The Backpack Press

My Front Door
by Clive Collins

The opening and closing of the front door at my childhood home ushered us through our lives. Our house was small, the last one in a nineteenth-century jerry-built terrace – two rooms and a kitchen downstairs, two rooms and a box room up. There was no hallway; the front door in the front room opened directly on the street.
We seldom used that room or its door. The post came through its letterbox three times a day when I was young, the envelopes falling onto the doormat like heavy leaves in a repetitive autumn. Late in the afternoon, later than the day’s last post, the local newspaper arrived, half its rolled-up bulk pushing sinisterly against the door curtain like the barrel of an assassin’s pistol. When people passed in and out of the door there was always a sense of occasion. My father opened…