I walked past a woman on The Quay on Thursday evening last. Her left eye socket was a hue of black and blue. I did my best not to glance in her direction for too long. But it left a mark on me, albeit nothing like the one that marred this woman’s face.
And then, when browsing through YouTube 24 hours later, I stumbled upon a BBC ‘HARDtalk’ interview with ‘Star Trek’ and Shakespearean actor Sir Patrick Stewart, which again brought that woman’s bruised eye socket to mind.
“I knew exactly when the shouting was done and a hand was about to be raised, I also knew exactly when to insert a small body between a fist and her face, a skill no child should ever have to learn.”
Stewart, a patron of the domestic abuse charity Refuge, was referring to his upbringing when his father, a former RAF regimental Sergeant Major of the Paratroop Regiment and heavy drinker, all too often raised a fist to strike his mother.
It remains, as Stewart so movingly put it, “a massive unspoken of problem around the world…this silent crime because people are ashamed to speak about it”.
And how right Patrick Stewart is.
