101-year-old neighbours

Tindle News

Two next door neighbours are both celebrating - their 101st birthdays. Josie Church and Anne Wallace-Hadrill have lived side-by-side since the 1980s. The great-grans share something else in common - the same birthday after being born on the same day in 1924. Anne, who grew up in Hampshire, first moved to the house following the death of her husband, John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, a historian.

Transcript

00:00What's your name?

00:01Josephine Trout, but I don't get called Josephine, I get called Jo, or Josie.

00:07And how old are you?

00:09Well, I'm almost 101, not quite.

00:13Anne is the same, we were born on the same day,

00:17and we've lived together side by side since 1986, I think.

00:25Anne's husband died quite suddenly, and that's why she came to live here.

00:32And my husband had a very bad stroke, and so he was really out of the picture as well,

00:40so it was just Anne and I, you know.

00:44I don't think we've thought much about the time passing, it's just passed.

00:48No, it's just like another day.

00:51Just like another day.

00:53And do you remember when you found out that you both had the same birthday?

00:57No, I can't remember.

00:59You've just known it for a long time.

01:01We just sort of, I don't know, became aware of it somehow.

01:06And do you have any plans for celebrations this year?

01:09I think the family gathering probably for both of us.

01:13The hospital I trained in, Festervaal Infirmary, I treated SS men,

01:18they were not nice.

01:20They didn't wish to be taken care of by us.

01:23They were very difficult patients.

01:26All hospitals took in military patients.

01:31Yes, they were a big teaching hospital.

01:34Once D-Day started, D-Day brought all the casualties back across the Channel,

01:40and then they distributed them in all the hospitals.

01:43When the war finished, my husband came back to Oxford to take up his degree work.

01:49We came back here for three years, and we lived the life of an undergraduate.

01:54Oxford's very strange because each college had a large intake of older people

02:01who'd gone through the war and were taking up their university places.

02:06So you'd get the old man in the hospital,

02:08and then the young 18-year-olds coming in from school.

02:12So Oxford wasn't like it is now, it was quite different.

02:15Where did you grow up? Do you remember where you grew up?

02:18Hampshire.

02:19Hampshire.

02:20Hampshire?

02:21Yes.

02:22And what made you move to Oxford?

02:25I went to St Hilda's.

02:27Oxford alumni.

02:29Yes.

02:30And what did you study?

02:32English.

02:33English.

02:34And how was it? Because obviously it was all girls at that point.

02:37We weren't forbidden from seeing men.

02:42It wasn't made very easy, though, was it?

02:47Well, we were expected to live decent lives.

02:52You just live. There's not much you can do.

02:58You just go on from one thing to the next, don't you?

03:02Yes.

03:03Yes.

03:04Really.

03:05Whatever you do what seems to be needing doing,

03:10and then you do that, and then you sort of...

03:13something else takes its place.

03:15You just go on from one thing to another, don't you?

03:19Yes.

03:20We don't engineer our lives.

03:23I think they've just engineered us.

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