A pensioner has reached her 100th birthday despite smoking 20 cigarettes a day for most of her life — as doctors hail her ”clear lungs and heart sound as a bell.”
Mary ‘Molly’ Repper, who only gave up the habit at the age of 95, was joined at Weston View Care Home in Moray in Scotland by family and friends to celebrate.
Both daughter Beatrice and son Jim had travelled up to Keith from London, on Wednesday, September 6, with their respective partners for their mom’s big day.
“Quick-witted”, “tenacious” and “organized” were some of the phrases they used to describe how Molly had been throughout her long life.
Beatrice said: “Mom was brilliant with numbers.
”At a checkout, she could add up the figures quicker in her head than the cashier on the till – and they’d certainly get to know about it if they’d got the amount wrong.”
Jim said: “We feared the worst when mom fell and fractured her hip five years ago, but she fought back.
“She’d been smoking since was a young teenager, but the doctors treating her said her lungs were clear and her heart was as sound as a bell.”
Molly was born on September 4, 1924, in Peterculter near Aberdeen.
She first met George, her eventual husband, before the start of the Second World War.
However the pair didn’t get together as a couple until after that conflict ended.
George, the son of a policeman, had grown up in London but, in 1934, he travelled up to Aberdeen for a job interview.
Finding his prospective employer’s place of business closed for lunch, he decided to take a walk up Union Street, where he bumped into a recruiting sergeant from the Scots Guards who persuaded him to join up.
A military regular, he was sent to North Africa after the war broke out in 1939.
Captured by the Italian Army during the course of 1942, he was interned as a prisoner of war.
However, after Italy changed sides the following year, George managed to escape.
He then spent the next six months on the run in Italy before being recaptured, this time by the Nazis.
George was shipped off to a prison camp in Germany where he was incarcerated until the end of the war.
Molly married George in 1947 and the couple went to live in London, where he followed in the footsteps of his father by joining the police force.
She, meanwhile, did a number of different jobs, including school bursar and working as a medical secretary.
The couple eventually moved up back this way in 1973 after George retired from the force.
Coincidentally, they came to live at the former police station in Knock.
George was more than six years older than Molly.
With the passage of time, his health began to worsen which led the couple to move to sheltered housing at Taylor Court in Keith during the 1980s.
Here, Molly cared for him until his death in 2002.
Molly has five grandchildren – Michael, Daniel, Louise, Alice and George.
She also has five great-grandchildren – James, Matthew, Eliza, Ari and Dimo-James – some of who live in Bulgaria.
