Joan Wild says she will keep the birthday cards out for a few more days, then put them away. Space is at a premium in her neat apartment in Swansea, and she doesn't like the place to look untidy.
"There's the thing that Charles sent me," she says not long after she invited us in on Wednesday afternoon, gesturing to a framed card on the table as if she were speaking about an old friend. It's her letter from the King to celebrate her 100th birthday.
"That's Charles and Albanese, the Prime Minister; my kids put them all in frames," she says. Then, with a wry smile: "I don't know where they think I'm going to put them."
These are small treasures for the woman who once shook hands with Winston Churchill. Joan doesn't mind King Charles, but there is a sense she preferred his late mother as a monarch - they served in the British military at the same time, after all. The young queen was a driver then. Joan, who would never allow herself to have one of the easy jobs, fiddled (her word) with her age and signed up with the artillery division when she was 17.
She was a radar operator during the Second World War - the last line of defence for London - where she helped shoot down the Luftwaffe's V-1 flying bombs. The Germans called them Hollenhunds - Hellhounds - the Allies called them Doodlebugs.
"They were menacing, though," she says. "They sound like a motorbike, but it was when they stopped."
Joan lets the silence hang for a second in her story and lowers her voice just enough: "As soon as they would stop, they would drop."
As a child, she remembers sleeping in bunks in her family's Anderson shelter, waiting out the bombs and air raids. Later, during her military service, it was a rare night when the sirens didn't go off. Still, she was never afraid.
"No," she says emphatically when I ask. "I thought if we have to go in the shelter, we'll go in the shelter. It was the same when I was in the Army - we were bombed and machine-gunned. I've lived under canvas - all that stuff."
The day she met Churchill, she had only just shaken the infamous wartime politician's hand when the sirens started again.
"He was alright," she says. "Everyone regarded him as someone who would help win the War. It was the only time that I saw him close-up.
"We were posted in Kent - the last line of defence," she smiles again in that telling, slightly mischievous way. "And he came down to say thank you. We shook hands, and he just got on to the next one, and the sirens went, and they whipped him up.
"I think he was only there for the publicity."
Mrs Wild asks if we would like some chocolate. She has been inundated with chocolates since her birthday, she says, and that we should see one of her gifts. She steps into the back room, where she has been keeping the well wishes, and returns with a box full of handmade treats. The card is from her beaus - Lance, Neil, Kevin and Bernie - they co-signed the birthday wishes lovingly, "Your toy boys".
"I have to laugh because they're 80-something. Some of them are 90," she says, but she likes to flirt.
They are part of a walking group called the Walkie-Talkies in the apartments where Joan lives and, until only earlier this year, was a long-serving barmaid in the neighbourhood canteen.
"The whole time I was a barmaid, I never bought a drink," she says, smiling again at a photo of her in a raucous apron pinned to her fridge. "The fellas would come up saying, 'One for you, Joan.' Now I have to buy my own - terrible, that is. All those years of work."
Mrs Wild married her life's great love, Stan, when she was around 23. He was a Navy man - an electrical engineer who discovered he had an aunt on the other side of the world and emigrated with his new wife to Australia, a pair of 10-pound Poms.
The couple moved to the Hunter, where Joan has lived ever since. Mr Wild was tragically killed in a car accident when the couple were in their early 50s. Joan has blazed her own trail ever since.
"Kids say, 'Why don't you get married again, Mum?'" she says. "I say, 'No, thank you - once bitten, twice shy'."
"When you're on your own, you can please yourself with what you do - come home whenever you want."
Mrs Wild was a traveller for years and saw the world from Europe to Asia. She fell in love with Japan and its people and dreamed of travelling to Vietnam (she had to give it away, she says with a note of disappointment, because her travel insurer didn't like the idea of her going alone). Her life, she says, has been taking things as they happened.
"Brits are tough buggers, you know," she says, "And I'm Cornish, and they're very tough people.
"One of the best times I had was in the Army. It was good - apart from the crappy stuff. There was a lot that you had to put up with then. But I have enjoyed my life - the kids, marriage, and travelling."
She thinks about the young people who have never known what it was like to live on War rations or what it was like to go to bed in an old bomb shelter that her dad built in the yard.
"I've done a few things," she says, "People say, 'Oh, you're 100!' and I say, 'So?'. I don't feel any different to last year when I was 99."
