Sunday, July the 16th, 2006

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Where Are They Now? No. 12 : Tad Wensleydale

A haggard, wizened old man, impossibly ancient, creaks across the stage, barely able to support himself on his battered crutches, which give off a powerful stench of linseed oil and dubbin. One of his eyes is dull, even dead. The other gleams with ferocity. The lights dim, and he crumples to the floor. Curtain.

This is, of course, the end of I Was Puny Vercingetorix, a play forever associated with the great child Method actor Tad Wensleydale. Some still find it hard to credit that a tiny tot of six could be so convincing as the one hundred and forty year old antihero.

But whatever happened to Tad? Did he, like so many child actors, succumb to booze and pills before taking up an important post in the diplomatic service or the United Nations? Did he attempt to revitalise his acting career later in life by accepting cameo roles in witless films? Did he get a ghost to write a confessional autobiography freighted with implausible scenes of childhood misery?

Tad did none of these things. It is well known that he retired from stage and screen at the age of nine, after his barnstorming appearance as the demimondaine flapper in The Barn In The Storm, an award-winning drama about an old barn reduced to matchwood after being engulfed by a violent storm. As he took his umpteenth curtain call, the diminutive thespian announced that he would never appear in public again, and swept melodramatically off the stage. And indeed, it was as if he had vanished forevermore. As days turned to weeks turned to years with not a jot of news of the mighty stage-mite, so inevitably did speculative stories begin to circulate.

It was said that Tad had become a full-time Buzz Aldrin impersonator, in a scheme cooked up by the astronaut himself, a rumour regularly scotched by Aldrin, who socked more than one inquiring busybody on the jaw. Another tale had Tad grown mad and bad, filleting his foes with a shiv in a dive, a master of disguise with murderous eyes and mustard breath. Some said he had fallen in with goblins, and lived among them as their King, in a sort of goblin-pod, now underground, now high in the sky, but this was clearly codswallop.

The truth was more prosaic. Tad changed his name to Gussie Ditch, opened a pie shop in Pang Hill, and lived out the rest of his days baking and selling Pang Hill pies to the pie-eating people of Pang Hill. It was an unremarkable and irreproachable life, banal even, a life filled with pies and pie-fillings. Tad—or Gussie—rarely alluded to the meteor that was those first nine years, an infant actorly glory comparable only to the career of William Betty, “the Young Roscius”, whose grave in Highgate Cemetery is now sadly overgrown.

Tad Wensleydale's own tomb, on which a solitary chaffinch is always perched, is, as he wished, a “baroque excrescence in questionable taste”, in the words of his own last will and testament, a remarkable document baked in pastry letters, filled with raspberry jam and lemon curd, and put into a pie.