were long and hot, with droning bees and the sweet hay smell of the chicken coop. She asked me how the trackpad worked. It
brought me from my reverie and I was startled to be thirty-six years old. In truth neither of us knew how it worked. My grandmother expected these things were done with concealed wires that ran beneath the surface. I wondered what else we could do with the
internet. I suppose I wanted to showcase the best of it, so we went to a mapping website and looked at images of her village. At the highest magnification her cottage and garden were visible, captured by satellites. I’d expected an expression of wonder. A gasp and an affirmation that it was wonderful, what they could do these days. Instead my grandmother narrowed her eyes and asked why they had taken photos of her home from space. I said that it wasn’t just her, that
half a dozen desperate blockade-breaking ships, had all been sent to the bottom of the Mediterranean by U-boats and dive bombers. My grandmother had simply assumed something
they did it to everyone. She asked why on Earth. I said that it was just nice; that people liked to see their places from above, and to check out the places where their friends and family lived. She brightened. In that case, she said, we should go and look at Malta and see if we could see George. George was my grandfather. He was in Malta, in
“My grandparents were correspondents long before they were lovers, and the mail in those days was less reliable than the human heart”
the war, in the siege, and when I understood that this was what my grandmother meant, I explained that the satellite photos were recent; that no trace of George’s presence in Malta could possibly remain. She gave me a level look, and reminded me that she wrote to him there every week. My grandmother’s letters to my grandfather
were a matter of record in the family. While he was stuck in the siege for three years, enduring daily bombing and starvation rations, she had written to him constantly. Tey had agreed to write and so they did, my grandmother entirely unworried that she never received a reply. Aſter the siege was liſted it turned out that her letters had mostly got through and that his, batched into
like that must have happened. Her letters continued, uninterrupted, taking a cheerful tone as they detailed the joys of her life and skipped over its privations as undramatically as a walker in tennis shoes might step over puddles. I think I’ve read most of those letters. Te best is one where she describes, in 1942, the first consignment of oranges to arrive in the port of Lowestoſt since the outbreak of war. Te stevedores cracked a case open so that the locals could gather round to look, before the oranges were put on a barge and sent up the river to London. Just to look was enough. Te unimaginable pleasures of peeling and tasting were reserved for the wealthy of the capital. Tere on the brown stone quayside of the docks, the startling ingress of colour into the subdued palette of the war was taken as a sign of improving fortune. “Oh, George –” (she wrote) “– I know it sounds daſt but they were just so... orange!” I oſten wonder what my
grandfather wrote in reply. Like all the men of his regiment his sunken letters disintegrated. Teir words dissolved into molecules. Teir voices float boats now and surround us when we swim in the sea, but the exact phrasing is no longer known. My grandparents were correspondents long before they were lovers, and the mail in those days was less reliable than the human heart. I showed my grandmother how to use the search function on the mapping website, and we took a look at Malta. My grandfather was stationed in the highlands, at a mountain fort in Binjemma. I was expecting to see nothing but my grandmother had more faith than I had, and she wasn’t at all surprised to see the huge concrete artillery emplacement, clearly visible exactly where it ought to be. “Tere’s George,” she said excitedly, and who was I to tell