When family and friends gather for the funeral of 100-year-old Bernice Bartlett next month, they will reflect on and celebrate the life of an extraordinary woman who was one of the country’s last Second World War widows.

Hers is a remarkable story of overcoming hardship and tragedy to eventually becoming a popular Kent pub landlady and ace whist and bridge card player.

Today’s children, armed with their subsidised bus passes and mobile phones, would not recognise Bernice’s childhood in the 1920s when her parents could not afford her one penny bus fare to school, leaving her to walk several miles back and forth from Dover to Temple Ewell in all weathers.

And her ‘packed lunch’ was a slice of bread and an Oxo cube, which a teacher would melt in hot water to make a drink.

Bernice’s parents would become publicans and she grew up at the New Flying Horse in Wye and then The Plough in Langley near Maidstone.

But her father, who continued to suffer the effects of toxic gas poisoning from the First World War, died in 1940.

Four months later, aged just 16, Bernice married Harry Golding, who she met at a dance in Langley.

Their first son, Bernard was born in 1941 but the following year Harry was called up, becoming a dispatch rider in the Royal Army Service Corps.

He returned home just before Christmas of 1942 when she was pregnant with their second son, Barry.

She saw Harry off from Maidstone railway station as he returned to the war effort but later admitted she feared she would never see him again - which proved tragically true.

Barry was born in September 1943 and shortly after Bernice heard that the 8th Army had invaded Italy from North Africa.

Harry was killed in action near Florence on September 5, 1944, leaving Bernice to bring up two small boys, with little in the way of state benefits to help.

But with no qualifications, finding employment was hard.

After many attempts, including being rejected as a bus conductor, Bernice got a job as a receptionist at the Star Hotel in Maidstone while her mother looked after the children.

But she found love again in 1946 when Jack Bartlett came to work at the Star. A casualty of the war, he had been shot in Egypt and spent 18 months in hospital.

They married in 1947 and moved into their first house in Boxley Road, Maidstone.

But tragedy was to strike Bernice again when Barry, who suffered with asthma, had an attack and became so ill that he was taken to Pembury Hospital where he died of sepsis, aged just five.

“Despite all the hardship and tragedy she endured in the first third of her life, she never complained about anything…”

So in the space of just eight years, she had lost her father, first husband and her youngest son, whose grave in Maidstone she would continue to visit for the rest of her life, with his brother Bernard, who still makes the pilgrimage.

But with Jack, she went on to have three more children, Timothy, Susan and finally Jennifer in 1953.

In 1949, the couple moved to Loose and took over the management of a pram shop in Maidstone, working six days a week.

But it wasn’t a financial success, so the following year they took on their first pub, The Hero of the Crimea in Sheerness, followed by The Swan at Sellindge from 1952 to 1955.

That was followed by The Royal Albert at Burham, a shop in Hamilton Road, Gillingham, as well as another shop and pub, and a spell in New Romney.

The couple were always seeking to improve their finances, which were never much above borderline.

Her mum, Dora had developed ovarian cancer in 1927 and became very ill but a new treatment with radium saved her life and she went on to live to the age of 76.

Bernice and Jack moved to Littlebourne near Canterbury about 40 years ago but he died suddenly in 1983.

Taking up a hobby to make friends and socialise, Bernice became a star player in whist drives at several villages around Canterbury and later took up bridge, which she played competitively in a Canterbury league and at Littlebourne until the Covid pandemic.

But the lockdowns consigned her to being home alone which her family believes initiated a decline caused by reduced mobility and lack of human contact.

She passed away at Oakfield House care home in Wingham on June 14, just five days shy of her 101st birthday.

“She had no recipe for her long life and actually was very much an egg and bacon person rather than avocados and blueberries….”

She leaves two sons and two daughters, eight grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.

Her first son Bernard, now 83, from Whitley Bay says their mother had a stoic personality and an attitude of just getting on with life, no matter what it threw at her.

“Despite all the hardship and tragedy she endured in the first third of her life, she never complained about anything,” he said.

“She just got on with things and tried to build a life for herself and her children.

“Her motto was ‘laugh and the world laughs with you’ but ‘cry, and you cry alone’.

“She had no recipe for her long life and actually was very much an egg and bacon person rather than avocados and blueberries.

“She was also very generous and would regularly give her whist winnings to her grandchildren.”

Bernice’s funeral will take place at Charing Crematorium on Tuesday, August 6 at 2.30pm.