Knock, knock. Who’s there? Well, according to the app it was the Evri man at 10.27, the Yodel man at 11.17, the post lady at 13.44 and the nursery-run mum with double buggy at 15.22. What romance, what mystery in the age of the Ring doorbell? Every coming and going, every missed parcel and key fumble is filmed, timestamped and sent to my husband’s phone with a notification.
We resisted Ring for two years. Two years of a broken doorbell and delivery drivers hammering on the door. Over the summer we caved and now the house is monitored night and day. ‘Must make it difficult,’ I mused to Andy as we reviewed the footage on the first evening, ‘for anyone to have affairs any more.’ Not that I want to, just what would love and literature be if not for the clandestine knock in the night? How do you booty-call when your housemates are pinged as the booty arrives? How do you dance the tentative, teenage, doorstep two-step deciding whether to kiss goodnight or not if Mum and Dad are watching on their phones?
‘Is there anybody there?’ asks the Traveller in Walter de la Mare’s much-anthologised poem ‘The Listeners’. And as his horse in the silence champs the grasses of the forest’s ferny floor, the Ring rings through to a mobile phone beside a sun-lounger in Corsica and the distant listener replies: ‘We’ve just popped to the shops. Could you leave the package in the bin shed?’ (Never tell the lonely Traveller you’re away for a fortnight.) What agony Tess Durbeyfield might have been spared if only Ring or Blink or Nest could have told Angel Clare that she had slipped her letter under his door! And spare a thought for the Highwayman riding, riding, riding up to the old inn door to twinkle his rapier at the inn-keeper’s daughter while the inn-keeper refreshes the feed.
Dithering earlier in the year about what to do about our door, I browsed eBay for brass ship bells, school bells and last-orders-please bells. Wouldn’t it be nice for visitors to ding-dong merrily when they came to call? I was even tempted by a sonorous ‘Marley-was-dead’ sort of knocker. I wanted something tactile, antique, traditional. Researching my book about Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, I was struck by the number of people who remembered with perfect clearness, sometimes at a distance of 60 years, the experience of first ringing the bell – a weathered cork disk on a knotted rope – to be let in.
A couple of burglaries on our road – power tools mostly, stolen from renovations – and a smashed window opposite made us anxious. I accept the usefulness of the Ring system as security and deterrent while mourning its inelegance and intrusion. No mobcapped maids summoned by bells, no private detectives in unwatched doorways, no thundering dunning of the bailiffs. Just the ubiquitous, soulless bing-bing-bong, bing-bing-bong ringing up and down the street.
Laura Freeman’s Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists is out now.
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