Philippa Woodridge

The last clear thing my mother said was "the garden needs water." Even at the very end, with everything else slipping away, she was still taking care of things.

My name is Mary, and Pippa was my mother — though to most of you she was probably Mrs. Woodridge, the teacher who could quiet thirty six-year-olds with just a look, or Pippa from the choir, or the woman with the most spectacular roses in the neighbourhood.

Thank you all for being here today. Mum would have been secretly pleased by the turnout, though she'd have waved it off with an "oh, stop it" if anyone mentioned it to her face.

She had this way of saying "right then" whenever she'd made up her mind about something. "Right then, we'll have fish." "Right then, I'll ring Dorothy." It was her signal that the debate was closed, the decision made, the world sorted — at least for the moment. I must have heard those two words ten thousand times, usually followed by her getting on with whatever needed doing next.

I remember when I decided at fourteen that I was going to become a vegetarian. Mum didn't argue or lecture — she just said "right then" and quietly started cooking two versions of every meal. For six months. One evening I came downstairs to find her making a separate shepherd's pie just for me with lentils, and she'd burned the regular one because she was concentrating on getting mine right. Dad was eating the burned version and winking at me. When I eventually gave up and went back to eating meat, she just said "more lentils for me then" and never mentioned it again.

That was Mum — quietly stubborn about the things that mattered, completely flexible about everything else. She once taught Peter to drive in her ancient red Volvo, a feat that nearly ended them both. He stalled eleven times just trying to get out of the driveway. When he finally made it onto the road and promptly went the wrong way around a roundabout, Mum very calmly observed, "Peter, we appear to be in France." He passed his test first time, and she took full credit.

Mum called me every morning at quarter past eight, just after her first cup of tea. Never longer than ten minutes. She'd tell me what the birds were doing in the garden, ask about the children, comment on something she'd heard on the Today programme. Nothing important. Everything important. I still reach for the phone at quarter past eight sometimes.

When Dad was diagnosed with cancer, she became completely calm and organized. She researched everything, asked the consultants proper questions, kept a folder of all his appointments and medications. She held it all together for two years with a strength that amazed us all. After he died, she fell apart very quietly, not wanting anyone to see. I found her once at three in the morning, sitting in his chair in the dark, holding his reading glasses. "I'm alright, love," she said, and I sat with her until dawn broke over her beloved garden.

The garden will need water again tomorrow, and the day after that. But the love she planted there — in the soil and in all of us — that continues to grow, season after season, year after year, in ways we're only just beginning to understand.