Good food, loving family secrets to long life
CENTENARIAN Jean Elizabeth Irwin, nee Nicoll, says her secret to a long life is good food and a loving family.
Surrounded by about 50 family members, including some who she had not seen in about 30 years, in her daughter’s Dunedin home, she celebrated the milestone at the weekend.
It did not feel any different from turning 95, she said.
‘‘I am quite healthy and I have loving family, fortunately, that look after me.
‘‘That makes all the difference.’’
Mrs Irwin was born in Wyndham, in Southland, on November 8, 1920.
She lived in a twostorey house on Hardwick Farm, a dairy farm, in Tuturau with her parents, two sisters and brother.
Recalling her childhood, she remembered boarding at Mataura School when she was 5, which cost her parents five shillings and two pounds of butter a week.
After two years, Mrs Irwin switched to Tuturau School, which she travelled to on her neighbour’s horse and cart.
A love of sewing and gardening developed. Her first garden was filled with pansies, primroses and hyacinths, she said.
When she was 12, she was not expected to live after her appendix burst. Eightyeight years later, she continues to defy that prognosis.
As she became a teenager, her father taught her how to drive in their new Chevrolet, which was questioned by many people at the time, as women did not drive cars at that time.
However, boyfriends were ‘‘in fashion’’ — a trend affected by the beginning of World War 2.
The news of the war broke in New Zealand when she was at a social evening.
‘‘I didn’t have a boyfriend at that time,’’ she said.
‘‘Many of the young men I knew went off to war and not all of them returned.’’
That was until she met and married the brother of her sister’s husband, John Irwin.
After deciding early on that she was not cut out for farm work, she trained as a nurse in Balclutha, which gave her the chance to take a job at Owaka where she was the sister in charge.
‘‘I think now, that was quite an accomplishment in my 20s,’’ she said.
Their move to Dunedin came in 1958.
She, John and their five adopted children, for whom she enjoyed making clothes, lived in Broad Bay on the Otago Peninsula.
Their last move was in the ’80s to her Rona St home in St Kilda, where she still lives.
Mr Irwin died in 1993, and she outlived her younger siblings.
After just one week in a resthome, she decided it was not for her and now, staying independent was as important as ever.
With some family members nearby, including her daughter Virginia Garner, and the help of Meals on Wheels, she manages to do just that.