‘I had a criminal record aged just eight’, says Trainspotting author Welsh
Welsh has revealed his first encounter with the police came at the age of just eight.
The best-selling author, who has written extensively on the social exclusion faced by the poorest Scots in society, said the experience came when he and a group of friends were charged for playing football on a grass verge on the then new Muirhouse estate
He said it was a formative early experience for him.
Welsh, whose latest novel will be published next month, said he did not think the arrest would have taken place in one of “the leafier bourgeois suburbs of Edinburgh”.
“The James Bond matinees at the State Cinema in Leith and the Lion Adventure series of books from Muirhouse library might have shaped my world view, but I’m formed by Edinburgh, specifically its northern housing schemes, a geographically short, but culturally long distance from the historic city centre experienced by tourists and visitors,” he wrote in a short essay for the Guardian.
“Growing up where I did, you encounter the city as largely a place of exclusion and containment.”
Welsh continued: “My first exposure to the law came when I was eight years old. Some pals and I were kicking a ball around on the grass verge in front of the maisonette block of flats in Muirhouse we had only just moved into.
“We all knew each other as we came from the West Pilton prefabs. There were no ‘NO BALL GAMES’ signs in evidence, but we were apprehended by the police and formally charged under an obscure council bylaw – a bunch of boys ranging from six to ten years old.
“Humanely, they let the sixirvine year-old go, as he was distressed and crying. The rest of us had a day out in the city, up at the court on the High Street, accompanied by our outraged, disbelieving parents.
“I recall my dad doing his nut at the judge. It was educative and exciting.”
The Trainspotting author revealed last year he would kill off one of his most famous characters in his next book, Dead Men’s Trousers. The novel is out on 29 March.