Why Knock is called Knock

Before mobile phones, this is what you did. You finished your tea. You walked down the street. You stood outside your friend’s front door. You knocked.

Sometimes their mum answered. Sometimes their nan. Sometimes the friend’s older brother, eating toast, who said “she’s upstairs” without moving. Sometimes the friend themselves, already wearing their shoes. You walked to the park, or to the corner shop for a Twix, or to the playing field at the end of the road. By teatime you came home. Your parents didn’t know exactly where you’d been and weren’t worried.

That’s the verb the brand is named after.

What the verb actually was

Knocking for a friend was three things at once.

It was a physical act, performed at a real door, in front of an adult who lived in the same street and who you’d known since you were five.

It was a negotiation, of sorts. The friend might say yes. The friend might say their mum had said no. The friend’s mum might intervene. You had to read all of that on a doorstep, in twenty seconds, in November rain.

And it was an invitation to a few hours of unobserved time. Whatever happened next, Snake on the back of the bus, climbing the hawthorn behind the swings, swapping Beano cards on someone’s bedroom floor, walking the long way home so you could keep talking, happened with nobody watching. Not your parents. Not your friends’ parents. Not a stranger with a smartphone. Not an algorithm.

What replaced it

A WhatsApp group, mostly. A “you up?” at half eight on a Sunday evening, from a bedroom, never closer than a bedroom. Photos of someone’s lunch. A row of laughing emojis from one of the boys you used to actually laugh next to. A small, glowing rectangle that records what you do.

The replacement is not, in itself, evil. The replacement is missing the three things knocking did at once.

There is no doorstep. There is no adult who knows your mum. There is no negotiation that ends, three minutes later, with the two of you wandering off into a few hours nobody is recording.

What we’d like to make easy to restore

Not all of it. The 1990s had problems too. Children walked home in the dark across roads that were a great deal more dangerous, traffic-wise. The friend group at the door was sometimes a friendship group that excluded one specific person on purpose. Childhood was not pure.

What’s worth restoring is:

• Snake. The first phone game most British people over thirty-five played. Still on the Nokia 3210. Still calming.
• Knocking for a friend. A child with a basic phone can still ring the friend’s house, but the doorstep version with the friend’s nan answering is the version that put you in a real conversation with a real adult, which has its own value.
• Being silly without it being posted. The cartwheel on the field. The wig from the dressing-up box. The lip-sync to Now 47. The bad joke that didn’t quite work. Children can recover from a bad joke in front of three friends. They cannot easily recover from one filmed and shared.
• Finding yourself, slowly, with nobody watching. The actual point. Adolescence is, in part, a series of small private experiments, clothes, music, opinions, accents, jokes, that you try, abandon, try again. Doing that in front of an audience of three hundred classmates with screenshots is a different developmental task. It might be impossible.

What Knock does about it

We sell a phone, a Nokia 3210, mostly, that doesn’t make those four things harder to come by. We don’t pretend the phone restores the doorstep on its own. The doorstep needs friends, weather and a willingness to walk down the road. But the phone removes the rectangle that would otherwise be in your child’s pocket while they were trying to do all of that.

That’s where the name comes from. Knock.