by Robbie Dinwoodie

THERE is a bleakness to the first and final reels of Gareth Wardell’s personal story, but it’s been a helluva life in between. “When you have a bleak childhood and you have been witness to a lot of violence, the theatre is a safe home. Running away to the circus is not a cliché,” he said.

That bleak childhood propelled him into a life in the movie industry and last year he revealed the latest plot-twist in his popular Grouse Beater blog, slipping into a paean to the Scottish NHS the dire news that he had “an incurable cancer cell with the look and the dimensions of a pearl of tapioca. Awe, crap! Why me? Why bloody me? Well, why not? Cancer doesn’t discriminate. Take solace knowing it couldn’t happen to a nicer person.”

He added: “An inept doctor can be lethal. Mine, one of the best in Edinburgh, like me, an Italo-Scot, spotted my skin cancer on my upper arm at the primary stage. It lies under the skin, not the melanoma type on top, a rare type contracted by people who live in very hot countries, or as I did, work seven years in Los Angeles wearing sleeveless tops, and for it, forever getting hit by gay guys.”

In an enjoyable evening conversation over Zoom, there are three things he does not want to discuss. Two of them are his illness and his age, not for reasons of vanity but because as he puts it: “I refuse to be defined by these things.” The third thing, we will return to later once some context has been established.

He is, however, frank about his heart-wrenching origin story. It is almost unimaginably cruel. In Fountainbridge, the brewery district in Edinburgh, a former Sicilian prisoner of war meets an Irish woman and they have a son. When the child is still a toddler Britain deports the father back to Italy, never to be seen again. The mother, her health ground down by abject poverty, marries a gardener whose acceptance as stepfather by the young boy is characterised by him constantly running away from their home on the north Edinburgh foreshore. When he is not in flight from his “unpleasant” stepfather he is forced to light the fire every morning before walking miles to primary school, where he is invariably late.

Still, the school sees a bright boy in him and at age ten he is awarded a dux’s prize of a book token. Does he want the Beano album or maybe the Eagle compendium?