The money raised will be used to buy a football strip Nora, 101, strips off for charity
A 101-year-old woman has posed topless for a charity calendar to promote a children's football team.
Nora Hardwick, who will be 102 next week, decided to pose behind the bar of her local pub in Ancaster, Lincolnshire dressed only in a pink scarf.
Nora is Miss November in the calendar, which is supporting Ancaster Athletic.
She said: "I am always game for anything, especially if it's for charity. I did enjoy it, though I don't suppose I will do it again."
Football strip
Donna Moodie, 37, landlady at Nora's local pub, the Ermine Way, said: "I thought if Nora would do it, then everyone would. She's amazing."
As well as Nora, mothers of some of the team players have appeared in the calendar.
Ancaster parish councillor Sandy Ford-Pain, whose husband Jonathan still coaches the youngsters, said they hoped to sell 400 calendars.
The money raised is being spent on a football strip so a second team can be set up.
Mrs Ford-Pain, 35, posed as Miss December for the calendar. She said they had raised £1,000 last year by asking men in the village to pose nude.
Copyright BBC MMVII
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LONDON, England (The Mirror), November 21, 2007:
Centenarian Nora Hardwick has bared all to raise money for a charity calendar.
The 101-year-old posed topless as Miss November to help raise funds for a kids football team.
Nora, who will be 102 when the calendar comes out next week, wore only a pink scarf for the photoshoot behind the bar of her local pub in Ancaster, Lincolnshire.
"I am always game for anything, especially if it's for charity," she said. "And I did enjoy it, though I don't suppose I will do it again."
Source: mirror.co.uk
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She's Been A Celebrity Already
LIFE AT 100
January 18, 2006
The Guardian
Nora Hardwick
Ancaster, Lincs
This is not going to be easy. There are never fewer than half a dozen people in the living room of Nora Hardwick's small bungalow in the village of Ancaster, near Grantham, Lincolnshire: her two daughters, Maureen and Janice, two old friends who happened to be passing through the area, another friend who dropped by and a grand-nephew who was delivering a parcel to the village and looked in. It takes Mrs Hardwick, who has eight grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild, a little while to remember his name. This interview will be neither linear nor intimate.
Mrs Hardwick is a celebrity in this part of Lincolnshire - not just because she is Ancaster's oldest resident, but also because she was a parish councillor for 39 years, runs the local whist drive, raises money for the village hall and several charities, and still drives a car. "Any accidents?" I inquire. "A few bumps," she replies. "The gateway's not been wide enough." Speeding offences? "Weaving-about offences, but no speeding," says Sheila, one of the droppers-in.
The day before, she had driven to Sleaford, six miles away. In Ancaster, Mrs Hardwick setting off in her Nissan Sunny is a ritual akin to trooping the colour. Vehicles stop, people scatter: the motive may be fascination or self-preservation. "There was a lot of oncoming traffic when I pulled out, but they all stopped and beckoned me on," she says. Her driving even permeates her religion. "I go to church once a month," she says when I ask her if she is religious. "I'm a believer. I say a little prayer now and again: 'God keep me safe when I'm driving.'"
The term "no-nonsense" could have been invented for Nora Hardwick. She can't understand the fuss over her 100th birthday, which she celebrated in November, and when at the end I thank her for telling me her life story, she says of it: "What a load of rubbish." Evidently, she considers it just another life. Here it is anyway.
Her parents ran a pub in Swineshead near Boston, Lincs. She was one of eight children - "a girl in between five boys". The youngest girl, too, which meant that when her elder sisters moved out she was left to help her mother with the endless washing and cleaning. "I used to spend the whole day at the washtub," she recalls. "I can remember finishing the washing by candlelight." She remembers childhood games, too, but it is the physical hardness of life that has stayed with her. She has little time for those who go on about the "good old days". Life in the 1920s and 30s was a grind. Ancaster and the surrounding villages didn't get electricity or running water until after the second world war.
She trained as a psychiatric nurse at a nearby mental hospital but gave up nursing in her early 20s to marry local blacksmith Robert Hardwick. They had two daughters and a son, and she was happy being a housewife. But in 1943, with personnel in short supply, the vicar persuaded her to take over Ancaster's post office and she ended up doing it for 35 years, retiring at 72.
Her husband had retired at 70 and lived until he was 94, but was confined to a wheelchair in his latter years. He died in 1998, on New Year's Eve. They had been married for 71 years. "I wasn't expecting it," she says. "The weekend before, I had been ill and was taken into Grantham hospital. My daughters felt they couldn't look after him, so he went into a nursing home. I came home and wanted him home, too. They said, 'Have a day or two at home and we'll bring him home on Saturday,' but he died on the Thursday morning. They came and told me he had died and I remember saying, 'He can't have, he's not been ill.' I think it upset him that I was ill."
I ask her how she adapted to being on her own. She answers with a vignette of what had been lost. "After the funeral, the girls stayed with me for a while, but then when you're left alone ... Before, I'd be sitting here and he'd be sitting there. Every night at seven o'clock he used to like a tot of whisky. I'd usually be having a doze on the settee and he'd say, 'Ma, it's tot time.' So I'd get up to get him it. A tumbler of whisky neat, Bell's, it'd got to be Bell's. He used to pick it up and have a little sip. He'd make it last about an hour."
There is no self-pity in the telling. "Tot time" is a happy memory, not a tragic one. And adapt she did. "I had my interests in life, though I hadn't started the whist drives then. I'd always socialised and gone out. I'd always mixed; the Women's Institute. It's when you're in the house on your own and there's an empty chair." But is this house ever empty?
Does she think about being 100? "Not at all. I don't feel any different than when I was in my 70s, apart from I can't walk so well. I get in my car; I don't think that I shouldn't be driving. I try to look forward. It's other people who have made the fuss about my birthday. Do I look 100? You needn't be frightened to tell me."
I am frightened - but no, she doesn't. She looks stately, indestructible. She sits in an armchair near the window and at 45 degrees to it, precisely positioned to maximise both the light for reading and her view of the village. "Look, there's Alice," she says, as a birdlike woman goes skipping past. "She's 90."
"It's the country air," explains Maureen. "Not like all that pollution you get in London."
So where does elderly start? "Look at my daughter, Maureen," says Mrs Hardwick. "She's 77, but I don't look on her as elderly. And Janice there. She's 72. I don't look on her as elderly. But years ago you used to look on people in their 60s as old. And the way people dress: people don't dress old now."
The non-elderly Janice adds: "As soon as some people reach 60 or 65, they think, 'Oh, I've retired now ... They think old, instead of getting on with it. I've just come back from London. I had a marvellous weekend. went to see Rod Stewart at Earl's Court. It was brilliant."
"I have good genes and the will to live," says Mrs Hardwick. "I'm well. I don't feel ill. I had a colostomy when I was 86 and it took me a long time to get over it. The first operation went wrong and I was in a nursing home for five months. It took a year out of my life. But eventually I picked up and I'm enjoying myself. I have a good quality of life and a good, loving family.
"When I go to the funerals of friends who are younger than me - and I've been to one or two recently - I say to myself, 'It doesn't seem fair for somebody to die so young and here I am.' I think, well, what I am doing here? It doesn't seem fair when somebody dies in their 70s - when you retire at 65, after working hard all your life, and you're taken ill in your 70s when you should be having the best years of your life. So I've made up my mind - I don't think I'll go to any more funerals. I'll not go until I go to my own."
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
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