Free Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury by Lesley-Ann Jones

disappointed about that. Another of our good school chums did go once to a Queen concert, and tried to go backstage to see Bucky. But when he managed to put himself face-to-face with him, Freddie just looked right through this poor fellow and said to him, “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I just don’t know who you are.”
    “That was when we all knew for sure that he wanted nothing more to do with us. The past was something he was determined to leave behind.”

4
LONDON
    I’m a city person. I’m not into all this country air and cow dung.
    Freddie Mercury
     
    Many people are drawn to London because of the relative anonymity. You can lose yourself in a crowd, meet large numbers of like-minded people. There’s a critical mass. London was swinging in those days. Zanzibar would have been constraining to a personality like Freddie’s, to someone with a restless spirit.
    Cosmo Hallstrom, consultant psychiatrist
     
    T he fifties saw a marked rise in nationalist advances against British rule. Britannia’s loss of India and Pakistan in 1947, the independence of Burma and Ceylon in 1948, and China’s social revolution of 1949 all impacted strongly on nationalist struggles in North, Northeast, and East Africa. Zanzibar was not immune. Trade unions there had begun to reinvent themselves as political parties in order to effect change. The Zanzibar National Party, founded in 1956 by the minority Arabs and Shirazi, was succeeded by the Afro-Shirazi Party, its leadership mainly of African mainland origin. Labor militancy was on the increase, and strikes were disabling many industries. Pro-Arab election results, and frustratingly poor clove and coconut harvests, incitedthe masses to riot. Although independence was achieved in December 1963, imbalances in electoral representation infuriated the black African majority, and their anger flared in a radical left-wing coup. The violent Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 saw the new Sultan Jamshid bin Abdulla deposed, and Sheikh Abeid Amani Karume, president of the Afro-Shirazi Party, installed as first president of Zanzibar. Thousands were slaughtered in bloody street battles. The Bulsaras and many like them ran for their lives. Leaving Zanzibar with a few suitcases between them, Freddie’s family headed for England, where relatives had offered them refuge. They never looked back.
    “That was that, as far as our family relationship was concerned,” remembers Freddie’s cousin Perviz, sadly.
    “When I heard, much later on, that Freddie had become a famous musician, I was very happy that we had such a genius in the family. How proud we were of him. But he did not communicate with any of us. He never even sent us a cassette.”
    Following the revolution, Zanzibar agreed to a union with Tanganyika in April 1964 in which it would remain semi-autonomous under the new name Tanzania. Zanzibaris today are laid-back, peaceful, and tolerant people—with the exception of their almost universal abhorrence of homosexuality.
    *   *   *
    The Bulsaras were not prepared for the culture shock when they arrived in Feltham in the London borough of Hounslow, a nondescript town about thirteen miles southwest of the capital and a couple of miles from Heathrow Airport.
    “My dad had a British passport,” explained Kashmira, “so it seemed the obvious choice to come to England.”
    “Freddie was so excited,” remembered his mother, Jer. “ ‘England’s the place we ought to go to, Mum,’ ” he said. “But it was very hard.”
    The dull, gray orderliness of flight-path suburbia, not to mention the cold climate, were in stark contrast to what they had known in Zanzibar and Bombay. In London, they found themselves without status, salary,servants, or mansion. Despite his government connections and track record, no official accountancy job awaited Freddie’s father. Bomi eventually found employment as a cashier with the Forte catering group, while his mother took a job as an assistant at a local branch of