Dogs had only played walk-on parts in my family. As far as I was concerned, the defining object in a house was a television. There was one in Bill's house. It stood like a lonely, redundant sentinel in a dank corner of his empty living room, cold and unused. When I asked Bill what he watched, he answered that the set didn't work—it needed a new plug or some such—and he hadn't bothered to get it fixed. What's more, he didn't miss it. To me, this was unimaginable. How could a person have a TV and not use it?
"Radio's best," Bill would wheeze. "You can't beat old steam radio..."
What Bill did for much of the day, when there was life and bustle outside (if the children were off school, for example), was stand in his slippers, leaning against the wall just inside his gate, and chat and banter with anyone who cared to do so. He wasn't the only one. People would stand in their backyards, go to their gates to chat, or chat outside someone else's gate. It was life.
Bill rarely left his garden gate unlocked, but most of us could unlock it if, as sometimes happened, a football went into his backyard. He had little tolerance for trespassing animals in his backyard and kept a squeezy bottle of water handy to repel cats. It seemed odd that he didn't get many feline visitors, particularly as his neighbor Mrs. Deakin had a menagerie of some fourteen cats, not to mention a flock of pigeons on her roof. For some reason, the cats stayed out of Bill's yard.
They felt no compunction about using our backyard as a lavatory, however. My father would regularly extract cat droppings from amid our tired rose bushes and tip the lot over Mrs. Deakin's wall.
"There," he would say. "It belongs to her; now she's got it back."
Though Bill wasn't much of a shot with his squeezy bottle, his yard remained curiously cat-free. I sometimes wondered whether the cats had such an awful experience in Bill's yard that they had determined never to make the mistake of returning. Bill would mutter darkly on occasion about 'doing a cat in' if he caught one, but I knew he never would—and knew he never had.