Patrick Stewart - 'I knew the exact moment to rush in and stop him hitting her [View all]

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/ios-christmas-appeal-patrick-stewart--i-knew-the-exact-moment-to-rush-in-and-stop-him-hitting-her-8373862.html


The actor tells Emily Dugan how becoming attuned to his father's violence helped him protect his mother





As a child, Sir Patrick Stewart learned to love the songs of Irish tenors. If his father, Alf, came home singing "The Mountains of Mourne" or his favourite, "I'll take you home again, Kathleen", then his mother, Gladys, was safe. The actor, now 72, and his older brother, Trevor, lived in terror of military tunes. "We would lie awake in what was really no more than a partitioned-off corner of my parents' bedroom, waiting for him to come back. Nobody went to sleep. We would listen as he came into the yard. If he was singing army songs, that was bad news. Then he would find fault with something and then the conflict would escalate.

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Often Stewart was forced to step in to defend his mother from his father's explosive rage. "I became an expert at judging the heat of an argument," he says. "As the temperature rose I would get out of bed and on to the landing, and, if it rose further, I would go down the stairs, sitting on the stone steps so as to be as close as possible to the door if something bad happened. If the escalation continued I could try to intervene.

"Now, it is really sad when a child becomes an expert on those kind of issues. But I was and I knew exactly the moment when I would throw the door open and rush in and say 'Stop!' or literally put my body between them."

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