HASLEMERE resident Vicky Cowper celebrates her 100th birthday on November 11 – the day of international commemorations marking the 100th anniversary of WWI’s Armistice in 1918.

Her son Ferris Cowper, a Grayshott district councillor, said: “Celebrating my mum’s 100th on Armistice Day is a vital link with a past that soon all of us might forget.

“The amazing courage of that generation is so hard for us to imagine today.

“We complain about overcrowded trains, but she walked through bomb craters and dodged doodle bug bombs to get to work.

“On Armistice Day, I will celebrate my mum’s 100th I hope, but all of us should celebrate the unimaginable sacrifices of her generation that gave us peace and freedom.

His mother recalls many vivid memories of vital service to her country during World War II.

Mrs Cowper, from Haslemere, rose to become staff sergeant in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army.

“I loved being in the ATS,” she said. “They were a wonderful bunch of girls, so friendly, and I was their leader. A lot of them had never been to school and I wrote their letters for them.”

Vicky married Edward Cowper, better known as Ted, in September 1948. The couple met when they both worked at Unilever in London and were separated under very difficult circumstances during the war.

Mr Cowper served as a bombardier in the Royal Artillery, in Singapore.

He was badly burned followng a bombing raid by the Japanese and survived horrific forced labour conditions, building the Burma Railway.

Unable to write letters home, his fiancee did not know if he was dead or alive, until she received a telegram from the War Office saying he was on his way back home. As well as the anguish of not knowing if her fiancee had died as a Prisoner of War, Vicky’s parents had to relocate three times as bombs rained down on London.

After the family home in Charlton, was bombed, they were rehoused in nearby Plumstead, but that house was also reduced to rubble in The Blitz.

Her parents relocated to Biddenden, in Kent, but Vicky and her late husband stayed in south London.

Their first home was a one-room flat in Wimbledon. They built a new home in Sutton in 1951 following the birth of their only child Ferris, and settled in Haslemere in 1971.