It was the light that said she was home safe.
Climbing the house stairs on a gloomy night in late October last year, I turned the corner onto the landing and there in front me was the golden glow around the door that said my student daughter was back and in her favourite place - the bedroom she’d grown up in and that had been her sanctuary throughout her childhood.
Two months before, my daughter, her mum and brother had tolerated my lack of patience and wild cursing at other drivers as we travelled an hour and half around London to drop her off at university for the first time.
After we’d lived as a tightly knit gang of four for the past two decades, she was off to give the world a go on her own, taking up a room in a university hall of residence with as many of her possessions we could cram in the car.
'In front me was the golden glow around the door that said my student daughter was back and in her favourite place'
GB News
I don’t know about the other three, but I didn’t really enjoy the moment we prepared to leave her for her first night in a room behind a clunking great fire door that looked like it had come off worse from regular student party nights.
Like most socially inept dads at key landmark moments in their children’s lives I bumbled around trying to make myself useful.
Showing the polite patience she’d always granted me throughout her first 18 years, she allowed me to do the blu-tacking - putting up the classic film posters we’d bought her to cover up the years of drawing pin hole damage left behind on the walls from previous Freshers.
As I busied myself making sure the posters were straight, her mum and brother made the bed while she was finding which bit of the fridge in the communal kitchen was hers - preparing to mark out her territory in the inevitable battle over “who left toast crumbs in my butter?”
It’s the little simple details you remember, and putting up those posters will always stay with me as the last thing I did for her before she truly became an adult, and we left her alone that afternoon.
I thought of that moment as I looked at the families of Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, two of the victims from the early morning horror in Nottingham on Tuesday.
Just like us, they too will have experienced the university drop-off feeling of excitement and anxiety in their stomachs late last summer.
But unlike fortunate families like mine, they won’t see the glow of light around their son and daughter’s bedroom door again.
I can’t pretend to say I can imagine how they feel right now.
What I do know from experience is that every parent frets when their children start enjoying a social life, particularly in that mysterious world away from home.
The first real taste of freedom that university life grants - when you can leave a nightclub at 4am on a weeknight and sleep in until 1pm – is a rite of passage that millions of British kids have enjoyed for decades.
Mums and dads back home go through their own rite of passage – the first time nervously awaiting the blue tick on a WhatsApp message they’ve sent – a sign that their child has read and received the message and has got back safe.
Grace’s mother Sinead, addressed the vigil crowd gathered in Nottingham on a Thursday evening, to praise her “beautiful baby girl” who she said, “wasn’t just beautiful on the outside, she was beautiful on the inside.”
But it was the simple line about Grace and Barnaby’s last moments that hit me, and I’m sure many more, hardest.
“All they were doing was walking home, just walking home after a night out…”
As the bare facts of what happened that summer’s morning emerged later that day you could sense a growing sense of anger.
A 31-year-old man has been charged with murder and attempted murder following the horrific incident in Nottingham
PA
Social media was a place where a depressingly familiar refrain about how a horror like this could happen on the streets of Britain played out – with many queuing up to point the finger of blame.
We’ve been here before and it’s understandable.
I felt a bit of it myself – though I hope my cynicism about where society is going is due to being in the depths of world-weary middle age.
It didn’t help that night that four young lads started brawling on my train home, heightening the already quiet communal commuter tension that emerges in the hours after an incident such as in Nottingham.
The swift switch of our political class from platitudes about the deaths of Grace, Barnaby and Ian Coates back to debate about cakes and kangaroo courts doesn’t fill us with hope that they will ever get a grip on this country’s societal ills.
But families like the O’Malley-Kumars, the Webbers and the Coates’s display the decency and dignity that does still exist across the country.
Unfortunately, it takes events like these to show that overall, this is still a decent country, full of decent, loving people.
As Barnaby’s mother said: “Please hold not hate that relates to any colour, sex or religion.”
And though those families will never see the comforting glow around their son and daughter’s bedroom door, they’ve shown this week that we should never let the light of hope go out in our hearts.
