Dinna Mess wi the Po Po Edited by Richard Bennett and David Northcroft

A Review by Alistair Lawrie

Dinna Mess wi the Po Po
A selection of entries from The Toulmin Prize 2008-2020
Edited by Richard Bennett and David
Northcroft
Elphinstone Institute (2021) £9.99

This compact anthology frankly surprised me in a number of ways. My first surprise was the realisation that I knew personally significantly more than a third of the writers contained in it but, as I read, I became aware that the real surprise was that there were so many I didn’t know. At all. And felt that I should have, not merely because of the confines of the north east but rather because there was such a wealth of good writing on display that I felt I should have been aware of such quality.

To be honest I approached this review with a certain trepidation, perhaps a fear that its contents would be too circumscribed by the nature and requirements of the prize. That it’d be too cosy, too couthy, too retro. I should have kent better. The first time I came across Toulmin’s work was happening on a copy of “Blown Seed” in a shop in Hawick and immediately dismissing it as likely to be a wallowing in an idealised view of the farming past. It was some years before I realised its unsentimental portrayal of life then.

The collection is remarkably varied in just about every imaginable way. There are portrayals of rural life but they’re predominantly concerned with how that lifestyle is confronted and affected by the huge changes that have happened in the North East in the last hundred years. And not always from the local point of view. At the heart of “Pink Wellies” for instance is the oil wife from London who can’t cope with the isolation of her beautifully modernised old farmhouse. There’s the stoic acceptance of a similar transformation to the farmhouse he’d occupied for most of his life in “Feebuie”. Or there’s the son in the symbolically rich “Ketea” quietly effecting his escape from being trapped in a once flourishing fishing town.

The characters who people these stories are wonderfully diverse too. Yes there’s the fisherman who is thirled to the whole lifestyle of going to sea but one of his relatives on the boat paints his fingernails and is often out of his skull on various drugs. One of the feistiest characters in these stories is a Chinese grandmother at a takeaway in Buckie. In another we meet a third generation Italian sweetie shop owner.

The subject matter is equally varied. There is an atmospherically powerful story that dances on a chilling borderline in a relationship that may or may not be breaking down where paranoia and the possibly psychotic jostle inconclusively. There is the poignancy of people left behind by those killed in WW1 and a beautifully drawn relationship between a young man and his severely disabled friend.

Styles vary throughout. From the exquisitely lyrical memories of the sweet shop owner in “Into The Sweet”, to the Carveresque economy of “Jenny’s Well”, to the powerfully page turning elements of character driven detective fiction that inform “The Catch”.

A number are very successfully written in Doric throughout, many only utilise it for the dialogue and one or two ignore it. Which feels right. Some are genuinely funny. Some are very sad. I like some better than others but there’s no doubt this an eminently readable collection at the end of which I found myself impelled on a search for other work that some of these writers might have produced. I don’t think there can be a higher recommendation for any anthology.

I was left with a sense of admiration for the good judgement of the judges but also feeling glad I didn’t have to make that call. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been, for example, to separate a winner from a runner up in the 2020 competition. They’re each brilliant in their own way. Choosing would have been beyond me.

I’d like to finish on a personal note by congratulating Richard Bennett and David Northcroft on a fine anthology and thanking them for providing the basis for some of my future reading.