An eyewitness to history: Mum turns 100

It was a cold day, the weather in London just below zero, the First Great War still casting its terrible shadow, on Friday, Jan. 31, 1919.
That was the day our Mum was born prematurely, a three-pound baby whose young mother lay gasping on the bed, feverish with the Spanish flu, a pandemic sweeping the world and cutting down millions in their prime of life. “Look to the mother,” the doctor directed, “the child will die.”
She did not. Her grandmother placed her in a shoebox