Mortlake's Ted Parker has seen a lot in his 100 years but by all accounts he was lucky to make it to the milestone on Monday.
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There were miraculous near misses during World War II, and he came close to death a number of times while recovering from tuberculosis but to look at him now you'd never know.
Last weekend as the family gathered in Warrnambool to celebrate, Ted took to the dance floor and kicked up his heels as Woodford singers The Sisters performed one of his favourite war-time songs Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye.
It's a song he said reminded him of having to leave his sweetheart, wife Thelma, behind as he went off to serve in WWII. "You thought about home everyday," he said.
Ted was born in London and left school at 14. He eventually found work doing maintenance at block of flats and there he met his wife Thelma, who also worked there.
They married in 1939 and, like most 20-year-olds, he joined the army and was first stationed at Portsmouth naval base on coastal defence "waiting for the invasion".
"I remember the air raid warning going one day and I looked out to sea and I couldn't believe my eyes," he said. "I counted more than 100 bombers coming towards us.
"There were 600 altogether. They just bombed indiscriminately.
"We were marching down the road and a bomber came over and nine bombs dropped all around us."
Ted, who was on his way to lunch, said the explosions sent bricks from the nearby houses flying all around him. "I had my mess can in my hand ... and a brick hit it and nearly flattened it," he said.
Following the Battle of Britain, Ted was deployed overseas for three years as part of the 54th heavy artillery regiment first to Algeria and Tunisia before being redeployed to Italy.
Telma, who was pregnant with their second child, had no photo of her husband to look at.
Daughter Jeannette Parker, of Woodford, recalls her mum saying all she had to hold on to was a memory of Ted's smile and "lovely teeth".
Ted and Thelma would write to each other often. She even sent him a hanky with the scent of Chanel No.5 on it which he carried with him till the end of the war along with a poem she had sent him on a card.
It read: No bomb on thee shall burst, lest your God permit it first. No shell above or mine below need cause you heart one pang of woe. The Lord of hosts and encircles thee, He is the Lord of land and sea.
The fellow I was going to go down to see, who I'd been talking to the day before, he was killed.
- Ted Parker
Those days were "hard going", Ted said. His eldest son, Anthony, was just a toddler when he left and would always run to the door calling out "Daddy, Daddy. Is that you Daddy?" whenever the postman would put letters through the box. "Every day he'd do this until he in the end he stopped doing it," Jeannette said.
Ted spent a year in Algeria and Tunisia as a gunner attached to the French Army on the 7.2 inch howitzer guns whose shells weighed 100 kilograms each. "It took four of us to pick it up," Ted said.
"They (the French) wanted our guns because they were the biggest we had."
He said the 16 guns were divided between the British and French troops. "We lost the toss and had to go with the French," he said.
Ted was involved in the battle of Pont du Fahs where Allied troops advanced from Algeria into Tunisia through the rugged and bare Atlas Mountains. "It was hot but you didn't notice it because you had too much to do," he said.
"It was rough living. You slept where could. You didn't undress to go to bed, you just lay on the floor."
Ted said it was a miracle that he wasn't killed during on the battlefields of North Africa.
Early one morning the was going to visit "one of the boys" who was stationed on the guns who the night before had received a letter from his mum saying he was her last surviving son.
He was halfway across the field along the fence line when he heard a voice behind him say: "Not that way".
"When someone speaks behind you, you turn around and see who's there. But I was by myself," he said.
"I thought I must be imagining things. I took another step towards the gun and voice again said: 'Not that way', so I stopped and looked again ... nothing there."
The next step he heard the same words but this time he felt a hand grip his shoulder and pull at his clothes. "Scary, but it didn't frighten me. I was a Christian then, and I still am," he said.
So Ted heeded the warning and headed back to the trucks, and in that moment the gun was hit and all that was left was a big column of smoke.
"Three of the men were killed and five were wounded," he said. "The fellow I was going to go down to see, who I'd been talking to the day before, he was killed."
After about a year in Algeria and Tunisia, the troops, dubbed the Forgotten Army, were sent to Italy where he spent time in Naples, Rome and Salerno.
As a driver, he would ferry officers around the country. Ted said he saw little action in Italy because by the time they'd arrived, the German army had been pushed back.
The bombing though had scarred the landscape and huge boulders blown off the mountain lay on the roadways. "It was a big as this house lying in the middle of the road. I had to drive around it."
With the Germans in retreat, people in Italy were starting to enjoy themselves again, he said. In the streets of Salerno the people would come out in the evening to dance. "There was a music shop down the road and they'd play music and dance in the street. They had something to dance about, the Germans had gone," he said.
When dad came out he wasn't allowed to kiss us.
- Jeannette Parker
Ted had escaped the battlefield uninjured, but just a month after returning home to England he was hospitalised for two years after he came down with an advanced case of tuberculosis. He was found in the bathroom vomiting blood. "It was on my lungs," he said.
His wife, who was pregnant with Jeannette, received a number of telegrams telling her to come to the hospital immediately because doctors thought he would die. "When dad came out he wasn't allowed to kiss us," she said. Doctors had warned her parents that if the children cuddled him they would end up kissing him and get tuberculosis.
Ted, who had trained as a watchmaker, couldn't find work in his trade after he left the army so the family moved to Cardiff in Wales where he drove trucks and then then later worked for the railways as a shunter and guardsman.
In 1964, the family came to Australia in search of a better life and bit of sunshine. They arrived in Warrnambool where Ted worked for Singer sewing machines. "I used to go around the farms fixing the machines," he said.
Work took him to Adelaide for a number of years before he returned to Warrnambool in about 1980 where his wife passed away a year or two later. Since then he has helped raise his great grandchildren and volunteered in op shops in Melbourne where he finally put his trade to use by fixing old watches.
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