a football went into his back

"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 he stood in his slippers, leaning against the wall just inside his gate, and would chat and banter with 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,  yard. He had little tolerance for trespassing animals in his back yard, and kept a squeezy bottle of water handy with which he would repel cats. It seemed odd that he didn't get many feline 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 lavatory , 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 curiously cat free and 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 Neo skin lab. 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.