Teenage years: the Fifties
1 Jan 1970 03:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
michael_gothardWe do not yet know when Michael's parents split up, but we do know that the marriage had been dissolved by 1961, when his mother re-married.
Divorce was not very common in those days. There may have been conflict in Michael's upbringing - a possible factor in his later depression.
Also, per the electoral roll, a man named Jack Walker was living at 1 Gloucester Court with Irene, Michael's mother, from 1952 to 1958. Jack was presumably her new partner - and an unofficial step-father for Michael - rather than a lodger, as according to Ritva's account there was a man around whom she presumed was Michael's father.
Perhaps conflict with Jack Walker was one of the reasons Michael left home so young.
Michael never appears on the electoral roll for 1 Gloucester Court, so he must have left home before he was old enough to vote, at 18. His mother still lived there alone until her re-marriage in 1961.
Aileen McClintock communicated with Marcella Crisan, a librarian fan of Michael's, who had met and interviewed him on a number of occasions in order to write a thesis on his life. However, Marcella and destroyed all her notes, on being diagnosed with terminal cancer. She remembered that Michael said he was brought up by his mother, as a single parent. If Jack Walker was in a relationship with Michael's mother through Michael's teenage years, perhaps that tells us all we need to know about how Michael viewed Mr Walker.
Marcella also recalled that Michael had suffered a nervous breakdown while a teenager. However, it seems unlikely that a mentally fragile teenager could have survived travelling around Europe, alone, as Michael did after leaving school. She may have got her times mixed up.
From TV Times: 8 February 1973
For most of his teens he was in fact an outsider. He was a "beatnik", one of those lost-looking souls who wandered around in the early Sixties - before the Beatles and Rolling Stones brought long hair to the middle-classes. [His teenage years would actually have been the Fifties]
"I left school when I was 17 or 18 with little idea of what I wanted to do. I think this would be true of most people if left to their own devices. Most of us are channeled into various functions, for better or for worse.
"This is how things are constructed, but you always get the odd one who slips through, who doesn't fit too well. I mean, people either find something they like doing or they end up gangsters or just plain bums. It comes down to that, doesn't it?"
Divorce was not very common in those days. There may have been conflict in Michael's upbringing - a possible factor in his later depression.
Also, per the electoral roll, a man named Jack Walker was living at 1 Gloucester Court with Irene, Michael's mother, from 1952 to 1958. Jack was presumably her new partner - and an unofficial step-father for Michael - rather than a lodger, as according to Ritva's account there was a man around whom she presumed was Michael's father.
Perhaps conflict with Jack Walker was one of the reasons Michael left home so young.
Michael never appears on the electoral roll for 1 Gloucester Court, so he must have left home before he was old enough to vote, at 18. His mother still lived there alone until her re-marriage in 1961.
Aileen McClintock communicated with Marcella Crisan, a librarian fan of Michael's, who had met and interviewed him on a number of occasions in order to write a thesis on his life. However, Marcella and destroyed all her notes, on being diagnosed with terminal cancer. She remembered that Michael said he was brought up by his mother, as a single parent. If Jack Walker was in a relationship with Michael's mother through Michael's teenage years, perhaps that tells us all we need to know about how Michael viewed Mr Walker.
Marcella also recalled that Michael had suffered a nervous breakdown while a teenager. However, it seems unlikely that a mentally fragile teenager could have survived travelling around Europe, alone, as Michael did after leaving school. She may have got her times mixed up.
From TV Times: 8 February 1973
For most of his teens he was in fact an outsider. He was a "beatnik", one of those lost-looking souls who wandered around in the early Sixties - before the Beatles and Rolling Stones brought long hair to the middle-classes. [His teenage years would actually have been the Fifties]
"I left school when I was 17 or 18 with little idea of what I wanted to do. I think this would be true of most people if left to their own devices. Most of us are channeled into various functions, for better or for worse.
"This is how things are constructed, but you always get the odd one who slips through, who doesn't fit too well. I mean, people either find something they like doing or they end up gangsters or just plain bums. It comes down to that, doesn't it?"