I never expected that the two people who would feature most prominently in this book would both become centenarians. In very different ways, the lives of May Nilewska and Frances Partridge have been highly revealing for me, and it has left me wondering why. The reason, in my opinion, is that the evidence demonstrates how the lived experience of growing older is one of slow but constant change, change that continues for as long as there is life. Undertaking research with centenarians is not easy and much of what exists has been largely epidemiological, aimed at discovering their ‘secrets’, the predictors of longevity (Yong, 2009). An unintended consequence of this curiosity has been the idea that they are in some way ‘freaks’ who have escaped the fate of the ordinary person.

As I was drafting the concluding chapter, Remembrance Day 2010 approached, and some attention was given to Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier who fought in the trenches, who had died in July 2009. In 2008, Andrew Motion, then Poet Laureate, was invited by the BBC to visit him. Motion's grandfather had fought in Flanders and he himself had edited an anthology of poetry from the First World War, and so he was pleased to take up the invitation. The staff at the nursing home where Harry lived told him that Harry was ‘amazingly robust’ for someone aged 110 years, ‘but, nevertheless’, they said ‘110 is 110’ (Motion, 2008a). Talking to them, Motion began to realise that for several years Harry had been regularly visited by media people and well-wishers. Although Harry insisted he was ‘just an ordinary chap’, he’d come to be seen as a hero: he felt awkward about this as well as pleased. In media interviews he had stuck to the same few stories, so what Motion hoped to do was ‘surprise Harry back into his old self ‘.

When they met, Harry was in a wheelchair, ‘little and frail but, given his great age, astonishingly spry-looking’. On his ‘sparrow-body’ there were medals on his chest: