Ian McMillan: When the hand of fate knocks at the door

I was whistling along with the rhythm of my scraping and I was a contented chappie.

Then a noise began to intrude into my shave, and I couldn’t quite work out what it was. It was a rattling and a tapping sound, and at first I thought that the head of the razor was working loose, and then I thought that a bird was hopping across the conservatory roof and then I thought somebody was chucking gravel at the window to attract my attention like they sometimes do in books and TV programmes although rarely in real life.

I stopped shaving and put the razor down, having done half my face. I looked like the bloke from Phantom of the Opera with his mask on. The tapping sound was still there; it sounded like a woodpecker pecking a corrugated iron shed or water dripping into a previously empty barrel. I stood with my hackles raised like a Native American in a cowboy film listening for the Seventh Cavalry.

The sound was coming from downstairs. It was growing more insistent. I felt oddly nervous, as though the house was coming apart. I went downstairs and the noise got louder. It was somebody knocking, somebody knocking at a door.

Funny how a knock at the door can make you excited or strike fear into your heart. If it’s a pounding knock, what they call round here a “Bobby’s Knock” then you’re almost certain it’s going to be bad news. Decades ago, in the days before we had telephones, it was always one of the more unwelcome jobs for the police that they had to come round and tell you about the illness or death of a relative.

I vividly remember sitting in the back room painting a model of a Spitfire in the early 1960s when I heard one of the loudest knocks on a door I’d ever heard. I thought one of the coal seams under the house had collapsed and we were about to sink into the coal face of Hougton Main pit. My dad opened the door and a young police constable said, using a form of words that must have been officially sanctioned: “I regret to inform you of the death of Mr George McMillan in the hospital in Peebles in the early hours of the morning.” My dad thanked the copper and shut the door; George was his dad. I don’t think that door was ever pummelled so hard again.

Back to 2013 and the knocking sound was still continuing in our house; it seemed to be coming from the region of the back room. It didn’t seem urgent in any way; it seemed like a friendly kind of knock, although it was going on a bit. I think the length of a knock is fascinating: very few people just do one knock, but a lot do two.

Two knocks is familiar, it’s the kind of knock you do when you’re going to your mate’s or your Auntie’s. Two knocks and straight in. Knock Knock: who’s there? Only me, Auntie, only me! Three knocks is more urgent: “Let me in, I need to go to the toilet!” Or “Come on, I know you’re in there! Open up!”

Four knocks is heading in the direction of the aforementioned Bobby’s Knock, and four knocks can also be the beginning of the comedy knock; it can be the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, for example. And that can lead to the king of all comedy knocks, the one that used to be called “Shampoo and hair cut: five cents!”, and which I have seen inelegantly written down as der der der der der: der der. I think the shampoo and haircut works better.

If the knock isn’t a comedy one then anything over four knocks simply gets irritating.

Five knocks means that it’s a debt collector. Six knocks means that person at the door thinks you’ve go
the radio turned up too loud. Seven knocks suggests that the person at the door has been seduced by the rhythm
of his or her knocking. And eight knocks is more of a flamenco dance than a knock.

And of course in certain countries,
 at certain times, the knock on the door is a prelude to horror: to the police van, to the dark cell, to the disappearance.

In my house the knocking was still going on, not getting any louder or softer, just continuing like a dripping tap. I went into the back room and there was my wife, locked in the conservatory by me turning the latch. She saw me and, oddly, knocked louder. I rapped a cheerful “Shampoo and hair cut” on the window but she didn’t reply with a “five cent”.

I let her out and said: “I could write a learned tome about varieties of knocking through the ages. I’ll call it Don’t Knock It.” She didn’t laugh.