George’s house also made me feel afraid. It was a broken-down wooden building, painted pink on the outside, and the galvanized-iron roof was brown from rust. One door, the one to the right, was always left open. The inside walls had never been painted, and were grey and black with age. There was a dirty bed in one corner and in another there was a table and a stool. That was all. No curtains, no pictures on the wall. And even Bogart had a picture of Lauren Bacall in his room.
I found it hard to believe that George had a wife and a son and a daughter.
Like Popo, George was happy to let his wife do all the work in the house and the yard. They kept cows, and again I hated George for that. Because the water from his pens made the gutters stink, and when we were playing cricket on the pavement the ball often got wet in the gutter. Boyee and Errol used to wet the ball deliberately in the stinking gutter. They wanted to make it shoot.
George’s wife was never a proper person. I always thought of her just as George’s wife, and that was all. And I always thought, too, that George’s wife was nearly always in the cow-pen.
And while George sat on the front concrete step outside the open door of his house, his wife was busy.
George never became one of the gang in Miguel Street. He didn’t seem to mind. He had his wife and his daughter and his son. He beat them all. And when the boy Elias grew too big, George beat his daughter and his wife more than ever. The blows didn’t appear to do the mother any good. She just grew thinner and thinner; but the daughter, Dolly, thrived on it. She grew fatter and fatter, and giggled more and more every year. Elias, the son, grew more and more stern, but he never spoke a hard word to his father.
Hat said, ‘That boy Elias have too much good mind.’
One day Bogart, of all people, said, ‘Ha! I mad to break old George tail up, you hear.’
And the few times when Elias joined the crowd, Hat would say, ‘Boy, I too sorry for you. Why you don’t fix the old man up good?’
Elias would say, ‘It is all God work.’
Elias was only fourteen or so at the time. But that was the sort of boy he was. He was serious and he had big ambitions.
I began to be terrified of George, particularly when he bought two great Alsatian dogs and tied them to pickets at the foot of the concrete steps.
Every morning and afternoon when I passed his house, he would say to the dogs, ‘Shook him!’
And the dogs would bound and leap and bark; and I could see their ropes stretched tight and I always felt that the ropes would break at the next leap. Now, when Hat had an Alsatian, he made it like me. And Hat had said to me then, ‘Never fraid dog. Go brave. Don’t run.’
And so I used to walk slowly past George’s house, lengthening out my torture.
I don’t know whether George disliked me personally, or whether he simply had no use for people in general. I never discussed it with the other boys in the street, because I was too ashamed to say I was afraid of barking dogs.
Presently, though, I grew used to the dogs. And even George’s laughter when I passed the house didn’t worry me very much.
One day George was on the pavement as I was passing and I heard him mumbling. I heard him mumble again that afternoon and again the following day. He was saying, ‘Horse-face!’
Sometimes he said, ‘Like it only have horse-face people living in this place.’
Sometimes he said, ‘Short-arse!’
And, ‘But how it have people so short-arse in the world?’
I pretended not to hear, of course, but after a week or so I was almost in tears whenever George mumbled these things.
One evening, when we had stopped playing cricket on the pavement because Boyee had hit the ball into Miss Hilton’s yard, and that was a lost ball (it counted six and out) — that evening I asked Elias, ‘But what your father have with me so? Why he does keep on calling me names?’
Hat laughed, and Elias looked a little solemn.
Hat said, ‘What sort of names?’
I said, ‘The fat old man does call me horse-face.’ I couldn’t bring myself to say the other name.
Hat began laughing.
Elias said, ‘Boy, my father is a funny man. But you must forgive him. What he say don’t matter. He old. He have life hard. He not educated like we here. He have a soul just like any of we, too besides.’
And he was so serious that Hat didn’t laugh, and whenever I walked past George’s house I kept on saying to myself, ‘I must forgive him. He ain’t know what he doing.’
And then Elias’s mother died, and had the shabbiest and the saddest and the loneliest funeral Miguel Street had ever seen.
That empty front room became sadder and more frightening for me.
The strange thing was that I felt a little sorry for George. The Miguel Street men held a post-mortem outside Hat’s house. Hat said, ‘He did beat she too bad.’
Bogart nodded and drew a circle on the pavement with his right index finger.
Edward said, ‘I think he kill she, you know. Boyee tell me that the evening before she dead he hear George giving the woman licks like fire.’
Hat said, ‘What you think they have doctors and magistrates in this place for? For fun?’
‘But I telling you,’ Edward said. ‘It really true. Boyee wouldn’t lie about a thing like that. The woman dead from blows. I telling you. London can take it; but not George wife.’
Not one of the men said a word for George.
Boyee said something I didn’t expect him to say. He said, ‘The person I really feel sorry for is Dolly. You suppose he going to beat she still?’
Hat said wisely, ‘Let we wait and see.’
Elias dropped out of our circle.
George was very sad for the first few days after the funeral. He drank a lot of rum and went about crying in the streets, beating his chest and asking everybody to forgive him and to take pity on him, a poor widower.
He kept up the drinking into the following weeks, and he was still running up and down the street, making everyone feel foolish when he asked for forgiveness. ‘My son Elias,’ George used to say, ‘my son Elias forgive me, and he is a educated boy.’
When he came to Hat, Hat said, ‘What happening to your cows? You milking them? You feeding them? You want to kill your cows now too?’
George sold all his cows to Hat.
‘God will say is robbery,’ Hat laughed. ‘I say is a bargain.’
Edward said, ‘It good for George. He beginning to pay for his sins.’
‘Well, I look at it this way,’ Hat said. ‘I give him enough money to remain drunk for two whole months.’
George was away from Miguel Street for a week. During that time we saw more of Dolly. She swept out the front room and begged flowers of the neighbours and put them in the room. She giggled more than ever.
Someone in the street (not me) poisoned the two Alsatians.
We hoped that George had gone away for good.
He did come back, however, still drunk, but no longer crying or helpless, and he had a woman with him. She was a very Indian woman, a little old, but she looked strong enough to handle George.
‘She look like a drinker sheself,’ Hat said.
This woman took control of George’s house, and once more Dolly retreated into the back, where the empty cow-pens were.
We heard stories of beatings and everybody said he was sorry for Dolly and the new woman.
My heart went out to the woman and Dolly. I couldn’t understand how anybody in the world would want to live with George, and I wasn’t surprised when one day, about two weeks later, Popo told me, ‘George new wife leave him, you ain’t hear?’