4 centenarians reveal their secrets to long, happy life
We are living longer, healthier lives and more of us are knocking off a century. Bess Manson speaks to four centenarians about their long, long lives.
Kath Anstey, 100
"It's no good living a long life if you're a bit doolally. There's no point if you haven't got your wits about you." Wise words from 100-year-old Kath Anstey.
Her own wits well intact, Kath cuts an elegant figure as she sits in her room at KenaKena Rest Home on the Kapiti Coast. Bejewelled and made up, she has no trouble remembering the many episodes of her ten decade-long life.
Her teenage years were the best, she says after some memory filtering. The parties, the boyfriends. There were plenty of both before she married.
She found fun in the simple things in her younger years – sitting on the beach with her friends, going to the local dances. "I loved dancing. There were a lot of balls and dances and we would wear proper ball gowns that we had made ourselves."
Kath was born on the Yorkshire coast in 1917. The eldest of seven children, her father, who had been badly gassed in the First World War, died young. Her mother ran a boarding house to make ends meet.
"We slept two to a bed to keep warm. I can't begin to tell you how cold it was. When I was little my father used to go out and cut a path through the snow to let us out in the middle of winter. Then we would walk an hour to school. There were no busses in those days. They were different times."
After leaving school she reluctantly dabbled in nursing but hated it so returned to help her mother run the boarding house.
She married Leslie 'Johnny' Bull and moved to Surrey to live with his family when he went off to war. Bull, a pilot, went on to become one of the leaders of the Great Escape in 1944. He was captured and executed by the Gestapo along with 50 other escapees leaving the young Kath a grieving widow raising their baby son, David. She later married Kiwi pilot Ron Anstey and moved to New Zealand in 1946. Along with David she had two more children.
Kath doesn't feel old. At least, she reckons she'd pass for someone in their 80s. Life isn't the same these days, though. "I don't have a circle of friends, they've all popped off. I miss being younger. But I'm perfectly happy. I'm just here with my record player, my radio. My family come to see me.
"I don't think anyone thinks about getting old. They are too busy being young and from what I hear on TV, they're having a really great time. It's funny, getting old. You can't do much. It's not like it used to be when you could get your hat and coat on and get in your car and buzz off. All that is finished. So you just have to make the best of what you've got."
She was driving till about six years ago. A few run ins with side mirrors put paid to that. The thing about getting older, she says, is that you just never really imagined what that would be like. "I never thought about the future when I was young. I certainly never wondered what it would be like when I got old. I have never bothered to think about age. I have just got old and that's all there is to it. I have just got on with living."
She doesn't have a mobile phone or use the Internet. She can't see well enough to negotiate these devices. TV is firmly in situ, though. She well remembers when her family bought their first TV just ahead of the Queen's visit to New Zealand in 1953. Television altered everyone's lives, she says.
She loves the royal family but is rather unimpressed with the tradition of getting a card from the Queen at 100 years old. "It's not personal," she says with some indignation. "She doesn't know me. She's never met me. It's a bit of nonsense."
She tries not to think about death and dying but she knows where she's going. "I don't like to think of not being here but one doesn't last forever. It'll come one day and I won't know anything about it. You're just gone. It's a horrible thought.
"I'm going to be buried up on a hill in Paraparaumu. I'm not going to be burnt up and chucked anywhere. I want to be buried so that if anyone has the inclination to come up with a little bunch of flowers I'll be there and they can come and talk to me. So that's where I'll be, in the back of Paraparaumu, in the sunshine."
Margaret Barns, 101
"I can walk and I can talk and I can see and I can hear!" Margaret Barns, in her one hundred and second year, is living proof that 100 is the new 90.
Propped up in an armchair at her serviced apartment on the Rita Angus estate in Kilbirnie, she reflects happily on a good life shaped by love and a strong faith. It never occurred to her that she might live this long, she says.
The former PE teacher says her career as a physical education teacher has kept her in good nick. "I'm very fit. But I'm quite happy to sit back and relax now. Now I let people come to me."
Her face, lined with more than 100 years of life, is powdered and her hair coiffed. Her two daughters potter about making tea and prodding her memory when it fails. There is astonishing clarity in that distant memory. Going back a century, Margaret tells of a childhood of security and love despite tragedy early on.
Raised with her sister Shirley in Bramerton in the Wairarapa she never knew her father who died in World War I during the battle of the Somme. She was one year old when she kissed him goodbye at the docks and has no memory of him other than the ones her mother shared.
Losing people you love comes with the territory when you live to be 101. And Margaret has lost more than her share of friends and family as she has edged into old age. But it was the loss of her fiancé that still smarts.
Describing that first meeting with Harry at the Skyline in Wellington, she drifts back to the 1930s. "I was there with another admirer of mine when Harry came along and said, 'are you Margaret Mace?' and I said 'yes'. He said 'then I believe this is our dance.' I knew he was something special. He was the love of my life."
They became engaged but all hopes of a happy life together were dashed when Harry died in Greece during the Second World War. More than 60 years on it's still a painful subject for Margaret who recites what must be a well-worn message relayed by Harry's colleagues as he lay dying. "Tell Margaret I love her."
The young Margaret trained to be a physical education teacher in Christchurch. In the late 1930s she travelled solo to Sweden to study for her diploma in gymnastics. But war was nearing and in the summer of 1940 she was given passage on a boat to London. "I was on the last ship out. We had to stay in the hold of the boat and slept in hammocks - men and women altogether. We arrived at 10am and war was declared at 11."
But Margaret was not out of danger. On her arrival she became unwell and was diagnosed with meningitis caught through the terrible overcrowded conditions during the journey. Administered to by Harley Street doctors she was the first patient to receive sulphur drugs to treat the disease.
