HOW WE PASSED THE TIME

In the dark ages, when this blogger was a lad, say, the early 1950s, we had to amuse ourselves while waiting for the iPhones to be invented. In the winter evenings we hung around the town, and got up to devilment to ease the boredom. Being super intelligent, we thought it was great fun to knock on doors and run away before the door was opened.  (Front doors had heavy knockers then). The prank would be repeated on the same door if you knew the occupant took it badly.  On the third assault on the same door, you just knew the householder was waiting inside the door with a stick.  Exciting! We made a big ‘improvement’ on the knocking method by getting a spool of thread and tying the end to the knocker.  That way, we could bang the knocker from a safe distance, and watch the puzzled householder come out and look up and down the street.  But we left it at that.  A report from 1923 shows that the lads of that time took their ‘fun’ more seriously, as the account below shows:

KNOCKER-WRENCHING AT KILLYBEGS.

Hallowe’en, was formerly the night on which stupid and very often destructive tricks were played on by unthinking youths but the date for such doings has been changed, in Killybegs at least, to, of all days in the year, Christmas Day. On Christmas Eve, or early on Christmas morning, the inoffensive knockers on the doors of 16 houses were wrenched off or broken, only a few, for obvious reasons, being left untouched.   The culprits were not ‘kids’ certainly, as the operation required both strength and skill.  Nor was it the work of the ordinary corner boys, though the perpetrators, generally suspected by their brainless and possibly drunken folly, proved themselves worse than the corner boy by stooping to such vandalism on such a sacred festival.

(31 January 1923)

As they say, ‘Don’t try this at home’ – or anywhere else.