ASKED how she felt about turning 101 years old today, Barbara Hewlins replied: “Fine, I feel the same as yesterday.”

Her daughter, Pauline Seaman, joked: “That’s the same answer she gave us last year.”

Today, Mrs Hewlins will celebrate her birthday with her daughter, son Michael, and a few other relatives and friends at St Katharine’s House care home in Wantage.

Members of Wantage Rotary Club will join the party, which might even involve a few of Mrs Hewlin’s beloved crossword puzzles.

The home’s deputy manager, Olga Parry, said: “Mrs Hewlins is very sharp. One morning, I sat down to do a crossword with her and I couldn’t get them but she was so quick and sharp. I was still scratching my head.

“She is a very respectable lady. She likes to do things properly and she has an amazing capacity to make her own choices on how she lives every day.

“It is a joy to spend time with her.”

Mrs Hewlins was born Barbara Rolls in Bournemouth on January 29, 1915.

Her parents were industrious, running their own boarding house, and the young Barbara started work at 14 behind the cosmetics counter at Boots.

She was 24 when the Second World War broke out, but life carried on almost as normal and she continued going to her local tennis club.

It was there she met a young man called Edward Cecil Hewlins, who would go on to become her husband and father of her children.

They were married in 1941 and the bride’s family saved up all their rationed clothes coupons to buy her a “going away” outfit for their honeymoon on the south coast. After the wedding, the new Mrs Hewlins took a job with the Ministry of Agriculture in Bournemouth.

In 1941 the couple had their son Michael, and Pauline came along six years later.

The children grew up and went to school in Bournemouth, then Michael took up a place to read chemistry at Cambridge.

A year later, when Pauline was still 15, the children’s father died after losing a battle with cancer. He was just 55.

Mrs Hewlins had to start working again and became a wages clerk for a bakery.

Pauline read theology at King’s College London and briefly taught in Lincoln, before taking a job at St Helen and St Katharine School in Abingdon in 1984.

Mrs Hewlins eventually followed her daughter to Oxfordshire in 2001, at the age of 86.

She first moved to Cherry Tree Court in Harwell and said she liked being in the countryside, before moving to St Katharine’s eight years ago.

Now, the birthday girl says she still enjoys life at St Katharine’s, attending weekly chapel services, reading magazines and solving at least one crossword puzzle a day, in order “to keep her brain working”.