A life in letters: Toilet man

One of our best family holidays was in 2005, when we spent the best part of a summer fortnight in our new Vango tent on the Glororum Caravan Park at Bamburgh in Northumbria. We explored Alnwick Castle and Gardens, including the magical tree house, we ‘window-shopped till we dropped’ at Newcastle’s Metro Centre, we crossed the causeway to Lindisfarne. I teased the girls about the Grey Starling for which Bamburgh was famous.

It was our first and only family tent holiday, and even though the weather was coolish, something about the experience stilled and calmed me, as we sat reading in the gas lamplight in the gathering dusk, and later lay in our sleeping bags listening to the laughter and chat of neighbouring campers which seemed so close, slowly dying out as they too drifted off to bed.

I remember the afternoon we came back to find the inside of the canvas alive with minute beasties which, when we sought her advice in panic, the lady at the site office told us unconcernedly came from a nearby cornfield which was being harvested.

Regularly, sometime after midnight, our younger daughter Bethany, who was 9, would need to go to the loo. She would reach a hand urgently through the canvas door of the pod where Lorna and I were sleeping and shake my shoulder or my face and ask me to accompany her to the toilet block. I’d drag myself out of the sleeping back, find my shoes and anorak in the darkness, and unzip the tent.

Bethany and I would make our way together along the sparingly-lit tarmac. As night followed night, she got into the habit, when she needed to waken me, of hissing ‘Toilet man!’

For some reason it seemed to be, and not just in the sweetness of nostalgia, that these brief nightly trips were among the most precious experiences of parenthood, and I savoured every second of them. Hand in hand, we’d walk in sleepy silence through the small-hours chill in the hush that wrapped the campsite in sleep. We could hear the roar of waves breaking on the distant shingle and see the warmly-floodlit façade of Bamburgh Castle across the fields. I would nip into the Gents, and then wait outside the toilet block while my daughter did her business, and then we’d go back to the tent. Bethany and her dad. Together, and, it seemed to me, profoundly at one.

We’d climb back into our sleeping bags on wobbly inflatable mattresses. Silence. Until the next time. ‘Toilet man!’