Script quote across the ribs

Your mother tells me the train leaves Penzance at seven and that you have not eaten properly since Tuesday, so I am sending this with the last of the saffron buns and I will not hear a word about it. I know you have been lying awake over the shipyard in Barrow, counting everything that could go wrong on a berth three hundred feet above the water. I can see it in the page you sent, the way the letters lean back as if they are bracing against a wind.

When your grandfather went down the Levant mine in 1911 he wrote out his fears and pinned them inside his cap. It ran to two sides. I asked him once why he kept it, and he said so he could read it on the cold mornings and find out which ones had been foolish. Most of them had. The roof fall he dreaded never came. The thing that did come was a cough that took him in March, and nobody had thought to write that one down.

So here is what I want you to do with the paper you are about to fold into your coat. Write your fears on one side, all of them, however silly. Then turn it over and write what you have faith in, and let it grow until the fears are only small marks at the edge of the sheet. Faith was never the opposite of being afraid, my love. It is what you carry while you are.

Tell your mam the bun was her idea and the saffron was mine.

Your loving Nan, Morwenna