The Wilton and District Thursday Club has just celebrated the 100th birthday of one of its members - Eve Wharton.
Eve is a quite remarkable woman - she has lost none of her faculties and looks and behaves more like an 80 year old.
She lives alone in Quidhampton, although she has a son living nearby.
She wrote an autobiography of her wartime experiences, which Dan Snow reviewed at the Chalke Valley History Festival. It is called Brave Faces, written under the pseudonym Mary Arden. A synopsis on the back cover reads: “An evocative memoir about one woman's journey from privilege to service, heartbreak to laughter. Mary Arden's story gives us an insight into the changes in society that took place with the advent of war.
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“As the Second World War breaks out, Eve's parents are determined that their daughter's privileged upbringing should continue, and that life should carry on as much as normal. She is sent to finishing school and becomes a debutante attending 'coming out' balls in London, despite the nightly bombing raids.
"However, Mary is determined to do her bit for the war effort, and volunteers to serve as a Red Cross Nurse, before joining the WRNS. Accepted into the WRNS, not as an officer, but as an 'other rank', Eve has to learn to live a very different kind of life to the one she was brought up to expect. She is used to being chaperoned, only talking to men she has been 'introduced ' to, so it’s an almost impossible task for her Senior Wren Officer to find a suitable category for this naive girl.
"Eve finally becomes part of a new elite category known as Night Vision Testers, training the young pilots to see in the dark so they can land their planes at night on the deck of their aircraft carrier and not in the sea. As the war progresses, Eve moves from one Naval Air Station to another. Her tasks become stranger than fiction and her duties are definitely outside her job description - and most probably outside the rules too. She has also been presented to The Princess Royal during a visit to Yeovilton Naval Air Station.”
Her birthday is on December 30 but the Thursday Club celebrated it on its last gathering before Christmas, on Thursday, December 21.
They meet in the Wilton Community Centre, West Street, Wilton.
At the end of the day, Lord Pembroke dropped to give Eve a bunch of flowers and witness the cutting of the cake.
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