Remembering Nana Ivy...

Who inspired Woodside Apothecary

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Trigger warning, contains content covering grief and bereavement

Today I’m thinking about Nana Ivy who inspired me so much during my training.

It’s 39 years ago today that Nana Ivy died. I was 11 and had just started high school. That challenging first term where you’re trying to find your allies and dodge the school bully because you wear glasses. Nana hadn’t been well for a few weeks and had recently been admitted to hospital. I used to get the bus home from school to my local town and sometimes Dad would pick me up. I don’t know what it was, but as I waited for him that day at the bus stop I just knew. I just knew she’d gone. I’ve never told Dad this. Not sure he’ll ever read this either, but I felt like the bottom had fallen out of my world. She hadn’t been in hospital for very long and I don’t remember going to visit her, so I knew it was serious. My Mum’s mum had died a few years before and although I thought she was wonderful (Nana Mary was definitely who I got my love of books from!) the extra couple of years with Nana Ivy really deepened the grandparent relationship. Plus she lived in a magical house…

Woodside Cottage was so incredible - a stone floor cellar filled with jars of preserves, bottled spiced pears, demi-johns lined up on the floor. The kitchen was always full of interesting things - bread and cakes cooking in the aga, jelly nets hanging up with various concoctions, tomatoes blanching in bowls of hot water. I could never understand why she peeled the skins off tomatoes but new that egg and tomato sandwiches always tasted better there than at home.

Me and my brother used to mooch around the garden poking our noses into Grandad Ted’s work shed and the long forgotten pig shed. We thought the pig shed would make the most amazing den and were always playing hide and seek.

The garden was a mixture of veg and fruit gardens, quirky wooden sheds, a tomato-scented greenhouse and a lawned area. ‘What time is it Mr Wolf’ was a regular game on the lawn which was bordered by hydrangeas and I remember the crowds of butterflies that would be all over the flowers,.

We were regularly caught literally red handed scrumping fresh raspberries off the canes at the bottom of the garden and then pretending we hadn’t eaten any, although no doubt out faces and hands smeared with red gave that away,

Breakfast in Nana’s bed (which I needed a step to get up into) was tinned mandarin segments in a cut glass bowl with triangles of bread and butter. Honestly I thought it was heaven. We used to have Weetabix at home. Mandarin segments in fruit juice for breakfast was so exotic. The decadence!

I love this photograph of her, I’m pretty sure it was taken by Grandad Les, her then boyfriend, who would become her husband after the war.

Nana Ivy was definitely a ‘do-er’ and wore many hats - baker, clothes maker - she could knit, crochet and sew, she kept bees and chickens, grew fruit and veg, made cheese, jams, chutney, wine, she even took up calligraphy. The list goes on! Her delicious birthday cakes for me and my brother always included a trap door in the middle of the cake with a surprise in it and her amazing handmade Easter eggs were the stuff of dreams - made with layers and layers of melted chocolate.

She made my Mum herbal remedies when she wasn’t well and now I have her grandmother’s old herbal book, now handed down to me in my new career.

Her life had had it’s sadness - her brother was killed in a motorbike accident in Alderley Edge as a teenager. He wasn’t talked about, I can’t even image how that had affected my great grandparents/her parents. My grandad (her husband) was a POW in Thailand in WW2 - we still have the letters he sent to her which she carefully kept. It must have been so terrible waiting for news over years and years. I sadly never knew him as he died when I was a baby so nana Ivy lost her husband at a young age. I do feel connected to them both though as he had the allotment I now work on with my Dad and I often think about him when I’m digging away.

So today I’m thinking of Nana Ivy and magical Woodside Cottage. All those wonderful memories and how grateful I am to have had her in my life. I think of her so much as she’s one of the big inspirations behind the name Woodside Apothecary.

Cath