I’ll disagree here; I don’t think it would have been uncommon, in the slightest, for a young adult woman of 20 in 1967 to have still been living with her parents until such time as she married.
Regardless, the sense I have from the lyrics is that her parents were not ready to let go, and were not ready for her to make adult choices. Whether she was a minor or not doesn’t change that.
Upon further consideration, I think she must be at least a little bit underage. Clearly, she views herself as making a bold, courageous decision to embark on life as an independent, liberated woman. It would be out of character for such a woman to ghost her own parents just to avoid a difficult conversation, unless they had the authority to do more than just express their disapproval.
But I can’t read the song as being entirely a cautionary tale about a girl who is obviously making a horrible mistake. I can’t picture her as being so young that there’s no chance at all this will work out the way she hopes they will.
“Daddy, our baby’s gone.”
While it’s not impossible that someone would refer to their adult child that way, it seems more likely to me that she is fairly young. Melanie Coe, who inspired the song, was 17 when she ran away.
Note that in the song, after they notice she’s gone it’s still all about them. There’s an undertone of “How could she, the ungrateful bitch, after all we did for her,”
She didn’t; she left them a note that she hoped would say more.
Yeah, but she didn’t tell them where they could reach her. To me that says either that she seriously hated them, which I don’t think is supported by the lyrics, or that she had a legitimate reason for not wanting them to know where she was going.
She isn’t giving her location because she doesn’t want to be caught and brought back. Pretty normal for runaways, innit
Right, but that just proves my point, that she must have been underage to have been considered a “runaway”. But yeah, “ghost” wasn’t the appropriate verb there.
FWIW, the concept of “ghosting” in the modern sense didn’t exist at the time.
The word didn’t. The concept definitely did:
FWIW, the age of majority in the UK was 21 in 1967.
True but there is no way that song is about a 19 year old IMO
Does that mean that a 20 year old could actually be tracked down by the police if she tried moving out of her parents’ house without their consent?
Did the concept of “runaways” being a police matter exist in the UK at the time? In the article posted above about the case that may have inspired the song, there no indication of he police were involved at all, despite the fact a 17 year old ran away to be with a older man (and the case was covered by the tabloids)
True, although the legal age of consent was 17. And many girls married young: "In 1965, 40% of [UK] brides were under 21."
When / where very few people of either gender go to college, a lot of everyone else’s marriages happen on the heels of graduation from their terminal schooling by whatever name.
Add the tendency for young men to date women a year or two younger, and vice versa, and real quickly the male tradesman just finishing his apprenticeship at 20ish is ready to wed his GF just out of school at 18ish.
On the whole, the gulf between 16 and 21 was a lot narrower everywhere for young women back in the 1960s than now.
Time to mention this, I think.
YouTube channel Palette-Swap Ninja took the tunes from the entire Sgt. Pepper album, wrote lyrics fitting Star Wars, Episode IV, and put them up as Princess Leia’s Stolen Death Star Plans. Track 6 is “He’s Leaving Home” covering Luke’s discovering the deaths of his aunt and uncle and following Obi-wan.
A sidelight on the then understanding of “man from the motor trade” - in the 1990s the Fast Show had regular sketches featuring “Swiss Toni”, just such a (wouldbe) slimy character:
