Audrey McGregor organised her own birthday party at 21, and almost eight decades later, she has done the same – albeit with a sightly more casual dress code.
The Motueka woman celebrated her 100th birthday on 7 October, pulling together a shindig the following weekend at the local RSA.
That 21st, held at the Wakefield Hall in 1946, was an event so glorious that she still displays a photograph of herself in the tiered gown that she handmade for the occasion.
“I made a stipulation that all the guys had to have suits and bowties, and all the girls had to have long frocks,” she remembers with obvious delight.
There was also rather a lot of wine flowing at the post-war party.
“I think I toasted the queen two or three times that night,” she laughs. “Anything to get the wine bottle flowing.”
In general, Audrey is not much of a drinker – she saves that for special occasions. She doesn’t smoke, and she does her exercises every night before bed. She also ends her day by thinking about what she will do in the next one – and doesn’t give much regard to the possibility that it won’t come.
“I’ve always danced,” she says, and she obviously isn’t afraid to try new things, having taken up water skiing for one glorious summer when she was 50.
She remembers travelling to school on a train where girls and boys were allocated to separate carriages and could only mingle by opening the windows and leaning out to wave at each other.
“And they were heavy,” she laughs, “but the boys didn’t mind.”
She also recalls the electric lights going on for the first time at her childhood home. Audrey was 12, and she remembers her mother running outside to see their house gloriously illuminated.
“She said, ‘Oh, we’ve got a castle!’”
This home was in Wai-iti, with Audrey’s earliest jobs being in the Wakefield and then Nelson telephone exchanges. She reckons those jobs, scheduling people’s appointments and phone calls, are what made her careful with time – “it was all done by the clock”.
Although she has never had the urge to leave New Zealand, her family always owned a campervan or caravan, and they travelled the country. She leaned into – embodied, perhaps – the post-war relief and freedom, saying that she can appreciate how different her life was to that of her parents, and the generations before.
The mother-of-two does, however, believe the world needs some more clever women at the top of the global hierarchies, “to clean up the mess that the men have made”.
Audrey is perfectly articulate and admirably spry, with bright eyes and a quick smile. She is up and down from her seat, collecting photographs and notes to punctuate her memories. She and her partner Bob have been together for 25 years, and Bob reckons that, at 96, he’s “just a young fellow” himself.
Audrey seems utterly joyful, but one cannot live for a full century without encountering sorrow – she is, unsurprisingly, the only one left out of six siblings, and her husband Jimmy died in his early 70s.
“It’s funny,” she says thoughtfully, when asked how a person copes with such a long lifetime of inevitable loss. “I have moments, and then it’s like, what would they expect me to do?”
She well knows the answer to that when it comes to Jimmy, speaking fondly about the wonderful independence she felt within the “great team” of their marriage.
“His last words to me were, ‘You’ve got a lot of living to do. Get on with it, girl.’”
And she certainly has.
