THERE’S A KNOCK AT THE DOOR.

Otago Witness, Issue 3755, 2 March 1926, Page 77

THERE’S A KNOCK AT THE DOOR.

(By A. G. Thornton, in the Daily Chronicle.) To arrive at a thorough understanding of suburban life a man has to lie in bed a night and a day. He then knows that housewives, housemaids, and other homekeeping creatures wear that harassed look and come to nervous breakdowns, not by reason of hard work, but by reason of the knocks. That little plate, “No canvassers,” etc., which bears an honourable place on every suburban gate, is the last weak cry of the tortured soul, the De Profundis of the Women of Suburbia. There arc women, no doubt, who are strong enough to ignore the knockers, even when they knock three times. Such women carry on cheerfully and live to a good old age. But they are exceptions. The ordinary, normal woman is always half expecting something out of the ordinary to happen. Ninety-nine knocks may be for trivialities; the hundredth may be that two yards of marocain that Cousin Angela promised to send on. Having 'spent the required night and a day in bed, I am now an authority on knocks and knockers.

First among the knockers in every sense of the word is the milkman. I call him a knocker though in point of fact he does not knock at all on his first call. But he does everything else; everything. He arrives punctually at half past six. He is never late; never. I think it is the best hour of the day, for he is simply bubbling over with life. So is his horse and his cart and his churns and his cans. They are all bursting with joie de vivre. You understand that in speaking of knocks and knockers I am referins merely to the auditory side of them. I have never seen them. I have never seen the milkman’s arrival at 6.50 a.m. ; blit as I conceive it, it goes something like this llis steed, full of oats, does the last hundred yards in even time. He does not want to stop, and the milkman threatens him in a sotto voice which can be heard at Daventry. The horse, irritated a little, backs heavilv into the fence, and tries to pitch the milkman over it The milkman does some more sotto voce, and the horse being still a little independent, the milkman throws a can at his head This missing its objective, the milkman throws some more cans, throws all his cans, throws his big can. throws his churn. He then pitches everything hack into the cart, juggles with a dozen or two bottles, draws a quart of milk, aims a flying kick at the gate, throws his churn at the front door hurls himself at the door, falls over his can, pitches heavilv through the gate, calls “Milk-oh !” and departs.

By contrast with the milkman, the paper bov is a little subdued. I always picture him waiting a little way up the road until the milkman and his horse have done their turn, envying them their noise-making apparatus. However, he gathers heait as lie- approaches, and when nearing the house lie is whistling “Rose Marie” in A flat with great vigour. Unfortunately, outside our house he always encounters the other paper boy, •who comes up on the other side, and they pass the time of day across the street. Their voices penetrate to me easily, but they fail to hear each other a good deal, so that 1 hear twice and thrice over the facts (1) that it is a good performance at the Empire; (2) that the dancing mule ain’t half a good turn; (3) Chat Bill Jones has gone to Australia; (4) that the football team of Paper Boy No. 1 are playing a hot lot next Saturday; (5) that it ain’t half cold—and so on for ten minutes. Then our paper boy assaults our gate. Gates seem to exasperate paper boys and milkmen. They always kick them twice cm entering and twice on leaving. No doubt to those who hare lo call at a couple of hundred house a day, gates must s«*em rather Rn anachronism. Builders must consider the labour-saving possibilities ot the gateless house.

There is a knuckles period after the last paper boy, an interval designed no doubt to enable those who have been thoroughly awakened to go to sleep again and become late at the office again. As i have already been 24 hours awake, 1 merely wait for the other knorkeis. From nine onwards they come thick and fast, the butcher, the baker, the grocer, gentlemen with knife cleaners, gentlemen with studs, with vacuum cleaners, with gramophones, with baby loud-speakers, with everything. Interspersed by ladies with vacuum cleaners, coal conservers, music, encylopedias, lace, ferns, everything. They come and go; they are* coming and Koing all over England. It is a desperate thought that at every second between nine o’clock and one each day somebody somewhere is knocking on an English knocker and producing » vacuum cleaner. We bear with it all, I fanev, because of one man, the supreme knocker, of them all, that most welcome of knockers—the postman. You may be in the sweetest ot dozes, but you never mind if the postman awakens you. He may fetch you down when you are strong and well and produce merely an unstamped postcard from Aunt Jane to say she will be over on Sunday. At times he seems to bring you nothin** but printed forms from all over the world demanding money. Rut he is, after all, the postman, the knocker who must do obeyed. He has not produced it yet, but one ot these days you know (if you are normai and human) that he is going to hand you the long-waited information that your ship has come home, and that you needn’t catch the 8.23 ever any more. Yes, the knocker was invented for the postman. Otherwise our ships might come home and sail away again without our knowing a word about it. ,