Audrey Northmore celebrated her 100th birthday with her family all around her.

The Tavistock resident had her big birthday on Wednesday, November 12.

Grandson Peter Pimley, his wife Leelien and daughter Mathilda, ten, came all the way from Singapore and granddaughter Jen Oakey and husband Jon travelled from Brighton.

They enjoyed a celebration lunch at Hotel Endsleigh and Audrey was also treated to a party by fellow residents at St John’s Court, where she has lived for over 15 years.

Still bright and lively and only a little hard of hearing, Audrey only stopped driving two years ago and still gets a taxi to Morrisons to do her own shopping. She does her own cooking and housework too in her neat apartment.

Audrey was born in Plymouth, where her father was a schoolmaster, but spent her teenage years out at Mary Tavy, after the outbreak of the Second World War, to escape the bombs.

“I liked it,” she says. “My first job was when we were still out at Mary Tavy. I worked for Chilcotts Solicitors in Tavistock for a time.”

Later, after many years travelling abroad, she and her husband Tim settled in Yelverton, and Audrey who has always been musical, was the organist at Yelverton and Buckland Monachorum churches and also ran choirs.

She moved into Tavistock, to St John’s Court in 2008, a peaceful spot off Abbey Rise, sometime after being widowed. “I feel safe here,” she says, adding laughing “I can’t be bothered to move!”

She looks back with pleasure on her life of travel – she ‘loved’ living in Malta and Singapore, where Tim’s work as a dockyard draftsman took them. ‘We went all over the world,” she says.

Audrey first met Tim a church in Plymouth, after she and her family moved back to Plymouth after the war.

“We got married after the war. We went to Bath first. Then we went to Malta. I loved it out there, we were there eight years altogether. We went to Singapore from 1964-67 then we went to Scotland, to Rosyth.”

After this, they settled back in Yelverton, where they had a house with a large garden, which is where Audrey’s grandchildren Peter and Jen remember visiting in the 1980s and 1990s.

“Tim and I would be best known for music in this area because I was an accompanist and Tim was an amateur conductor, so the two of us would play together,” said Audrey. “I used to play piano and was the organist at Buckland Monachorum and Yelverton churches and two choirs in Plymouth. I was taught piano when I was five and I always loved it. I was still playing for a choir in Plymouth until quite recently. “

Audrey and Tim had one daughter Julia, the mother of Jen and Peter, who has sadly died.

Asked about the secret of her long life, Audrey says: “To be honest, I don’t know.”

The highlight of her life was the travelling, living in Singapore and Malta. “Just seeing something new.”

She’s lived in 18 houses in her lifetime. “You don’t accumulate much rubbish,” she said. She doesn’t want to move again, though. “If I move again, it will be up there or down there,” she says gesturing towards the ceiling and down to the floor, smiling the while.