Audrey celebrates 100 years of ‘luck’
A retired nurse from Hampshire celebrated her 100th birthday – and says ‘luck’ is the secret to a long life.
Audrey Stein, who was born in Alverstoke, Gosport, in 1923 and now live son Hay ling Island, celebrated the momentous occasion with family and friends yesterday.
Audrey said: ‘I’m very lucky because I can walk and talk and do all my own shopping.’
Alongside luck, Audrey put her good health over the years down to‘ syrup of figs every Friday night ’, which her brother Norman explained is a family joke from regularly being given the health supplement as children.
Audrey has spent her life caring for other people and got her first job – working as an ‘undernanny’ for the aristocratic Roe family – after leaving school at the age of 14. In this role, she was responsible for caring for an heir to the family fortune and instilling aristocratic values into them. For much of her career, Audrey ran a medical practice in Elland in the midlands with her late husband David Stein, who was a doctor from Scotland.
Audrey’s brother Norman March, 92, said: ‘She’s spent all of her life caring for people in one way or another. In the first place, she was the eldest sibling of four and from my recollection she was obviously the example to all of us. In a way, she started taking care of us at an early age.
‘She came from a house that had one cold tap and just a basinin the kitchen–there was no bathroom, we had at in bath on the wall – and was transferred into this luxurious house. It must have been operatic, the scale the decor, the meals, the servants, the chandeliers instead of lampshades. These were the people who were the judges of the day, they wrote the laws, they carried them out – these were the decision makers. She told me they were all treated equally. It was a very happy scene for four years.’
Following this formative role, which Norman explained has made Audrey an excellent hostess, she went onto become a nurse in the Second World War and her training began around the time of D-Day.
Norman added: ‘The invasion came and all these trains and lorries arrived at Winchester Hospital with all the injured. From then on, it was non-stop. She eventually ended up as a staff nurse which was great because by the time she was 25, she’d learned everything in life. Take her name; she was Audrey Irene March – her initials spell aim and that’s her. Direct and hits the target.’