Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser
New book pulls no punches
Debut novel in the Trainspotting mould
The first moment that changed Airdrie man’s Graeme Armstrong’s life was when, aged 16, he had to literally fight to save a drug addict from dying of an overdose while his pals refused to call 999.
The second was a few months later when he was handed a copy of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.
Having spent his youth fighting in gangs, drinking Buckfast and taking drugs, it was only when he was faced with the horrific endgame of his lifestyle, personified in the chilling blue coloured face of a drugs victim, that he wanted to escape.
And when he read the modern classic novel, he realised how he was going to do it.
Now 28, and hundreds of thousands of words later, Graeme’s dream is coming true later this week when his first novel hits the shelves as one of the most eagerly anticipated and talked about new British titles of the year.
The Young Team, while, not his own story, is all about the world he grew up in, of drinking tonic wine and then rattling the empty bottles off the bodies of rival gangs, and taking drugs every single day.
Launched by publishing giants Picador on Friday after eight years of heartfelt writing and editing, Graeme isn’t just delighted his dreams are coming true, but that he has the life and the liberty to enjoy them.
Raised by a hard-working single mum after his dad died when he was very young, Graeme rejected his solid upbringing in favour of gang culture, drink and drugs.
He joined the Glenmavis Young Team aged 12.
Graeme, who has spent time living in Stirling and London, said of his previous home: “This is quite a violent place, there’s lots of it around you.
“I started fairly young, around 13 or 14, and was fighting all the time. I tried to count up all the instances of violence, from a punch to a full fight and I got to 16. There’s loads of dodgy characters round here.
“When I was 16, three of our extended circle died of a heroin overdose in a year and I got seriously assaulted and bottled. I wasn’t scarred but I had friends who were left really badly scarred, so I was counting my blessings that I’d seen all these drug deaths and my face wasn’t cut to ribbons.”
His own drug taking extended to cannabis and later ecstasy and valium. But the other man’s heroin overdose was the worst thing he’d ever seen.
“That’s when I realised, ‘f***, I’m in a really dodgy world here.’ I had been experiencing violence and been taking drugs but I’d never seen someone at the brink of death.
“This guy had taken heroin without us knowing, and I went in and he was blue. He was older than me but younger than I am now.
“I checked his pulse and he was alive so I ran out to the hall and the phone was dead, his best friend had pulled the cord out of the wall and said ‘no ambulances here, wee man’.
“I threatened the guy and said, ‘if you don’t f***ing put the phone cable back in, I’m gonnae punch f*** out of you’.
“His other friend then assaulted him when he found out he did that, so there’s two guys in their 20s fighting, their friend in there lying dying and I’m 16 and running about in the middle of all this trying to get the paramedics in. I saved the guy.
“Within a year, the same thing happened to the guy that pulled the phone cord, and the guy I saved ran away and left him to die.
“Then he died, and one of our friends who grew up in my street, died the same way.”
After being encouraged to stay in school because there were no jobs, Graeme, who had always been described as bright but troublemaking and been expelled from high school stuck in and was handed a book that would change his life.
“One of the first tasks in English was a book report and this girl next to me said, ‘why don’t you do Trainspotting, you’d be into that.’ I said, ‘f***, I didn’t even know that was a book’.
“It saved my life. That was the lightbulb moment, it spoke to me and I started telling people I was going to go to university and study English, which was met with healthy scepticism because I’d been expelled from high school and they said ‘aye, alright’.“
The Young Team is written in the Lanarkshire slang and vernacular (although he admits the first draft, written in 2012, was even more coded and almost unintelligible to the untrained eye) and takes the reader right inside the mind of the type of angry and troubled young men he grew up among, and as.
Graeme hopes the public connect with book – but the toughest audience has already been satisfied; his “maw”.
He said: “I drove my mum to distraction. She was brilliant, she worked hard and there was never any drink or drugs in our house.
“Losing your dad young is a factor, but my mum gave me a great childhood and I threw it away.
“So she was worried about reading the book. She was pleasantly surprised when she realised it was a fictional book. It’d be different if she was to read my memoirs. No mum wants to know what her kids get up to on Friday nights.”
The Young Team is out Friday, with a book launch at Waterstone’s Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, and Graeme is speaking at Airdrie Library on April 23.
It [Trainspotting book] saved my life. That was the lightbulb moment