When someone reaches an age most people can hardly imagine, everyone wants to know the secret. Usually, it gets pinned on some “miracle” food, a strict routine, or a quirky habit. But Ethel Caterham, now 116 years old and officially the oldest living woman in the world, shrugs all that off. Her secret is simpler — almost disarmingly so. “I don’t argue with anyone,” she said. “I listen, and then I do what I like.” And given the life she’s lived, the woman might be onto something.
Ethel was born on August 21, 1909, in Shipton Bellinger, Hampshire. To put her age in perspective: she was already a toddler when the Titanic sank. By the time the First World War began, she was five. She grew up as the second youngest of eight children in Tidworth, Wiltshire, in a family where longevity wasn’t just luck — it seemed hereditary. One of her sisters, Gladys, lived to 104. Even then, nobody could have predicted Ethel would outlive her entire generation and become a global record-breaker more than a century later.
Her early adulthood was just as remarkable. At 18, while most young women of her era stayed close to home, Ethel left the country altogether. She traveled to British India to work as an au pair for a military family — a huge adventure for a teenager in the 1920s.
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