Freddie still held on to his dreams, still sought the elusive fortune and fame that would bring him the happiness he so desperately needed to return.

He saw around him the explosion of new music and the fortunes that could be made over night. The rest of England was still in many ways in post-war poverty and austerity. Rationing had only finished a few years earlier and the young middle-aged men were a missing generation, victims of war. Television was young and neither it, nor the stage, ever really paid well in England. Although you could achieve some fame, it was a fame of poverty totally unlike America. Making money in conventional ways was gone: colonial preferred trade was a thing of the past, and England, as a world power, was fading. Yet in music, in modern music, fame and money could come and it was to this that Freddie set his sights.

Always single-minded, Freddie set his goal and then set about making it happen. Although highly intelligent, he was not suited to the formalised, rigid education system of the time. He did well in class, but was too open, too

needful of something more to ever move into an area where he would be trapped for his future education. Utilising his creative flair, he entered Art College: an ideal place to meet like-minded individuals. Always an intelligent person, he needed an outlet for his creative side and used painting and art to release some of this urge, but never seeing it any more then a stepping stone for his future path. He chose Ealing as much for its graduands as for what it offered him. London was also the centre of the new music and the new culture, a culture that Freddie adopted with aplomb, quickly making it his own and then extending it with all the power and passion that he had within him. If the fashion was for floral, Freddie would make it floral and flowing; if floral and flowing, he would make it floral and flowing, with nail varnish, or makeup, or other forms of glitz and glamour.

It was the glamour that the early Freddie took onto himself. Glamour itself was a word from folklore, describing the methods used by the fairy folk to disguise their true natures and appear beautiful and rich and thereby trick