The tanks rolled on over the children and the dog rolled over in his sleep.  His legs churned up the air - he was chasing Germans.  An old dog, he saw them in helmets with spikes, and knew them as Prussians.
'That dog's going to die,' Henry remarked one morning as he stepped over the dog, which was lying in the porch.  The dog looked up without raising his head as a person might do upon hearing a particularly stupid remark, then went back to looking at the flowers in the garden.
'Henry,' said Henry's grandmother, 'Don't let the dog lie in the porch like that.'
Henry knows very well that you can't teach an old dog new tricks.  His grandmother will keep nagging him about the dog, and no amount of Henry wagging his finger at the dog will change the dog's behaviour.

Henry himself was not of much use.  He wasn't of use in the war, because he had a bad back, two bad knees, a bad heart and a bad constitution.  The only thing he could eat without coming down with something was a lettuce sandwich.  These he ate in the comfort of his own home.  Every morning he went around to his grandmother's house and invented three square and balanced meals quite off the top of his head.  He was careful to vary both style and content, but was clever enough to be wary of of regularity.   Once he had lentil soup twice in one week, because he'd overestimated his hunger and put the remainder of the soup in the 'fridge for another day.  Certain foodstuffs went on special offer at the supermarket.  Occasionally he ate out.  Sometimes he threw caution to the winds and had a salad.  Perhaps one day, he thought, one day when I'm feeling cocky, I'll have a sandwich.  He shivered at the thought, and his grandmother made him a temporary present of her electric blanket.  It made him feel as though he were being very slowly cooked, salty with his own perspiration, and didn't feel like eating his lettuce sandwich the next day.

Henry therefore resolved never to take a holiday abroad, which was a pity because there was a good-looking girl living in Paris who would doubtless have taken a fancy to his white skin and flapping arms, and perhaps she would have fed him up a bit and taken him home and up the aisle and into a French bingo club.  But it was not to be, and quel dommage, Henry Lambert died in an English puddle while on holiday in Cornwall, never having been to Europe and never having held to his heart so much as a hot water bottle since the incident of the electric blanket.

That was how his grandfather referred to it.  Henry's state of lovenessness was to him "the incident of the blanket".  He referred to Henry's grandmother as "the marriage incident", and held throughout his life that women were a distraction from the achievement of great, great things.  The teenaged Henry had once, after a particularly enlightening science lesson, tried to explain to his father's father how he, Henry, had come about, and the necessity of a woman in such an operation.
'That's as may be,' said Grandfather.  'But I had nothing to do with it.'

Whether Grandfather was even in Henry's family was a source of much confusion.  It was later discovered that as a boy Grandfather had been an avid reader of detective novels.  When he had read every detective novel in the public library he became depressed and was drunk for two years.  He emerged when the possibilities of mail order were revealed to him, and was disgusted by the fact that he had wasted two years of reading time, and that he was now encumbered with a wife and child, the results of an apathetic courtship, marriage and copulation.  He resented this, and made it clear that he thought he'd been tricked out of a great deal of money he could have used to build up a personal collection of dustjacketed hardbacks with a dial to regulate the humidity of their surroundings.

'Go to France,' he told Henry.  'If I'd gone to France, you wouldn't be here.'
The other relatives shook their heads and told everyone they knew that Grandfather was a nasty old man, and very poor in both pocket and spirit.
'Insensitive,' they said.
It was true that Grandfather listened in to the radio broadcasts with the air of an easygoing uncle who allows little Nazis to rummage in his drawers for sweets.  He winked when they invaded Poland, and not even the dog took him seriously .  Once he laid pearls of wisdom in the toilet pan like eggs (they turned out to be dried peas he'd mistakenly ingested).  This was real proof, the relatives said, that Grandfather was a witless old man who needed somebody to look after him, but none of them was going to be the one to do it.