MY GRANDMOTHER wasn’t going anywhere. She was the tooth that wobbled but wouldn’t let go, and time worried away at her with its tongue. It was an unequal struggle but I was on her side, if we have to pick one. In her ninetieth year I thought it would be nice
to get my grandmother online. I’m not the first grandchild who has begun such a project. It’s a favour my generation bestows on hers: we hook them up with the mess we’ve made. I arrived at her house with an inexpensive laptop that I’d bought before I leſt London, we set it up in her little front room, and she put out an antique lace mat for it on the beeswaxed occasional table. She asked if the computer used the ordinary electricity, and when I confirmed that it did, she connected the power to the socket where she normally plugged in the Hoover. Te laptop made its fanfare, its trill of proud notes with anxious chimes coming in little resurgences aſter the main event. It was a child who had done a trick on its bicycle and wanted to make sure you’d been watching. My grandmother eyed it coolly. She’d taught kindergarten for 40 years. She made us tea. Te procedure hadn’t changed. In 1941, she’d been watching a movie when a
bomb came through the roof of the cinema. She’d bled almost to death. Her fiancé had died in the seat beside her. Died instantly, is how the story was always told to us, although one wonders how quick these things ever are. He was in seat 4F. My grandmother said he’d given her 4E because the man in 3F was too tall to see over. It comes down to these mundane things in the end: chances with no loſtier significance. Te film was High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino. Te bomb was a little SD4, one of a string of twenty that joined Whitechapel to Bow one matinée aſternoon with a long ellipsis of evenly spaced craters, as if... well, as if life went on. I once asked my grandmother about that day. She told me Bogart was good in it. I’d carefully planned the operation to get her
online. I’d made arrangements for a cable connection ahead of time. On the installation day I’d spoken with the engineer on the phone, from the back of an airport taxi. I asked him how he intended to route
the cable: would he run it along the top of the skirting, or the base? Really I was worried about his muddy boots on my grandmother’s carpet, and that she would be confused when he came. Te likelihood was that on the day he knocked,
she would be living in another decade. For her, the year was a four-digit setting on a combination padlock and she had her thumbs on the tumblers, cheerfully trying out numbers and hoping for a click. If she opened the door one morning and found a sci-fi future out there, with the sky full of personal gyrocopters, with cold fusion reactors where her bedding plants used to be, she would afford the visitor no outward sign of her confusion. If the doorbell sounded and it was my grandfather, home from the war with his duffel bag, she wouldn’t be a bit surprised and they would simply take it from there. I think the engineer caught the note in my voice.
He said it was OK: that he had a grandmother himself. Te way he said it made me feel we were in a club of two. I was jetlagged and grateful and I nearly cried in the back of the cab. We agreed to tell her he was just fixing a fault with the phone. I’m guessing he took his shoes off. My grandmother still had a way of looking at you as if she was deciding what to write on your report at the end of term. He’d set up the wi-fi unit on the telephone table
in the hallway. She’d waited until he was gone, I should think, before slipping a doily under it. At some point during the installation process, it’s likely she told the engineer that she ran the kindergarten from this house and that the telephone number was Lowestoſt 8. He would have smiled indulgently, already knowing the eleven-digit number of her landline. My grandmother would have smiled back. When the telephone reached Lowestoſt, they’d installed the first units in accordance with the greatest need. Te doctor had been Lowestoſt 2, and the lifeboat, Lowestoſt 1. Te cold gales still came in off the North Sea and whipped the harbour approaches into a white fury prejudicial to shipping. Tey still blew inland across the fens and cut through children’s winter coats and made them pale and chesty. But the phone numbers as they proliferated had lost their ordinal urgency. My