Freddie, with his comfortable family life, and without the necessity of rationing, would never have gained a sense of rationing as a child. He had position and money: both equaling status and luxury. This, again, was something he enjoyed and craved throughout his life.

When he went to St Peter's boarding school in Panchgani, India he merged quite well into the pseudo-English Indian school. Again, this was a result as much of his cultural diversity as his personality. Yet it also had the effect of separating him from his family and from his childhood: neither of which ever returned. He was always a dutiful son to his mother (and we must assume to his father) yet the break of schooling meant that he was broken from the influences of childhood. As do so many students who board, he became independent and began to carve his own way in life, perhaps before he was truly ready.

One area that he did begin to explore was in public performance and, in that, saw a way that he could once

again receive recognition and the attention that part of him craved. This path would give him fortune, fame and would enable him once more to enjoy the lifestyle of his lost childhood.

That his ancestry was from the Parsis in India is not in doubt. His first name was Parsi (or Parsee on his birth certificate), and his second name, Bulsara, comes from Bulsar, a town north of Bombay: it is certainly not an Arabic or Persian word. The Indian school enhanced his 'Britishness' but again, after the close of the British Raj in 1950, the end of the direct British influence in India had occurred. The school of St Peter's was an anachronism during the time of Freddie's tenure and again, there would be the sense of impermanency, of not really belonging there that would permeate Freddie's soul during his later life.

End of Part One

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