Maidstone Care Home Resident Joan Roffey Celebrates Her 100th Birthday

Joan Roffey turned 100 this month, celebrating with friends, family and fellow residents at Care UK's Invicta Court care home on Gidds Pond Way in Maidstone, where a cake made by her daughter's neighbour took pride of place. Asked for her secret to a long life, Joan kept it simple: "Living it to the fullest, and making the most of each moment."

Joan was born in Loughton, Essex, in September 1926, and grew up mostly in nearby Wanstead. When the Second World War broke out she was evacuated under Operation Pied Piper, the mass evacuation of children from British cities, moving between several locations in Essex before eventually settling in Coleford, Gloucestershire, until the war ended and she returned home.

Joan started work at 14, with the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, and later held roles with Cunard Shipping and a Dutch-language newspaper called Free Netherlands, where she spent the final years of the war writing letters on behalf of the paper's proprietor - often, she recalls, having to use her own judgement to fill in what he'd meant to say. It was a later job, at the British Tourist Authority, where she met Reginald Roffey, whom she married in 1950. The couple stayed married for more than 60 years, spent 13 years living in Toronto, and travelled to more than 55 countries together.

One trip became family legend. Visiting their daughter in South Africa during the apartheid-era sanctions, Joan and Reginald drove to Oribi Gorge with only enough rationed petrol for the round trip - only for Joan to realise, halfway back to Durban, that she'd left her handbag, with their money and passports, hanging on the back of a toilet door at the gorge. Forced to return with the tank nearly empty, and with syphoning petrol or using petrol cans illegal at the time, the family had to arrange for a relative to refill the car by hand in the remote bush, "terrified the extremely vigilant South African police would catch us," as Joan puts it. The trip is still known in the family as "'orrible George."

Joan was also a keen seamstress, knitter and embroiderer throughout her life, making many of her own clothes in the years after the war - including her wedding dress, sewn from parachute silk. She and Reginald had two children, Lynne and Neil, who were joined over the years by three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Source: Care UK, via press release