Don Paterson does not have a typical poet’s CV. He grew up on a council estate in Dundee and left school at 16, having failed most of his Scottish Highers. Poetry is indeed entirely absent from his memoir, which takes us through his first 20 years and some extraordinarily retentive memories of working-class life. Paterson likes being jokey and grim in equal measure. How tough was his Dundee secondary school? “On a regular day, chairs were hurled through windows, legs were ripped off pigeons and shites taken in teachers’ desk drawers. Discipline was enforced through corporal punishment: officially, the threat and practice of belting children insensible with an oven-baked Lochgelly, the fork-tongued, hand-tooled leather tawse.” Some poetic licence? It is difficult to know.
The book’s title is the name of a childhood game that the author found himself doomed to play. “Toy fights” were mass brawls, begun without any reason by one child’s announcement that fighting should start. This serves as a metaphor for Paterson’s boyhood – his main fights being with “God, drugs and insanity”. God came first, when, in his early teens, Paterson joined a fundamentalist Christian sect. Its zealots are vividly recalled. Here, as elsewhere in the book, you realise that the most striking poems in his 1993 debut, Nil Nil, were versified but unedited fragments of his youth.
