grandmother was Lowestoſt 8. It was everyone else who had forgotten. Tree months aſter her fiancé was killed, she met
the man who would become my grandfather. It happened during a bombing raid on Liverpool docks – my grandmother had a knack for heavy ordnance at both ends of a relationship. When the air-raid siren sounded she ran for the cover of a little dugout where she found a red-headed officer of artillery, two years her junior, already sheltering. Tey admired each other immediately and must have admitted as much, at least implicitly, since they exchanged addresses and agreed to write. I don’t know how the process worked in those days. Sparkling eyes and chaste smiles, doubtless. It was before the invention of colour. I like to think of them alone in that dugout, with its wholly inadequate tin roof, as the ground shook with explosions coming closer and closer. I wonder if they held hands – if they clung to each other, strangers for whom terror was a mutual acquaintance. And aſterwards, when the all-clear sounded, I wonder which of them first found their voice to extend that providential solidarity into a provisional future in which the Luſtwaffe could not be relied upon to enforce such particular closeness. In my grandmother’s garden, rain was coming
down steadily, pooling in the hubs of the lupins. Te internet connection worked straight away. I clicked through the computer’s set-up wizard while my grandmother lit a fire. She had a trick of using a page of a broadsheet newspaper to get it going. She held the news page up to cover the whole mouth of the fireplace save for an inch-high slot at the base, forcing a low ingress of air to rouse the smouldering kindling into a roar. Te fire once established, she would surrender the news to the flames. In recent years the Times had gone to a tabloid format and she had switched to the Telegraph. Te Times had sent her a multiple-choice feedback card, hoping to understand why she had cancelled her subscription. Tere had been no box relating to her particular circumstance so she had ticked “Other (please specify)” and written: “Impractical”. She was a perfectly shipshape vessel that had simply become
unmoored from time. It could happen to anyone. When she’d opened the door to me, she’d beamed
and called me James. James is my uncle, my mother’s brother. I resemble him a little if you can look past the fact that I’m thirty years younger, which my grandmother can, quite easily. She mistakes us for each other all the time. We’ve all learned not to correct her and instead simply to perform our duties under whatever name she draws from the tombola of years. We have become adept in the family at being our parents, our cousins, our children. What at first was a thing of amusement or an awkward duty has finally become a source of relief. It took my grandmother to remind us that we are all interchangeable, that none of us bears the particular responsibility of clinging, limpet-like and earnestly, to a calendar year that has no reciprocal fondness for us. I accorded my grandmother an email address and
set her password to the name of her village and the year of the coronation. When I got to the part of the set-up wizard that concerned the internet settings, I experienced the first loss of conviction. Looked at from London in the summer of 2012, it had seemed a self-evident benefit to be connected to three billion users in real time and to benefit from their contributions, clothed and otherwise, to the human experience. Here in East Anglia, in a year subject to continual revision, and with the smell of wood smoke in the room, I enabled the parental filter. I was, finally, embarrassed for my grandmother to see what we had become. We drank the tea and I showed her how to use
the trackpad on the laptop. Tis, at least, was fun. She was thrilled with the way the pointer on the screen aped the movement of her fingertip. We laughed together, delightedly, the way we’d giggled when I was a child and she had shown me the trick of hypnotising chickens. It had been before breakfast, late in the last century, and we had been collecting eggs in the coop she and my grandfather kept in those days. She’d shown me how to do it, just for kicks, and now the moment persisted in the slow spirals her fingertip described on the trackpad. I was eight. I closed my eyes at the memory. Te summers