Dogs had only played walk on parts in my family. As far as I was concerned the all defining object in a house was a television. There was one in Bill's house. It stood like a lonely, redundant¹ sentinel（哨兵） in a dank corner of his empty living room and seemed 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 fixed². And 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 wheeze³（喘息着说） , "you can't beat old steam radio ..."

What Bill did for much of the day, when there was life and bustle⁴（喧闹） outside, if the children were off school for example, was he stood in his slippers⁵, leaning against the wall just inside his gate, and would chat and banter⁶ with（开玩笑） anyone who cared to do so. He wasn't the only one. People would stand in the backs, they would go to their gates and 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 back yard. He had little tolerance⁷ for trespassing⁸（侵入） animals in his back yard, and kept a squeezy bottle of water handy with which he would repel⁹（击退，抵制） cats. It seemed odd that he didn't get many feline¹⁰ visitors, particularly as his neighbour 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 back yard as a lavatory¹¹（盥洗室） , however, and my Father would regularly extract cat droppings from amid our tired rose bushes, and tip the lot over Mrs Deakin's wall.

"There, it belongs to her, now she's got it back," he would say.

Though Bill wasn't much of a shot with his squeezy bottle, his yard remained curiously¹² cat free and I sometimes wondered whether the cats had such an awful experience in Bill's yard that they had determined¹³ 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.