Wingfield Care Home celebrated the birthday of remarkable 105-year-old Alice Kudirka with four generations of her family on Friday by holding a party for its oldest resident.

Mrs Kudirka, who has been at the home in Wingfield Road, Trowbridge, for the last year, was born in 1909 in the East End to Lithuanian parents, shortly after they moved to the United Kingdom from their native country.

Her father left them at a young age and after her mother died from breast cancer, Mrs Kudirka was left to care for her two younger brothers, Felix and Victor, from the age of 14.

Mrs Kudirka got a job working in a sewing factory in Dalston in London and lived with her brothers until she married her husband Constantine in 1944. She had a daughter, Monica, a year later in Derbyshire, where she’d been evacuated during the Second World War.

Daughter Monica Ferris, who lives in Hilperton with husband Gordon, said: “I’m not sure she has a secret to long life, it is just pot luck. The people from her generation had a hard life and she has certainly had an interesting one.

“She came to live with us in Slough when my dad died in 1987 and she continued to do so when we moved to Trowbridge 16 years ago. She was then in Westbury Care Home for eight years, until we moved her to Wingfield.

Mrs Kudirka was visited on her birthday by Mrs Ferris and her husband,their son Maurice and his step daughter, who came with her boyfriend and their one-year-old daughter.