Out of the woods and into the trees

The author of this astonishing memoir is already a fairly celebrated figure - an ex-drug addict turned entrepreneur who transformed his life to win the Prince's Trust Young Achiever Of The Year Award a couple of years ago.

But the Mark Johnson who has set up his own tree- surgery business and been given awards by Prince Charles and Victoria Beckham is not the Mark Johnson described in this book.

The sober, successful Mark Johnson turns up only in a brief afterword. Most of the preceding 300- odd pages describe an increasingly desperate, occasionally violent, always-bombed-outofhis-brain heroin-, crack- and anything-else-going addict.

Recounting his long decline and fall, Mark Johnson follows the regulation story arc of the misery-and-trauma memoir - first the misery, then the trauma, then both together as things go from bad to worse to much worse before the rescue and the book contract.

Mark's family in Kidderminster was never poor - his father was a steelworker who went on to earn very good money on the oil rigs in the Eighties, when his mother bought a farm in the Lake District.

But his father was also terrifyingly violent. He looms over Mark's boyhood and these early chapters with drunken menace and clenched fists.

'Here he is, a massive dark presence in the lounge. He crosses the room, grabs me and starts to punch me . . . He punches me hard with his right hand. His left hand, the one with LOVE tattooed across it, holds me tight, too tight, round my throat. . .'

Young Mark glimpses an escape from fear and emotional deprivation when he takes his first swig of cider, aged eight.

By the age of 11, he is already conning himself about his alcohol problem ('I'm a social drinker'), losing his virginity and taking his first hit of heroin ('I inhale again and when it reaches the back of my head I become aware of a great kindness wrapping itself round me and making everything all right').

It's page 57 and the real theme of the book is about to begin - Mark Johnson's astonishing career of addiction.

His teenage years of drugged oblivion come to a temporary end when he is involved in a vicious gang fight and is sentenced to 191/2 months in jail.

He is 17.

After his release he tries to kick the heroin, finds a job as a baker, and enjoys the rave scene of the late Eighties.

But just as a new life beckons, Mark falls back into drugs and crime, soon finding himself up in court again after mugging an old age pensioner, and looking at another couple of years inside.

This time when he gets out, he sets off on a new direction - one devoted to crack, as well as heroin, Ecstasy, speed, acid and Special Brew. To finance his new habit, he quits work and starts dealing, touring the country with his girlfriend in a camper van stuffed full of powder and pills.

By now Mark's life and this book have settled into a reliable pattern - mounting addiction, crisis, doomed attempt to go clean, and then, after a week or maybe ten days, he'll lapse and he'll be back on his heroin-andcrack diet.

Jail doesn't stop him. The arrival of his baby son Jack doesn't stop him. He ends up spending Millennium Eve standing in a bath in a squat in Birmingham, taking crack, surrounded by his own blood.

That's got to be the low point, you might think. But no. Oh, no.

There's much, much worse to come when Mark approaches 30 and a new low as a homeless junkie in Central London - but one who manages to finance a £400a-day habit by thieving and dealing.

Food being less of a priority than heroin and crack, his nutritional intake consists of one Snickers bar a week. He's 6ft and weighs less than 7st.

He is not only working for gangsters but thieving from them, feverishly consuming huge amounts of stolen crack and heroin in a crazed, fearful, paranoid binge.

When he checks into the final, successful rehab centre, Johnson's life has degraded to the extent that he has to be taught the basics - 'You change and get into bed and that's when you go to sleep. Then in the morning you get up.

You stay up all day.

You don't go to sleep again until you've changed out of your clothes and got yourself into bed at night.' Finally freed of his addiction in the summer of 2000, Mark puts his energy and intelligence into working as a tree surgeon. Sober, he's an amazing success story, with a booming business that makes him the golden boy of the Prince's Trust.

With this memoir, Mark Johnson also proves himself to be a noticeably effective writer, describing his life and his almost superhuman capacity for addiction often with real verve.

And the final third, when he sinks to drug-crazed homelessness in Soho, is as gripping as it is appalling. Wasted is all you could ask of a misery-andtrauma book - it's shocking and it's haunting and it's about one hell of a life.