Beatrix and Norman

Every young person should have an old person as a friend. Every old person should have a young person as a friend. Old people know things that young people don’t know. Young people know things that old people don’t know. Together we can learn from each other.

The picture above is of my niece, Beatrix. We call her Trix or Trixie. The photograph was taken at the Cornwallis Circle Play Area in Whitstable, not far from where I lived, on the 3rd September 2012. Beatrix was about 7 ½ years old at the time. She’s 19 now.

Trix is very important in my life. When she was born I was at a very low ebb. My life felt like a failure. I’d set out to be a writer, but things had gone wrong. I’d had a few good years but, one by one, all of my contacts began to fail. I’d lost my column in Mixmag. I’d lost my column in the Big Issue. I’d lost my column in the Guardian. I’d written four books by now, but the last three hadn’t sold well. It was looking like the end of my career.

I was sinking deeper into depression, living alone in a flat above a carpet shop in Tankerton, a suburb of Whitstable. It was a mile or two from the center of town and all my usual haunts. I was very isolated. Writing is a solitary business. It takes a certain inner motivation to get it done. Not having anyone to write for, not knowing how to get people to pay attention, was having a deleterious effect on my mental health.

It was a vicious cycle. The less I wrote, the more empty I felt. The more empty I felt, the less I was able to write. Writing is my way of engaging with the world. It’s like the completion of a circuit. Things are never quite real for me until they’ve been put into words. I was unable to act or do anything useful with my time. I was becoming increasingly alcohol dependent. I spent more than three years virtually housebound, hardly ever going out except to buy my nightly cans of lager.

There was one particularly bad night. I’d just got back from Scotland where I was visiting a friend with the aim of writing a book. It hadn’t worked out. I’d fallen out with my friend and the book seemed an impossible task. My sister had picked me up from the airport and was dropping me off at my flat. She said something, I forget what, and something broke in me. I was thinking about my sister’s life. She had a house of her own, a husband, a child on the way, a future, while all I could see for myself was endless emptiness and despair. I burst into tears. It was my lowest point.

After that I resolved to do something to change my life. I got a job. I was delivering leaflets through people’s doors. The fresh air and the exercise, the daily dose of sunlight, began to make me feel better. One day I was out delivering. I got to one particular front door. There was a postman there, about to push letters through the letterbox. He laughed, held out his hand and took my leaflets to add to his stash. There was a twinkle in his eye. He looked so at ease with his life. I resolved to get a job as a postal worker.

Trix was born in February 2005. By May that year I’d become a postal worker. It was a wrench. I’d been almost famous once, now I was anonymous. I remember delivering letters one day and passing a friend on the street. I called out to him. He looked around, baffled. He couldn’t see where I was. I was dressed in my uniform and had become part of the street furniture. When he did catch sight of me he laughed.

So that was the atmosphere into which Trix was born: me as a postal worker, beginning to make sense of my life again after a period of depression. Our relationship was based upon recreation parks and insults. The insults were mainly of the scatological kind, which children always enjoy. We called each other names, like poo-face and smelly. I’d pick her up from school when her parents were busy and we’d go to the park together. We had a project, to visit as many parks as possible, and to review them for a blog. I still have the notes, many of them in Beatrix’ handwriting. She’d name the park apparatus: “The Swinging Mattress,” “The Flying Diamond,” “The Bouncing See-saw,” “The Crazy Climbing Frame,” “The Scary Fast Spinny Thing,” “Wobble the Whale,” “The Bumpy Dinosaur,” “The Sliding Squid” etc.

I have lots of pictures of her, climbing and swinging and spinning on the playground equipment, leaping about from platform to platform like a monkey in the jungle. Kids love to climb. They love to be called little monkeys because that’s what they are. They have natural hand-to-eye co-ordination and an almost telepathic relationship with trees. I always had complete confidence in her and her abilities.

I’d watch the other adults hovering about by their children in a state of nervous anxiety, which would communicate itself to the kids. Children can sense these things and would often react by doing exactly what the adults most feared. The child would falter, the adult would become more agitated, and a feedback loop of nervousness and uncertainty would take all the pleasure out of the occasion. Me: I just stood back and enjoyed the spectacle, helping Trix when she needed it, giving her a bunk up when she couldn’t reach, but otherwise staying out of the way. Over the years I watched as her confidence grew, as she took on more ambitious climbs. She could climb lampposts and flag poles as well as climbing frames and trees. She could climb anything. She never put a foot wrong, and while the other children were tripping over themselves halfway up the frame, Trix was balanced on top, poised and at ease, her long hair flowing in the breeze, absolutely in her element, like a bird about to take flight.

When she was very young she was a girlie girl. She liked to wear pink. Then one day—I forget what age—she announced she didn’t like pink any more, she liked blue, and she wasn’t a girl any more, she was a boy. Her name was Norman, she said. Why, I asked? Because boys have more fun. She remained Norman for many years. All of her friends called her Norman, or Normy. All their parents too. We all had to call her Norman, which, for some unknown reason, struck me as hilarious. It’s such a comical name. It shows she always had a sense of humor.

I had a Nissan Micra with a sunroof which I’d inherited from my dad. We used to go to a holiday park half way between Whitstable and Herne Bay. It was served by a network of private roads with a speed limit of five mph. I’d drive through slowly, Trixie standing on the front seat with her head and upper body out of the sunroof waving her arms in the air. She took to entering and exiting the car through the sunroof as well. Doors were much less fun. Later I passed the car onto her dad. I think he was a bit surprised the first time he parked up and she climbed out of the sunroof and onto the bonnet instead of going through the door like a normal person.

All that was many years ago. Trixie’s grown up and become a young adult. She’s kind, considerate, always funny, occasionally opinionated. She tells me off when I do something entitled, like snapping my fingers to get a waitress’ attention. She was a waitress herself for a while. She’s doing a BA Hons in Television Production at the University of Westminster in London. She’s taken to the London life. She says it makes her feel grown up and part of the real world, and she thinks she’ll probably stay there. She sent me a letter. It was addressed to Stinky Fart Face and signed Monkey Poo Brains. This article’s in the way of a reply.

So that’s it, Trix. I feel privileged to have known you, to have watched you grow up and to have played some part in your life. I wish you a bright future, all the love you need to thrive, and all the confidence to win it. Pay attention to everything and everyone. There are no accidents in this world, only lessons to learn. Each new generation has to begin again and discover the essential truths for themselves, and each old generation has to step aside and accept that really we know nothing at all.

—Follow Chris Stone on X: @ChrisJamesStone