Who says Grandma's too old to surf?

Batley's older generation may have trouble with mice, but when it comes to e-mail there's no stopping them.

When Lucy was young, she says, she danced in long dresses and silver shoes - "I thought I was it." Now she is 82, walks with the aid of a white stick, and she is learning about IT.

Lucy, from Batley, West Yorkshire, has been making new friends through electronic mail as part of a project called 3i: international intergenerational Internet. The idea is to get old people involved with new technology by encouraging them to swap stories and reminiscences via e-mail. First, they corresponded with local children; now they are moving on to write to groups of senior citizens overseas.

The old people batting for Britain are the Friday Group, seven spirited pensioners with a combined age of 580 who attend the Age Concern day centre in Batley on Fridays. They are ideal candidates: having run the gamut of basket-weaving, bingo and macrame, they are willing to try anything by way of a diversion.

Each pensioner was assigned a schoolchild from Batley to correspond with. The children, aged between nine and 11, were already familiar with e-mail because the teacher Chris Levack, the man behind the 3i project, wired all the schools in Batley to the Internet two years ago.

He says: "We are just trying to see whether the older folk find anything in the Internet." The Batley e-mails, which will be published in a special Web site later this year, reveal that they are having a whale of a time.

The introductory letters are restrained, listing little more than name, age and the briefest of CVs. But by week two, prompted by the children's curiosity, the pensioners were racing down Memory Lane, back to the days when a Yorkshire mill girl's wage was nine shillings a week, and there was "no messing about in the classroom".

All life is here in the correspondence, from poems learnt by heart 80 years ago to first-hand social history. They may not have mastered the use of emoticons - those signs you incorporate in e-mails to show how you feel - but their words drum up a response. When Lucy described her wedding to her correspondent, 11-year-old Lee, he replied: "I think you'd be a lovely lady to see - I'd like to meet you." They did meet recently, and there were tears all round.

It is easy to conjure up images of super-grannies whizzing through cyberspace. But, by their own admission, the members of the Friday Group are "a bit frail", and three are partly blind. Just as most need help to nip down to the shops, support is also required on the computing front.

Assisting them is Val Asquith. Described as "a peer group tutor", she is actually only in her fifties, but was brought in because "we don't want a young whizzkid going to old people and saying 'come on, log on'." When she volunteered to help, Val "just about knew the bottom of a computer from the top", but after a one-day training course and a little practice, she carted the computer to the day centre, found a phone socket, and away they all went.

Val says: "It has been wonderful how this has got them going. They talk about the project with family and friends, and spend time during the week building up to what they are going to write on Fridays.

"Because they are very elderly, they haven't really been able to have very much hands-on experience. They couldn't control the mouse, or see the little cursor on the screen, although I did manage to make the font size bigger."

Val asked the group whether it would be better just to write letters and pop them in the post, but they aren't having any of that. Honora, 81, says: "I dictate and Val types. I'm itching to have a go, but I can't see properly. This is bringing me into a different category of life. I thought that computers were just for the intellectuals.

"This is teaching us to get on better with the young people. We used to think, 'What we did when we were young, they don't do any more,' but now we're understanding why."

Lucy has seized the opportunity to score a few points from her 18 great- grandchildren, who keep telling her about their experiences with computers at school. "They made a bit of fun out of this," she says, "but it lets you voice your opinion, and keeps your mind active. And it is nice to have the letters, especially when you are on your own."

And for 85-year-old Jack (motto: "I'll have a go at owt"), the computer has taken on an added fascination since he found it could play dominoes. "I've tried to teach the ladies to play," he says, "but they don't take any notice."

Chris Levack had the idea of 3i after visiting a project called Teaching Older Folks New Tricks at the University of Ulster. "They were introducing people to word-processing," he says. "I said: 'OK, what are they doing to do now? If they write their life stories, where's the audience?' There is a communication aspect to word-processing - that's called the Internet - and nobody had thought about the next step."

He then went to a European conference on older people and new technology, run by an organisation called Active Age. "When I told people what I planned to do, 90 per cent of them looked at me as if I was crackers. But the others said: 'Come on, let's do something here.' " The result was the formation of similar groups in Norway and Denmark.

The Batley project is managed by the Artimedia Centre, founded three years ago with the aid of a City Challenge grant for economically deprived areas. The centre specialises in social, cultural and educational uses of new technology.

The Friday Group has just started to e-mail Norway and Denmark. The Scandinavians have already explored the World Wide Web - that's planned for Batley later this year. Chris says: "Someone suggested that we should set up age-related interest groups on the Web, but the old folks are saying: 'We want to do the whole thing. This is the Internet - no censorship, we'll see what's out there and we'll make up our own minds.' "

Chris envisages that one day there will be a PC in the corner in every old people's home. "In a couple of years, when costs are way down, older people are going to spend enormous amounts of time on the Internet, especially those who are frail.

"It is important to empower older people. They should be participants in this Internet business, not just passive recipients."

They may never get to grips with the technicalities, but that is a minor concern. As Dorothy, now 85 and once Batley's only lady taxi-driver, says: "I can't give you very much information about the computer. But if ever you want to know an old song, come to me and I'll sing it for you."