A SPRITLEY woman from Ross-on-Wye has just celebrated her milestone 100th birthday.

Jose Williams of Gloucester Road reminisced about her first memory at the age of four. the Airship R101 flying above her home in Eastham in London in 1930,

Jose explained that she excelled at school passing her 11plus which enabled her to attend grammar school.

When war broke out in 1939, Jose was evacuated to to a family who didn't have children. “They were very sweet people,” she recalls.

Jose’s family bought an old, thatched Inn near where she was living in Oxfordshire as her father’s work had dried up because of the war and Jose moved in with her parents at the inn, as it wasn’t far from her school.

Her father taught her to drive and by the end of the war she was driving trucks which involved taking prisoners to the farms to work under guard and ferry the Land Girls to the farms for the early morning milking.

Jose and Charles, her first husband, adopted two girls before going on to have three boys. But when the couple had been married for 29 years, Charles suffered a heart attack and died at the age 57.

Some 18 months later Jose met Ron, from the Isle of St Helena, and he became her second husband.

But during the early 1980s things weren't great for employment in the UK, so the couple decided to emigrate to Canada.

However, when Ron's health deteriorated many years later, they bought a recreational vehicle and travelled all around Canada and America in it.

Jose stayed in Canada for two years after Ron died in 2005 and at the age of 82, she decided it was time to go home.

On returning to Ross, she reconnects with her Goddaughter who lives in the town.

Jose remarked that her recipe for long life was having a daily glass of red wine, something she has done for over 40 years.