Word: cocke
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...soldier's only surviving name is "Old Cock," and his last surviving grip on Britain's economy is a job as curator of a rubbish dump in London's bombed-out East End. Slightly addled but still marvelously eloquent after his life in the trenches, Old Cock has one friend, known only as "Arp" (from the initials on his Air Raid Precautions uniform jacket). A bomb had deprived Arp of everything -house, family, name, memory and speech. But Old Cock talks enough for two-his language flows like pig's ear in a boozer on Saturday...
...witz evidently sets up these two old human ruins as symbols of man's condition on earth, with well-meaning officials as their natural enemies. The officials are the book's runts and spivs and riffraff-the ones who have fared best under the Welfare State. Old Cock pegs them down (to quote the most printable of his memorable vocabulary) as bowler-hatted, bean-eyed, lousy, bootlicking Picklewaters. The old man is quite a social thinker. After one brush with authority-represented by an arrogant doorman-he reflects: "If we have to take to wearing bowlers before...
...novel's plot concerns Old Cock's attempts to hold on to his job and to keep Arp secure in his Nissen hut, located on the edge of the garbage dump. Among his adversaries are not only the city authorities and the garbage men (who have no respect for a well-conducted dump), but a film company run by a madly implausible American operator named Claygate Corst. Though Corst doesn't have "enough do-re-mi in his pocket to acquire a second-hand mouse-trap," he takes over the decayed movie studios next to the dump...
...always have," Old Cock replies. "I always paid for me pleasure and I always bloody well will." So yelling, he knocks the helmet off one purple-faced bobby...
Beer & Baccy. However this bit of fancy does not occur before Old Cock has duly delivered himself of a few well-rounded reflections on the "Socialist mob, the thieving upstarts," and stated his Weltanschauung: "Cutting the cackle, it's a bloody washout in which the baby is thrown out with the bathwater and devil take all. Talk about Rights. What Rights? Then I will tell you . . . the right of an Englishman true-born and free to get his beer and baccy, his Java, bread and scrape, plum-and-apple, cut off the joint and choice of two veg . . . good...