100

Today would have been my Mother's 100th birthday so we made a little trip to the cemetery. She was born in 1919 in Riga, Latvia and came from a very wealthy influential family. She lived through unstable times and had her share of tragedy's to live through. Her father died when she was 8 years old, her sister died at 16. The history of Latvia is turbulent and tragic. Jumping ahead, she spent WW11 nursing in Germany and often told us the stories of her time in Hamburg during the Allied bombing raids, how they draped the patients in wet sheets to get them out of the buildings, and how the pavements were melting. At the end of the war she was declared 'stateless' as she could not return to Latvia with the Russian occupation she would not have been safe. So the UK took her in. She retrained as an SRN while learning English. It was while nursing that she met my Father, who would also have been 100 this month.
Her life was incredible and we often said she should write her life story, sadly we never pushed enough to get it done.
In all the years growing up I never heard a word of bitterness about all she'd lost. She was a strong character, a little eccentric, certainly not embarrassed by anything that she did! Her accent was strong and not easily defined. 
She came from a privileged background with servants and Nanny's and died in Council bungalow. Extraordinary.