Nonagenarian Nellie shows you’re never too old to be an author

Tales from her life in Kinghorn raise hundreds for charity

Unless you’re the Duke of Edinburgh, most nonagenarians took the decision to retire decades earlier.

However, being 94 years young has not deterred one Fifer from starting a new chapter in a long and eventful life.

Kinghorn’s Nellie Phillips, known to many in the Forthside village as Auntie Nellie, has become a first time author just six years short of her centenary.

She has already sold 200 copies of her book, Auntie Nellie’s Memoirs and has another print run of 100 on its way.

And that in turn has raised hundreds of pounds for charities close to her heart, the Sick Children’s Hospital – which helped save the life of her daughter Joyce – in Edinburgh, CHAS’s Rachel House and the Victoria hospice in Kirkcaldy. The sale of the next 100 will go to the Save the Children charity.

The book is a collection of stories about Mrs Phillips’ “wonderful” family life in Fife, from her birth on February 29 onward – a fact she says actually only makes her 23 years old.

“I was the youngest of seven children and they all had wonderful lives, I was part of a wonderful family,” she said.

As a youngster she lived in the country, while her father was manager of the tannery near Kinghorn Loch.

When she left school she worked in a chemist’s and the Co-op before training to be an aircraft mechanic when war broke out.

She worked her way up to become one of a small band of female aircraft inspection engineers at Donibristle, just along the coast from her Kinghorn home.

The book also chronicles her happy life with her husband and their children.

“I’m a very lucky woman,” said Mrs Phillips, who has stayed in Kinghorn all her life.

The idea for the book came about as the pensioner had always written so she could commit the stories of her life to paper.

Yesterday Mrs Phillips visited Rachel House in Kinross to hand over proceeds to CHAS.

I was part of a wonderful family. I’m a very lucky woman

Picture: David Wardle. CHAS’s Stephen Hart with Nellie Phillips, who has donated money from the sale of her stories of living in Kinghorn to the charity.