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Two residents in a seafront care home have celebrated turning 102 years old - on the same day.
Staff were astonished to learn Norah Drake and Dorothy Taylor, who are looked after in Herne Bay, were both born in London on September 23, 1917.
Christine Wells, head of care at the Laleham care home, said: “The odds of two people in the same care home turning 102 are very, very long - it’s amazing.”
Both women - born while British soldiers fought in Flanders Fields - have wartime stories to tell.
Norah, hailing from Manor Park, met future husband Ernie aged 19, before working in a munitions plant in the 1940s. Her home was destroyed as she hid nearby in an Anderson shelter.
“A bomb came straight down and we lost everything,” she said.
“It was frightening – they were getting nearer and nearer.”
Ernie, who served in the RAF for five years during the Second World War, died of pneumonia at the age of 38, leaving Norah to raise her three children alone.
She moved to Whitstable in 1973 to be nearer her sister Peggy and continued to live in her Saddleton Road bungalow until she turned 100.
She became a resident at the Laleham Care Home in Central Parade a couple of weeks ago after living with daughter Angie in Broomfield for about 18 months.
The great-grandmother says she started to enjoy the occasional KFC at the age of 99.
Now, Norah – described as “loving, inoffensive and quiet” by family members – enjoys adding tomato ketchup to most of her meals.
She added: “You can get to 102 by being a good girl – I’ve been behaving myself. I don’t touch a drink now.”
Dorothy, meanwhile, moved into the Herne Bay care home 12 years ago following a stint living on a barge.
Originally from Woolwich, she was born into a family of musicians as her mother worked as a singer and her father played the saxophone.
Like Norah, she came perilously close to being bombed during the Second World War.
Ms Wells said: “She worked in a factory and it got bombed, and Dot was in it. She has tinnitus, which goes back all those years.”
'You can get to 102 by being a good girl – I’ve been behaving myself. I don’t touch a drink now' - Norah Drake
Having celebrated her birthday last Monday, the grandmother attributes her old age to “good, careful living.”
