ANN ‘MIMI’ CAREY, 98

THERE can’t be too many people alive, either in Ireland or beyond, whose first memory is of their father lifting them up and pointing out a Zeppelin airship flying high overhead, carrying passengers from Germany to New Jersey before the Hindenburg disaster in 1937 brought an end to that mode of travel.

Ann Carey does, though few people call her Ann now. When one of her granddaughters was young, she couldn’t say ‘granny’, and used to tell neighbours in Ashbourne that ‘my mimi is coming to see me’. When Ann herself moved from her native Dublin to Ashbourne, everyone just assumed Mimi was her actual name, and it stuck.

She grew up in various places, including Kill O’ The Grange in south Dublin, and Donabate in the north of the county, and only later realised that her family always were on the move because of economic conditions in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

She worked in the fur business in Switzers, Dublin’s grandest department store, in the premises now occupied by Brown Thomas on Grafton Street. ‘They had a bakery and a laundry, and an upholstery business — it was the biggest shop in Dublin,’ Mimi says. ‘I served my time in the fur trade but I wasn’t keen on it. I wanted to be an upholsterer, because they got better money.’

It was a different time when it came to fur as acceptable wear. ‘You had really made it when you got a fur coat from your partner,’ Mimi says, before correcting herself with a giggle. ‘Well, we didn’t have “partners” then — we had boyfriends and husbands!’

Mimi’s husband died in 1978 of multiple myeloma at just 53, when their three daughters were still in school. ‘Nowadays, he would have got a bone marrow transplant, but they didn’t have that then,’ Mimi says. She was left to raise them by herself, and now also has three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Amazingly, she still has friends from her schooldays, also in their 90s and still in touch.

At 98, Mimi is finding is harder to walk nowadays. ‘It’s getting worse day by day,’ she says, though she’s baffled by it because she doesn’t have arthritis in her knees or hips. However, she looks on the bright side — ‘I’m still standing anyway.’

Mimi puts her longevity down to being active. ‘I was always in a terrible muddle,’ she says with a hearty chuckle. ‘There was always something to be done. I love gardening, and I do painting, sort of folk art, and I knit and sew.’

She still likes her little glass of whiskey too, and also a drop of Drambuie, especially at Christmas. ‘I wouldn’t go mad or anything like that, though,’ she laughs. ‘I stay respectable!’

‘You had made it when you got a fur coat from your partner’