In 1944 she returned to New Zealand after the sudden death of her sister. "She had two young daughters. I fell in love with them and they fell in love with me so I ended up marrying their father."
The marriage didn't last long but she and Arthur Barns divorced amicably and Margaret raised the children in Masterton and later Eastbourne.
She taught at Wellesley College in Eastbourne for more than 30 years and recalls taking the boarders, whose parents couldn't come and fetch them, for weekend tramps mothering them as if they were her own.
These days life is a little more sedate. She likes a drop of sherry with her friends and her oldest daughter who lives in an apartment in the same complex. She loves television and watches any sport going. She is mad for rugby and would love above all to meet an All Black.
She believes the modern world presents a challenge to today's young. The world is in a bad state with wars in Syria and the rise of such leaders as President Donald Trump - "he may have his good points but he's a dangerous man."
But he's a far away problem and he's not going to spoil lunch, where Margaret happily and independently meanders off to.
Hector Hopkins, 101
Hector Hopkins is neither here nor there about his age. He's 101 and pretty glad to have made it this far. He has galloped past the family's benchmark for a long life set by his aunt who made it to 98.
"I talk to myself sometimes and ask 'What am I still doing here?' I don't know why. Maybe it was all my running for the Harriers when I was a young man. I don't know when I'll go. I don't want to know. It's better that way."
Cared for now in Wellington's Te Hopai Home, he is surrounded by pictures of his family. There are three children, ten grandchildren and 12 great grandchildren. A photograph of him in his army uniform on the day of his wedding to Dorothy six weeks after returning from World War II sits above his bed.
"I asked her to marry me a year before I went off to war so we had a five-year engagement. I remember arriving back at New Plymouth railway station in 1945 and there she was with my mother and father. It was a wonderful moment."
He and Dorothy were married for 67 years until her death at 95, five years ago. A pile of empty envelopes on his desk scribbled with various lists jog his memory when the need arises.
When he talks about his childhood, though, he needs no prompting. One of four siblings he was born in 1916 in New Plymouth. As children they made their own fun, he says. "We used to play with tyres - one of us would be inside the tyre while the other pushed them along the road. We would go eeling with our cousins in a stream at the back of our property. Got a six pounder once. We got it home, skinned it and my aunt cooked it up for breakfast the next morning."
When World War II broke out he volunteered for the Army and was shipped out to Egypt. About war, he will not say much. "My grandson came to me years ago and asked how many Germans I'd killed. I said, 'I'm afraid soldiers don't talk about those things.'
"In both wars, there was such a terrible loss of life, particularly in the Great War, men were just mown down. War is a terrible thing. Why we had them I don't know."
He fears we live in unstable times now. "I hear about what happened in Manchester, what happened in London. It's very distressing."
He reads all about it in the paper every day, watches the goings on of the world outside his room on his huge LED wall-hanging TV – a far cry from his first black and white set hired for an Olympic Games in the 1950s.
Hector, who later became a property inspector for State Insurance in Wellington, brushes off the idea that reaching such a great age offers a different perspective on life. "I've just lived it. That's all."
Madeline Anderson, 110
For most of her life, Madeline Anderson was pretty old school about revealing her age. She kept it in the vault till she turned 90 by which time she thought it was enough of a milestone to make a song and dance about.
That was 20 years ago. These days she's famous for being the oldest living New Zealander. Still, she doesn't feel 110. "When I dream I am a much younger woman, I'm still only 50," she says.
Madeline was born in the autumn of 1907. The eldest of four sisters and the only survivor she was born and raised in Dunedin where her father was a sheep farmer.
She reflects on a happy childhood of endless games with her sisters under the shade of the macrocarpa trees. She recalls playing tennis on the court her father built at the back of the house with her friend John 'Jack' Lovelock, who went on to become the 1936 Olympic 1500m champion.
At Archerfield High School her headmistress told her there was no point in going to university because she'd no doubt be married soon enough. "I wanted to be a home science teacher but I thought she was probably right."
Madeline did become engaged but the romance ended before marriage. In the late 1920s she moved to Auckland where she got work in an office. The disappointment of her failed engagement paled when she met and married Harry Anderson. They raised three children, including a foster child. But her early motherhood is etched with sadness.
Her son was killed at the age of seven while riding his bike. "I lost my little boy. That was dreadful. It was weeks before I could even shed a tear," she says, her eyes prickling with fresh tears recalling the tragedy that occurred more than 70 years ago.
Years later her foster son died in a car accident when he was 20. Her Christian faith saw her through both tragedies. It's also shook the fear out of death. "I don't think it matters much what happens after you die. I don't fear it at all."
The first World War doesn't hold many memories for Madeline but she recalls the tide of returned servicemen coming home from World War II. "Nearly all of them were mentally damaged. The war had affected their peace of mind."
The first manned mission to land on the Moon in 1969 was a memorable enough event but she is more excited about what we are discovering about space now.
Technology is pretty miraculous, she says. She remembers well when the family got their first telephone. The housekeeper was frightened by it and made five-year-old Madeline stand on a chair to answer its ring.
"It's a real revelation that now you can ask your telephone when World War I began and it can tell you. Being able to talk to someone in Australia and see them at the same time in a Skype conversation - technology has changed everything."
Not long ago she was able to use a computer and her iPad. But failing eyes mean she's reduced to talking books.
Over more than a century of life Madeline has gained some perspective on the world and has come to the conclusion it's in a pretty poor state.
"We're not learning from our experiences of the past, the wars we have fought. I don't think we'll ever learn how to stop fighting. My recipe for living is simple: Live in harmonious surroundings, don't get into quarrels, love one another. That should be the foundation of our lives."
Written by Bess Mason. Republished with permission of Stuff.co.nz.