Word: cocked
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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...
...part rather sleepily, without much of the old Bing zing. Sinatra plays the reporter like a dead-end kid with a typewriter. The two of them come off best together in a song-and-dance number, Well, Did You Evah?, in which Bing boo-boo-boos as Sinatra cock-a-doodle-doos...
...books about faithful dogs have one thing in common: almost complete immunity from literary criticism. Who would be rash enough to examine the soft underbelly of Bob, Son of Battle or cock an ear to the corny notes in The Voice of Bugle Ann? The same armor of sentimentality will surely protect Old Yeller. Texas Author Fred Gipson, onetime newsman and veteran of the pulps, has written double insurance into his third novel. Not only is Old Yeller a mongrel of rare courage and devotion; his 14-year-old master, Travis, totes about as much man on his boyish frame...