English Original
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.
中文翻译
狗在我们家只是跑龙套的角色。在我看来，房子里最重要的物件是电视机。比尔的房子里就有一台。它像一个孤独、多余的哨兵，立在他空荡荡客厅的潮湿角落里，冰冷而闲置。当我问比尔看什么节目时，他回答说电视机坏了——需要换个新插头之类的——他也懒得去修。而且，他也不想念它。这对我来说是不可想象的——一个人怎么能有电视却不看呢？
“收音机最好，”比尔会喘着气说，“老式蒸汽收音机无可替代……”
当外面充满生机和喧闹时（比如孩子们放学时），比尔白天大部分时间都穿着拖鞋，靠在他家大门内侧的墙上，和任何愿意聊天的人说笑。他不是唯一这样做的人。人们会站在后院，走到自家门口聊天，或在别人家门口聊天。这就是生活。
比尔很少不锁花园门，但如果有时足球飞进他的后院，我们大多数人都能打开它。他对侵入后院的动物没什么耐心，手边常备一个挤压水瓶来驱赶猫。奇怪的是，很少有猫拜访他，尤其是他的邻居迪金太太养了大约十四只猫，更不用说屋顶上还有一群鸽子了。出于某种原因，猫都远离比尔的院子。
然而，它们却毫无顾忌地把我们的后院当厕所。我父亲会定期从我们蔫巴巴的玫瑰丛中清理出猫粪，然后全部倒到迪金太太的墙那边。
“给，”他会说，“这本来就是她的，现在物归原主了。”
尽管比尔用水瓶的准头不怎么样，但他的院子却奇怪地没有猫。我有时会想，猫是不是在比尔的院子里有过如此糟糕的经历，以至于决心再也不犯回来的错误。比尔偶尔会阴沉地嘀咕，如果抓到一只猫就要“干掉它”，但我知道他永远不会——也从未这样做过。