The water is off at the main and the electric is off at the box. Van 41 is warm. I have put my hand on the wall.
The site closes on the last Sunday in October and opens on the first Friday in March.
In between there is me. I do three visits a week and I live eight miles off, and the job is simple: drive round, look at everything, write down what is wrong, and stop things getting worse. A branch through a roof in January is four hundred pounds. A branch through a roof in January that nobody sees until March is a scrapped van.
Two hundred and six pitches. Sixty of them are seasonal tourers that go away, and the rest are static holiday homes that stay.
Everything gets drained down.
That is not optional and it is not casual. The water is off at the main by the gate and every van's system is blown through with air, because a burst in a static costs more than the static is worth. The electric goes off at the distribution boxes, one box per row of eight, with a rotary isolator you turn with your hand and a padlock through the hasp.
I do it myself in the last week of October. It takes two days.
Van 41 is warm.
It is in row F, which is the row furthest from the road, backing onto the woodland belt. It is a 2009 static, cream and green, with a wooden veranda that the owners paid to have built and which is now weathered grey.
I noticed it in my first winter, which was five years ago, and I noticed it because of the frost.
Everything is white at seven in the morning in January. Every roof, every veranda, every step. On F row the whole line is white and 41 is not, and it is not the trees, because 42 is under the same trees and 42 is white.
I went up and I put my hand on the wall.
Warm is a word people stretch, so here are the numbers.
I have an infrared thermometer in the Land Rover, the pistol grip sort, because you need one for the gas bottles. On a morning where the air was minus one and the wall of van 42 read minus one, the wall of van 41 read fourteen degrees.
Fourteen. That is a house with the heating on.
It reads about that all winter. It drops a bit in the very cold snaps and it comes up again. In November when the air is eight or nine it is still fourteen.
The obvious explanation is that somebody has turned the electric back on and is living in it, and I want to walk you through why that is not it, because I spent a whole winter on that theory and it cost me a lot of sleep.
The isolator for F row is off. I check it every visit. It is off and the padlock is through it and the padlock is mine, one of a set of nineteen, and I have the only keys.
I fitted a meter reader on the F row supply in my second winter. Not a clever one, an old spinning disc unit from a scrap box in the workshop, wired in after the isolator so it can only see what goes past. Five months. It has not turned.
The gas bottles at 41 are the ones I took off in October and they are in the cage by the office with a tag on.
There is no wood burner. Statics do not have them and the insurance forbids it.
There is no smell. A van that somebody is living in smells of that person within a week and you can tell from the step.
I have been inside.
The keys for every van are in the office in a cabinet, because we hold them for the owners, and going in is part of the job if there is a reason. In my third winter I gave myself a reason and I wrote it in the book: reported condensation, F41, inspected.
It is an empty caravan.
Two bedrooms made up with the mattresses stripped and the bedding bagged, the way owners leave them. A kitchen with the cupboards open, which is what you do so they do not go musty. A lounge with the cushions stood on their edges. Everything correct. Everything as it should be at the end of October.
And warm. Warm the way a house is warm, evenly, with no source. I stood in the middle of the lounge with the thermometer and got fourteen off the floor, fourteen off the ceiling, fourteen off the inside of the window.
Fourteen off the inside of the window with minus one on the outside of it, and no condensation. There should have been running water down that glass. There was nothing.
I did not stay long.
I looked the owners up in my fourth winter.
That was not really allowed and I did it anyway, on the office computer, one evening when I had gone in to do the invoices.
The pitch fee is paid every January by standing order. It has been paid every January since 2009. It goes out of an account in a name I will not give, and the address we hold is a house in a town about forty minutes away.
They have not been on site since 2016.
That is not from the computer. That is from Iris, who runs the shop in season and who has been there twenty two years and who remembers everybody. I asked her, as an idle thing, over a cup of tea in March. Do the people at 41 come much.
She put her cup down.
She said: not since the accident.
I did not ask her what accident and she did not tell me, and we have never talked about it again, and it is the single strangest thing about the whole business.
I have had a hundred conversations with Iris. She will tell you anything about anybody on that site. She once told me about a man's divorce while she was cutting a loaf.
She put her cup down and she said four words and she changed the subject to the roof of the toilet block, and I let her.
I have not reported it.
The reasons have changed over the years and I know how that sounds. The first year it was that I did not want to be the new warden who rings up in January saying a van is haunted. The second year it was that I had a meter and a thermometer and no explanation, and a report with no explanation in it becomes a report about the reporter.
Now it is something else, and I have not said it to anybody.
If I report it, somebody comes out. And what somebody would do is turn the electric on to test it, and open the van up, and get a fan heater in there to prove it is condensation, and put it in a file.
And then it would not be warm any more. That is my honest fear. Not that something would happen, but that they would fix it, the way you fix a draught.
Because a fourteen degree caravan on a minus one morning, in a field of two hundred and five cold ones, is somebody keeping a house.
I do my last visit of the winter in the last week of February. Check the water back on, walk the rows, note the jobs for the March lads.
I always finish on F.
And every year, on that visit, 41 is cold. Not cooling. Cold, the same as the rest of the row, the same as the air, with condensation on the inside of the windows like every other van on the site.
Every year, by the last week of February, whoever it is has gone.
They are back by the second week of November. I have checked, with the thermometer, on the same date three years running, and it comes up over about a fortnight, like a house warming through after somebody has arrived and put the heating on and gone to bed.
The site is open from March to October and there are four hundred people on it and children on bikes and somebody's radio going, and van 41 sits in row F with the shutters up and nobody in it.
They only come when it is empty.