FIGHT … FIGHT … FIGHT! Remember that chant from the playground? The original pile-on, the rush and the madness: hauners!
Don Paterson brings that beat back in his new book A Boyhood. As a kid growing up in one of the rougher parts of Dundee, he was often in “fake” fights that turned all too real.
His memories of school are multifaceted – pathos and piss-takes exist in the same paragraphs – and his telling is lapidary, cutting into the past with hilarious precisionterse expression.
You read, nod and rock with laughter and recognition when he recalls Tate & Lyle syrup sandwiches, Mivvis, Bonny Bobby Shafto, Jay Osmond’s daffy dancing, scuffing, skiting and sparking down the road with Segs on your heels.
This and much more – remember that time kids demonstrated against the BBC because it wanted to cancel Scooby-Doo?
But Toy Fights is a serious affair. Paterson is arguably Scotland’s finest writer at work today; his sense of the absurd is acutely honed, his wisdom hard-won. He tells us he’s a Scot who does not think of himself as British – he loves England “above all nations, excepting my own”.
Modestly, he says he sometimes “does” poetry. He’s won prizes galore and was a professor at St Andrews. Paterson is also a jazz guitarist. He lives in Kirriemuir these days and describes his politics as “radically centrist”, following this up with a shout-out relevant to the moment: “Pay your damn taxes.”
An early fib about TS Eliot hints that some of the tales here are taller than Robert Wadlow. Exaggerated golf club “bacchanalias” are apparently hushed up with “a certain what-happens-in-Troon omertà”. Paterson’s skills at metaphor and simile are exemplary: a fellow musician has “an ear like Jodrell Bank”, a Ford Anglia “looked like a duck”.
But he can be as spiky as a rambutan and has little time for the “performative Scottishness of the expatriate”. Or “narcs”, narcissists, advising we should avoid them, call them out as bullies and soul murderers incapable of compassion.
There’s a fair amount of swearing – all fine and appropriate – that Paterson puts down to fury. His anger “is really only about one thing: the unfair treatment of the poor”. And specifically in Dundee.
Poor Dundee – Paterson is alert to the “municipal vandalism” of his hometown, comparing the council’s treatment of the city to a “bent dentist” facing an “empty canvas for unnecessary fillings, veneers, root canals, crowns and bridges, implants and extractions”.
He knows the challenges of his home all too well: “The Hilltown, that Alpine thoroughfare any other city would have declared only traversable by funicular, has the contour of a ski jump, and if my mum had ever forgotten the brake when she shopped to get fags I’d have been catapulted over the Tay into Fife.”
What was growing up in Dundee like? Fun, a right laugh with a tragic pay-off.
Here he is remembering his old schoolmates: “But in my head, I was also saying Aids living murder (that was Mark Whittle, me, Arthur) living junkie junkie living diabetes living living jail living missing Aids living living suicide living. It really was a poor estate.”
Toy Fights is no lovesick letter to the city. Paterson – at this point reminiscent of John Ireland’s The Holy Boy – gets tight with a prayer group and an oppressive “charismatic firebrand” straight out of Flannery O’Connor.
Teenage Don becomes unwell and suffers an episode of life-threatening psychosis not long after inhaling what might have been PCT-laced Afghan hashish. Salvation of a sort comes via music. His listening as a kid was, he admits, “both utterly snobbish and madly eclectic” taking in Scritti Politti to Henry Cow, Steely Dan to Shostakovich.
He’s terrific on the “micro-inflection” subtleties of Sandy Denny’s voice, the gorgeosity of both Robert Wyatt’s “Sea Song” and the Danny Wilson tune “Davy”. Here’s Paterson on Johnny Rotten: “He was strange, baleful and spellbinding as a comet.”
It’s very reassuring to read that someone else thinks the movie Popeye was “unfairly trashed”. Oh, and that his maw calls a “pouffe” a pouffée. These facts alone argue for this future classic’s swift inclusion on to the Scottish curriculum. CC First Minister.
