Patrick Stewart grew up listening for the moment a family argument would turn violent.
Then he and his brother would step between their father and their mother.
His father returned from the Second World War in 1945, when Stewart was five. He had been a regimental sergeant major in the Parachute Regiment.
Until his return, Stewart remembers his childhood as idyllic. At home, things gradually became more difficult.
Speaking on Loose Women, the actor known as Professor X recalled sitting upstairs with his brother, listening.
“We became experts in something that children should never, ever have to deal with.”
They learned to judge when an argument was becoming dangerous. That was their signal to intervene.
“All we could do really was we would just try and put our bodies between my father and my mother.”
Decades later, Stewart discovered that wartime reports had described his father as suffering from “severe shell shock.”
He says his father was never treated for it, the condition he now understood as post-traumatic stress disorder.
“He was never given any help.”
The discovery helped Stewart understand his father. But it did not erase what his mother had endured.
“That does not justify what he did. Not remotely.”