Birthday buddies and next-door neighbors turn 101 on same day

Imagine living next door to a neighbor who is exactly your age and who shares the very same birthday.

Josie Church and Anne Wallace-Hadrill know all about this. They also know about longevity — and a lot of luck. 

The two women have lived side-by-side since the 1980s.

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The great-grandmothers were also born on the same day in 1924 — April 1 — according to news agency SWNS. 

Said Josie Church, "I think life has gone quite quickly."

She added of her neighbor in Oxford, in the U.K., "Anne was very busy when she was younger — so was I — and was very productive and creative. She did a lot of painting and tapestry, and she was always busy, and I was always busy doing something else, somewhere else, because that's the sort of life we live."

She also said, "I don't think we've thought much about the time passing. It's just passed."

Both women were very involved in volunteering and creative activities after their husbands died, said the same news source.

Church's husband, Peter, passed away in the 1990s and the women formed a friendship.

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Wallace-Hadrill, who grew up in Hampshire, first moved to the house following the death of her husband, John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, a historian.

She taught English at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford University, and served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service as a radio mechanic during World War II.

While St. Hilda’s was an all-female college at the time, Wallace-Hadrill said, "We weren’t forbidden from seeing men. We were expected to live decent lives."

She said she enjoyed being at the university, adding that it was both "a lot of fun and a lot of work," said SWNS.

After graduating, Wallace-Hadrill worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. "I was always interested in words," she said. "It was my trade."

She was quite proud, she said, to receive a medal for her service from the Royal Navy last year; it was described as "long overdue" by the representative who gave it to her.

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Originally from Manchester, Church did her training at Preston Royal Infirmary and remembers the introduction of the National Health Service (NHS). She said the training was "three years of hard work."

Said Church, "In those days, you had to live in, and you couldn't get married, and it was very strict. People wouldn't put up with that sort of life now."

Her time in nursing during World War II included a "chilling" experience of caring for SS German soldiers. "They weren’t very nice," Church said. "They didn’t wish to be taken care of by us. They were very difficult patients."

She moved with her husband to Oxford so he could continue his degree at University College — which was interrupted by the war — and they "lived the life of an undergraduate."

Half of the undergraduates had been to war, she said, while the other half were young students who were just matriculating.

"Oxford was very strange because each college had a large intake of older people who’d gone through the war and were taking up their university places," said Church. "So you’d get the old men and then the young 18-year-olds coming in from school."

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After marrying, Church worked for a while and looked after her family. Her husband was a housemaster at a boys’ boarding school and she was the house nurse — so she had an "interesting" few years looking after 120 boys.

She has three "wonderful" children, she shared: Chris, Pamela and Andrew.

Meanwhile, Wallace-Hadrill's son James lives in Poole and her son Andrew in Cambridge.

The two women said they don’t remember the moment they discovered they share the same birthday — but they enjoyed the celebrations arranged for them last year, SWNS reported.

"We live on the most amazing road. It’s like one big, extended family," said Church. "Everybody knows everybody else. If you have a problem, you just give a shout and somebody will come."

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"It was wonderful. We had a lovely day last year," she said, referencing the women's 100th birthday celebration. "It was quite unexpected because I didn’t know anything about it. It's just an amazing street. I think we are lucky."

As for tips about leading a long life: "Just live," advised Church. "There's not much you can do. You just go on from one thing to the next."

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She added, "You do what seems to need doing, and then you do that, and then something else takes its place. You just go on from one thing to another."

She also said, "We don't engineer our lives. I think they've just engineered us."