A FORMER nurse who was told almost 70 years ago she would live to be 99 celebrated her 100th birthday yesterday (Sunday, February 15).

Ivy Potts was told her “lucky face” was a sign she would lead a long life by a door-to-door salesman in the late 1940s.

“I was 32 at the time and 99 was a lifetime away so I didn’t think much more about it,” said Mrs Potts, a resident at Willowdene Care Home in Sedgefield, County Durham.

“When I turned 98 I thought ‘I’ve almost done it’ but the week before my 99th birthday I was convinced I wouldn’t make it and wouldn’t that have been typical?”

Born in Bishop Middleham in 1915, Mrs Potts emigrated to New Zealand with her family at the age of four.

She remembers the long ship journey vividly and has many happy memories of the four years the family spent there.

On returning home, Mrs Potts went in to service in Knightsbridge, London, but returned to Bishop Middleham in 1934 and worked as a psychiatric nurse at Winterton Hospital.

In 1950, she married her late husband, Tom. The couple settled in Fishburn and had one daughter, Christine, born a year later.

Mrs Potts, who has one granddaughter, Yvonne, and two great-grandchildren, Adam and Rachel, accredits her long life to healthy eating.