Toast, Wrapped in Tinfoil

Every time I landed in hospital with another asthma attack, I'd be in there for days. Steroids, medication, the whole routine. And every day, before her shift, my Nanna would visit.

She'd bring me toast. Warburtons white toaster loaf, lots and lots of butter, wrapped in tinfoil.

I don't know what made that toast the best thing on the planet. I've tried to recreate it since — the right bread, the right butter, the right amount of both — and only a handful of times have I got close. Close enough to feel that exact rush of nostalgia. A moment of love, passed to me through tinfoil.

My Nanna lived at the bottom of a lane, in a little cottage among a row of eight or ten, with my grandad. They grew rhubarb. Between her cottage and the hospital was a massively steep hill — the same hill me and my brother used to fly down on our skateboards. She walked up it every day, to work, to mop floors, to clean predominantly the elderly and psychiatric wards. And most days, on her way up, she'd stop in to see me first.

I've thought about that hill a lot since. How ordinary it must have felt to her — just the walk to work. And how, to me, it was the walk that brought the toast.

Five days after my fifth birthday, she passed away.

I never really got to know her properly. Not in the way you get to know someone as you grow older, through conversation and years. What I have instead are the strong memories, the strong smells, the fragments that a five-year-old holds onto.

One of them is this. She'd had a stroke, and she was in a coma. I took all my new birthday toys to the hospital and sat on her bed. I told her about every single one. One toy in particular — a plastic toy shopping trolley, yellow basket, blue wheels, red frame — was so big I put it right on the bed with her. I talked to her about it like it was the best thing I'd ever owned. I turned to my mum and asked, can she not hear me?

She can hear everything, my mum said. She just can't see you. She can't be with us right now.

I think about that a lot too. How much of loving someone happens in the small, physical things — a toy placed carefully on a bed, toast wrapped in tinfoil, a walk up a hill before a shift starts. Not the big declarations. The doing.

I never got the years with her that I might have had. But I got the toast. I got a woman who worked exhausting shifts on wards full of people who needed her, and who still, every single day, found a way to climb a very steep hill early enough to see her grandchild first.

I think that's what she was trying to tell me, in the only language a five-year-old could really understand. Not with words — she didn't have many of those left to give me, in the end. With butter. With tinfoil. With a loaf of bread carried up a hill.

Some love doesn't get spoken. It gets wrapped up and handed to you, still warm.