We only had the one entrance. It had a number on it. Wherever we lived people would know that was us. It followed us about. It was always “31.”
The first time I was aware of it, was I conscious? The first time I was conscious of it, was I aware? That’s not a good way to begin, but I was little, and it sets up… I can’t premise anything.
This initial “31” knocking in my memory was answered by my dad. He was home. So, it must have been a Saturday morning, or a Sunday afternoon between 3 and 7 p.m. I knew that he answered the knock because he was crying as he came back in, and I had never seen him cry. I had only met his mother once, in another country, and I was too young to think of her like he did. The shock was soon forgotten.We moved after my younger brother turned a year old, so that first door was closed to everything but memory.
We had a house now in a new neighborhood and with a lot of life on the street.
The daily air in late October has a freshness that gives way to rot. To be caught in-between seasons as the sun is too low and goes, somewhere, Australia maybe?
Hallowe’en was close to my birthday and my brother’s birthday and my younger brother’s birthday and three of our friends’ birthdays. The beginning of November was a treat nothing could shock or scare the hell out of us with. Hallowe’en was like Christmas Eve, we got giddily kid drunk on it waiting for presents.
There was Bonfire Night though. We all had to deal with that, “Penny for the Guy?” We usually gave a penny. I never went out doing it as they had their crews and they put up a good bommie, plus we were Catholic. I didn’t know why we were celebrating the burning of effigies of a kindred spirit, but I did know my history and we enjoyed the warmth, and maybe I shouldn’t have enjoyed the Catherine wheels and made do with sparklers and puffing monkeys instead of rockets.
Kids used to knock on all doors, sporadically, asking for sweets or money from late September until Boxing Day. There was always some loose handed-down tradition going on, and then some later commercial tie ins. Hallowe’en, Bonfire builders and the weirdest, still out there, Mummers. Shoe polished, black faced Mummers would not answer you when you said, “Who is it?” They would just pretend to wash your windows. Mummers didn’t talk but also didn’t wash! They were filthy and out of water. I never understood them.
Knocking on doors was normal - if you lived in a council street and had no phone and were a part of life. Knocking on doors was so normal that you could pretend you were knocking on someone’s door and then run away and laugh when they, stupidly, answered the door in all innocence thinking it might be a friendly knock. How we would laugh - from behind a bush - at their faces, when all they said was, “Who’s there?” We had nothing, but at least we weren’t asking for it.
I was a paperboy for two years and delivered the daily mail to the wardens up at a Youth Offenders Remand Centre. It was a farm that helped rehabilitate. The big lads would be out on a tractor trailer coming in from early milking as I tried to avoid eye contact. They would shout and pretend to be tough guys and I would shrink.
It wasn’t such fun on dark mornings. In fact, it could be scary. This was the 1970s and not too far from the Yorkshire moors.
One of my dad’s favorite songs was ‘The Knock on the Door in the Night Squad’, and I know that it can cause panic and bad memories, but he used to enjoy the ridiculousness and laugh at those in control. He had escaped most of the worst to England anyway.
The only bad thing that happened after that at the front door…
I remember answering when I was about ten years old, and having a good conversation with two people that I thought understood me.
I got told off three months later for signing my parents up to a complete set of Encyclopedia Brittanica. There were 31 volumes in total that I still have not read as I got severely cancelled that day.
A to zzz.
Anthony C. Murphy is a regular host of the Irish American Writers & Artists salon in New York. He is the author of “The House of Murph.”
