Not understanding what was going on, Austin asked Mercury on which hand should she place it. Eventually, I found a lovely jade ring inside the last small box,” Austin told the Daily Mail in 2013. Inside was another box, then another and so it went on. “When I was 23 he gave me a big box on Christmas Day. The couple would eventually move to a bigger flat in London’s Holland Road and in 1973, the year Queen’s eponymous debut album was released, Mercury asked her to marry him. READ MORE: The Complicated Nature of Freddie Mercury's Sexuality Mercury's marriage proposal was unexpected I liked him – and it went on from there.” “He was very confident, and I have never been confident. “He was like no one I had ever met before,” Austin told OK! Magazine in 2000. Austin was initially hesitant about the sometimes larger-than-life Mercury, but they were soon a couple living in a cramped flat together as he worked on his music career. It was while working at the fashionable London clothing store Biba when Austin first came into contact with Mercury, who had just completed art college and worked in a clothing stall in nearby Kensington. Her father worked as a wallpaper trimmer and her mother a domestic for a small company. Austin was born in 1951 into an impoverished family in South London’s Battersea neighborhood. Mercury, real name Farrokh Bulsara, was born in Zanzibar, Tanzania in 1946 and had moved to England with his parents in the 1960s. Mercury and Austin met in 1969, a year before he would form what would become Queen with bandmates Brian May, Roger Taylor and eventually John Deacon. Photo: Dave Hogan/Getty Images Mercury and Austin quickly fell in love Mary Austin and Freddie Mercury at Fashion Aid at the Royal Albert Hall in London in November 1985

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