Don Paterson endured violence, unrequited love, and a terrifying drug-induced insanity.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Toy Fights: A Childhood

by Don Paterson (Faber £16.99, 384pp)

If you find a better memory throughout the year than this wonderful book, you will be very lucky. True confessions first: I wasn’t familiar with Don Paterson’s work, and I’m more fooled.

He is one of the most acclaimed poets in the country with a bookshelf full of poetry prizes (Whitbread, Costa, two TS Eliot prizes, the Queen’s Gold Medal and many more), as well as being Professor of Poetry at St Andrews. Oh, and he’s also a noted jazz musician.

So why should we be interested in the first 20 years of a man most of us don’t really know? Because it’s the funniest, most truthful, moving, honest account of a childhood I’ve ever read: witty and dry, profane and brutally hilarious in a laugh-out-loud way, it’s full of shocking moments of recognition.

Whether you’re a working-class kid from Dundee like Paterson or a middle-class kid from Home Counties, or anywhere in between, growing up is, I suppose, more or less the same painful experience, wherever and whoever. you are.

We all have problems with our parents; have a terrible uncle; getting into fights and friction; falling in love with the wrong people; they are full of insecurities; having problems at school; drink too much or take too many drugs; eating too many sweets and obsessing over music.

As an award-winning poet, Paterson certainly knows the language well, and this is as brilliantly written a book as you’ll find anywhere.

He was born in 1963, a hard time in Scotland. Her mother was obsessed with the tenor Mario Lanza and she was desperately upset when he died early, of overeating, as often happens.

Paterson’s father was a part-time musician who worked for DC Thomson, coloring the Beano and The Dandy comics.

The book’s title refers to a horrible children’s game in Dundee known as Toy Fights. “It was basically 20 minutes of extreme violence without pretext,” something you think Dennis the Menace would have enjoyed in his striped jumper.

At night, Paterson’s father also worked as a country and western singer, and was an undoubted role model for his son, whose growing skills and passions as a musician dominate the later sections of the book.

Don Paterson (pictured as a child) was born in 1963, a difficult time in Scotland. In accordance with Scottish education policy at the time, discipline was enforced through corporal punishment, officially the threat and practice of beating children unconscious.

Young Don becomes obsessed with origami (a brilliant and totally amazing passage), God, The Osmonds, Boys’ Brigade and, of course, sex and girls.

One glimpse of Debbie O’Hanlon’s panties would lead you to ‘delusion’, although the truth, of course, is that ‘our interaction with the female population was limited to the agony of long-distance longing and bizarre brief contact: a borrowed contact. pencil, a whispered test response, fingers touching a recovered steering wheel, where one was briefly acknowledged to exist.’ The school is hard. He goes to Baldragon Academy, an invigorating sort of institution: “On a normal day, chairs were thrown through windows, pigeons’ legs were ripped off, and poop was carried into teachers’ desk drawers.” “.

In accordance with Scottish education policy at the time, discipline was enforced by corporal punishment, officially the threat and practice of beating children unconscious.

Paterson is very willing to give the school its due: ‘One should make it clear that. . . Amidst all the carnage, a Scottish education was stubbornly pursued, and indeed was regularly imparted.

‘You can leave Baldragon with a heroin habit, tears tattooed on your face, pregnant, dead, or all of the above, but you could have added to that some superior Latin, an opinion on the South Seas Bubble, and some basic facility on the clarinet.’

The most harrowing section of the book is an account of Paterson’s descent into madness. One day he goes out to buy hash, of which he is already consuming an epic amount, in one of the many doss houses around which his and his friends’ social lives revolve.

Someone rolls a big joint of strong dope mixed with brown heroin.

On the way back, he suffers the first of many wild panic attacks, so severe that he is hospitalized. The diagnosis is ‘acute adolescent schizophrenic episode’.

When Paterson reacts badly to a particular drug that doctors prescribe, the results are horrific.

“I had started the long walk back to the living room and was looking towards the vanishing point of the corridor, when it began to slowly incline downward. She moved through 90 degrees until she was looking into a mine shaft. The ground was sinking… the descent accelerated and I was separated from me again. Oh no no no no

He remains in the room for three and a half months. Only when he improves can he properly immerse himself in his music.

My only reservation here is that, for such an intelligent and perceptive person, he fails to make a real connection, unless I missed it, between the staggering amounts of drugs he used as a teenager and his bout of schizophrenia. God knows if there is one, but he can’t stretch the limits of probability too far.

However, Paterson can dish out the best of them, and he does so in a very even-handed way in some superbly acid asides about the state of the modern world.

He’s not a fan of social media (“a disaster for the species”), and as far as virtue signaling goes, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better approach than this: “Unless I find myself on a soccer team and rooting for fellow team members, no, I will not kneel because a) some of us working class people find all kneeling demeaning; b) this is not America; and c) I will not be coerced by white elites to point out, in the prescribed manner , my endorsement of a cause that many of them love to champion but do very little to advance.”

As for his politics, ‘I can’t stand the right, I can’t stand the left, and I really can’t stand the appeasing, quietist, weedy, status quo “liberal” center.” And never forget, he says, the “astonishing indifference of the elites on the right and left toward the poor I grew up among.”

In the end, after a tour of the Dundee club scene and its spectacular sexual antics, he boards a train and sets off for London, guitar in hand. I just hope she’s working on the second volume of his memoirs.

Life in your 20s and 30s can be different from childhood, but if anyone can make your experience universal, it’s Don Paterson, the poet who brought us this instant classic.