Someone at the Door

Someone at the Door

Someone came knocking at my wee small door.

Someone came knocking, I’m sure-sure-sure.

I listened, I opened, I looked to left and right,

But nought there was a-stirring in the still dark night.

So begins a poem by Walter de la Mare which was one of the first I memorised as a child.  My mother composed a little tune for it, and we used to enjoy singing it together.


Fourteen years after the life-changing incident described in my last blog post, A Startling Discovery, I had cause to remember those words.  By then I was thirty years old, happily married to Bob, with two lovely little daughters.


One Sunday morning in April we had just arrived home after visiting Bob’s mother and father when the telephone rang.  Bob answered it.  Looking shocked, he turned to me and said “It’s your mother.  Your father has just died”.


I rushed over to my parents’ house.  As I entered the living-room I saw the familiar sight of the balding top of my father’s head above the high back of his armchair.  But then I was confronted by the pale silent presence of Death on that beloved face…


My mother told me what had happened.  On his return from the Sunday evening church service, he had sat down for a cup of tea, about to tell her a piece of local news, when he had suddenly given a gasp and died of a massive heart attack.


It seemed to me that a terrible subtraction sum had been made.  There in front of me was his body – but minus his spirit.  This body, familiar as it was, was not my Dad.  It was meaningless without his personality, his essence.  Where was his spirit now?  That I could no longer communicate with him felt like torture.


He and I had been very close.  A street photographer took this photo of us on holiday in Rothesay when I was five.  (My mother is in the background.  She didn’t feel well enough dressed to be in the picture!) 

Every Sunday morning the two of us would walk together to church, leaving Mum in peace to cook the Sunday roast!  (She preferred to attend the quiet evening service.)  Before the children left to go to Sunday School, I loved to hear my father singing the bass part of each hymn.  He instilled in me a great love of music.  He played the piano and sang in a choir.  When I was seven, he took me to my first orchestral concert – the SNO conducted by Walter Susskind.  On Sunday afternoons we would often set out together on what he jokingly called our ‘Sunday Walk’ – our aim being to travel on as many different kinds of transport as possible! – a bus, a tram, the Underground, and (best of all) the Govan ferry across the River Clyde.


A chartered accountant, he worked hard to support my mother, my younger sister, Freda, and me.  (Freda was born in Ayr after we moved there from Glasgow when I was eight.)  Quiet and calm, but with a good sense of humour, he was our rock on whom we all depended – something we realised only too well after his death.


Now, in the midst of my shock and grief, a strange, unfamiliar worry tormented me.  Did he know that he had suddenly passed on?  Was there anyone there to receive him, to comfort him?  His mother, my Gran, for example?


Totally unprepared for the traumatic suddenness of this parting, I did not know how to react.  On the funeral day and for the next two months I struggled to maintain an air of composure, while inwardly I battled with the huge questions which now confronted me: Where does the spirit go after death?  Will we meet our loved ones again some day?  Where is God in all of this? 


At home I tried to appear cheerful and normal for the sake of Bob and our two small daughters, not allowing myself to shed a single tear – but all the while the little girl inside me was silently sobbing, ‘Oh, Daddy … Daddy!’


All this was difficult enough to cope with, but something even more mind-blowing was to follow. One night, about six weeks after the funeral, Bob and I were just settling down in bed when we were startled by a loud thud at our front door.


“Someone’s trying to break in!” we exclaimed, sitting up in alarm.  But what burglar would make such a loud noise?  It sounded as if he had made a rush at the door, trying to force it open.  Hastily we reached for our clothes.  I was trembling with fright.


But suddenly something strange happened. A wonderful sense of peace and reassurance enveloped both of us simultaneously.  Puzzled, we stared at one another.  Somehow, we knew there was nothing to worry about.  We continued dressing, but less hurriedly, then made our way to the front door.  There was not the slightest sign of any unwelcome visitor, nor any damage to the door.  We looked to left and right, but both garden and street were silent, deserted.  And yet we had both heard that sudden loud noise, just before the strange calm had descended on us!


Whatever could it all mean?  Troubled, I began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, it could possibly have been my father, trying to reassure us that all was well with him?  That thud on the front door was the sound which, in the month before his death, had announced his arrival.  Because the newly-painted door had tended to stick, he would thud his shoulder against it and give it a strong shove in order to open it.


A few mornings later my mother phoned me, in a considerable state of agitation.

“You’ll have to phone the police for me!” she said urgently.  “Last night an intruder was at the back door, ringing the doorbell!”


I felt my hair stand on end.  Being of a nervous disposition, Mum had been in the habit of barricading herself in whenever Dad was out at night.  Both front and back doors had a lock, bolts and a chain.  There were two different doorbells – another safety precaution, so that she could tell whether the caller was a stranger at the front door, or Dad, who always used the back door after parking the car at the rear of the house.  He was the only person who ever rang the back doorbell.


“You must just have had a bad dream”, I replied as soothingly as I could – trying to control my own alarm – “In any case, what kind of burglar would announce his presence by politely ringing the doorbell?”  That worked for a couple of days - until the same thing happened again! 


Now I faced a dilemma.  What was I to do?  Phone the police, as she requested – but tell them what, exactly?  Remembering that she always steered clear of any talk of a possible after-life, I could not risk frightening her by suggesting that these might have been paranormal experiences.   That would have been too unkind, especially now that she was all alone at night.  I just had to continue my attempts to try to soothe her.


A few days later I was bending down, tying four-year-old Sally’s pixie hood under her chin when she suddenly came out with “I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m really dead!”  then skipped off out into the garden!  I straightened up, looking after her in amazement, but she was busy playing with a toy.  She obviously had no idea of the significance of the words she had just uttered…   (Some years later she told me casually that she had seen her Grandpa after his death.  He had peeped out from behind a door, playing ‘Keek-a-boo!’ with her, as he had done ever since she was a baby.)


By now I felt close to breaking point.  Day and night, I battled with huge questions concerning life and death, until I was in a state of total nervous exhaustion.  To my shock and grief had now been added the primitive fear of an invisible dimension of spirit!


Dear blog reader, what would you do in such circumstances?  What would you expect to happen next?  What advice would you give me?


What actually did happen is described in Chapter 4 of my book Joyful Witness.  If you don’t have a copy, here are two clues! –  the first is the title of the book; the second is the title of that Chapter: Reborn. 


Suffice it to say here that over the next few months, the words of the Lord’s Prayer became more and more precious to me, as did the 23^rd Psalm, especially verse 4…   

Deo gratias