Esther Clark arrived early, and she is in no great hurry to leave.
“The good Lord doesn’t want me,” the Motueka woman quipped as she celebrated her 104th birthday last month.
Although she grew up in Christchurch, Esther’s story began on 17 June, 1922, in Golden Bay’s Tarakohe Valley, where she arrived prematurely during a family holiday.
Her family later shifted to the West Coast, where her father managed a farm. There, Esther married her husband Harry in 1938, at the age of 16. They would spend the next 63 years together until Harry’s death - years Esther still describes as the happiest of her life.
“He was wonderful. I couldn’t wish for anybody better.”
Along the way they experienced great joy and great loss - including losing a baby daughter at 10 days old, and later a set of quadruplets who, at a time when incubators were not widely available, did not survive past two days.
The family moved to Motueka in 1960, to help Harry’s brother who had fallen ill. Esther says the transition was difficult at first, but she eventually found friendship and community through the Church of Christ, now Alive Church.
Daughters Thelma and Colleen describe a childhood with few luxuries but “all the basics”.
Esther was a young mother, and they remember her as active and engaged, joining in with athletics, running and basketball. She worked in a Motueka shoe shop once the children were older.
“She’s been a good mum,” Thelma says. “She’s looked after us well.”
These days, Esther enjoys visits from family and friends at Woodlands Retirement Village. Her family now includes 13 grandchildren, 37 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren.
She was joined on her birthday by her two surviving daughters Thelma and Colleen, their respective husbands Stan and Fred, and her friend Rosemary Paynter.
As for the secret to a long life?
Colleen reckons her mother has always lived simply - no smoking, no drinking - and stayed at home until she was 100 before moving into Woodlands.
But the final word belongs to the birthday matriarch herself:
“I’ll go when I’m ready.”
