A resident at a veterans’ care home has celebrated her 104^th birthday.

Ena Mitchell enjoyed a party with fellow residents from her floor at the Home in High Wycombe on Friday 30 September.

Royal Star & Garter is a charity which provides loving, compassionate care to veterans and their partners living with disability or dementia, and also has Homes in Solihull and Surbiton.

Ena was born in 1918, in Kingsley, Hampshire. Royal Star & Garter had been established just two years earlier to care for the severely injured young men returning from the battlegrounds of the First World War.

Husband killed by enemy fire

Ena’s husband Bill, who she married in 1938, was a soldier in the East Yorkshire Regiment. He was one of the 330,000 troops successfully evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940, and four years later took part in the D-Day landings on 6 June. Bill survived the offensive, but later that year, on 13 September, the 33-year-old was killed in Belgium by enemy fire. Their daughter was just two at the time.

Later, Ena started fighting for the rights of the women who had lost husbands during the war, and joined the War Widows’ Association (WWA).

She has lived at Royal Star & Garter since 2019.

The High Wycombe Home is welcoming new residents. For more information, please go to www.starandgarter.org/hw