heretics’ because they were so different and so extreme for the time. But when Freddie left Panchgani and St Peter’s School on 25th February 1963, having failed his Class 10 examinations, The Hectics were no more and instead he returned to Zanzibar and an uncertain future.