ONE of her earliest memories is of a Zeppelin airship coming down on London in the First World War.

At a party to celebrate her 104th birthday this week, Grace Brett of Darnick recalled some more of her early life as she reminisced with her 83-year-old niece Pamela Bendersky.

Grace told the Border Telegraph: “There were four of us, my brother and us three girls, sometimes in the First War you could hear the big guns going off in the far distance.

“My dad fought in the Dardanelles campaign in 1916 and his legs got frozen, he had to have one amputated. I remember his artificial leg and how he used to sit in my mum’s sweet shop serving people.” Grace was born in Lewisham on November 6, 1910, just after George V had been crowned King.

She says life has sort of happened but at one point she had a grandstand seat on history during the abdication crisis of 1936.

From 1927 Grace was a telephone operator and while working at Buckingham Palace connected secret calls between Edward VIII and his lover, American divorcée Wallis Simpson. She was one of the first to hear of the Royal scandal which rocked the world.

As a birthday treat this week Grace’s daughter, 73-year-old Daphne Pratt from Galashiels, took her mum to the Darvel telephone Museum in Ayrshire and it brought the memories flooding back as Grace used an old fashioned switchboard again.

That part of Grace’s life ended in 1939 when she married Leslie Brett at Walthamstow.

But their early married life was interrupted by the Second World War which saw her husband serving as a radio operator with the RAF.

Neice Pamela recalled Grace’s wedding day and said: “One of my earliest memories of Aunty Grace was when I was seven and a bridesmaid at her wedding.” Two years later, in 1941, Daphne was born followed by her brother Peter in 1947.

Each had three children giving Grace six grand-children and so far she has five great grand-children, the eldest is 21 and the youngest two-years-old.

After her husabnd died in 1955 Grace returned to work as a civil servant in the government pensions department and continued past retirement age Daphne moved to the Scottish Borders in 1971.

She is still independent and with the exception of half an hour’s help each day looks after herself.

Grace’s secret for long life is to keep active and she still cleans her house most days.