'Cheeky' grandmother, 104, shares her secrets to living a long and happy life
A woman turning 104 today has revealed the secrets behind her long life.
Henrietta Thornber - or ‘Hetty’ as she is known to her loved ones - says that hard work and doing a job you love is what keeps one youthful.
Speaking to the Liverpool Echo, she took out a books of old photographs and recalled the key moments of her long life. She grew up in Bootle in Merseyside and went to a local school. In her spare time, she'd often visit the nearby Strand.
She explained: “I was never away from the Strand - I was there every day. It’s not the way it is now though. Back then, every house in the neighbourhood left their front door open.
“We had no money. I had 10 brothers and sisters and we all slept in one double bed - I’d often find myself saying: ‘stop kicking me!’ We lived on Scouse - it’s my favourite - and it didn’t matter what it was [beef or lamb] - just anything we could throw on a plate.”
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Henrietta’s mother, who she “idolised”, kept chickens while her father played piano at a local club. She said: “I’ve never heard anyone play like him. I used to take his coat to the shop on a Monday and then go and get it back every Thursday so he could wear it to play at the club.”
Her first job was to make wreaths out of flowers and hand deliver them to customers. Meeting her future husband, Joe, when she was a teenager, she used to “sneak him upstairs” as he wasn’t allowed in the house. Whenever they would go on a date, her mum would grease the doors to their home so her dad wouldn’t hear Hetty coming in at night.
The pair married when she was 18 at a church in Bootle: “Saint something,” she guesses, jokingly. They had two children; one boy and one girl.
Hetty would go to the Metropole Theatre on Stanley Road and wait for the actors to come out. She said: “We didn’t have enough money for the theatre so we would wait outside and say hello to all the actors.”
The now-grandmother was in her early twenties during the Battle of Britain when her husband was an air-raid warden. She said: “It was hard-going. You could hear the whistle from the bomb coming down from the plane and you’d wait and say: ‘oh God, not again’.
"When you got out of the shelter, all sorts of questions would be going through your mind but you just had to get on with it."
It was during the Blitz that Hetty tragically lost her best friend: “My friend got killed. She told me: ‘I’m not going to the air-raid shelter, I’m going to wait by the Metropole!’ The next day the theatre had been bombed and she’d gone. I never saw her again.”
Working at The Triad building in Bootle as a cleaner until she was 70, she cried on the day she had to leave: “When you really love your job it’s everything. It was really lovely; I had good friends and it was really great.”
Despite her old age, like many of the same generation, Hetty says she “loved her ciggies” but eventually quit, describing it as "a real job to pack them in”.
At the age of 85, Hetty found herself flying for the first time on a family holiday to Spain. The last time she had her passport renewed was only a few years ago and on her 100th birthday, she received a card from the late Queen.
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So, what does Hetty put her long life down to? She said: “I’ve worked my whole life. I haven’t drank or smoked for a long time.
“My greatest achievement is working for myself and knowing a job that I love - which I’d get up and do because I liked it so much. You look back now and, although you’ve seen a few hard times, you got on with it.”
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