michael

Patrick Stewart spent most of his life hating his father. At 72 he read a medical note from 1940 and had to start the man over from the beginning. He grew up in a two-up two-down in Mirfield, Yorkshire. His father was a regimental sergeant major. The violence at home was aimed at his mother, and police came to the house more than once. Stewart was a boy and could do nothing. He has been a patron of Refuge, the domestic violence charity, for years. "I do what I do in my mother's name, because I couldn't help her then," he says. Then he went looking for his father's war record. At the Imperial War Museum he read the notes. In 1940, after France with the British Expeditionary Force, his father was diagnosed with what was then called severe shell shock. Today it is called PTSD. He was never treated for it. It never left him. A doctor told Stewart that every condition of his childhood he had just described was a textbook symptom of an untreated veteran. In the video below, a woman at a convention asks him what he is most proud of outside acting. He answers with this. He now works for Refuge in his mother's name and for Combat Stress in his father's, and says he does both in equal measure. For 70 years his father was the man who did it. He is now also a man it was done to. Is that an explanation, or an excuse that arrived 70 years too late?