Christabell Lavina Cann might be turning 100 today, but she has all her faculties and is a hip and happening matriarch.

She has not only been blessed with a long life, but is also blessed with her family – she gave birth to nine children, and now boasts more than 40 grandchildren, 24 great-grandchildren and she is a great-great grandmother to nine.

Her parents James Horton, from Saba, and Josephine Bailey, of St. Kitt's, emigrated to Bermuda and settled in "God's Acre" Somerset. After marrying they had seven children, the second of which was Christabell Lavina Horton.

Miss Horton's other siblings were the late James, Kenneth-Ray, David and Bessie, and sisters Geraldine and Barbara, who are 96 and 98 respectively.

She was born on January 29, 1910, in a little cottage on the right side of what is now the gate of the Cambridge Beaches or Ferry Point (where the laundry is now).

The family moved over to Ferry Point, near Watford Bridge, where there is now a graveyard, and it was at Ferry Point where her mother ran a laundry business and where Mrs. Cann learned the meaning of hard work.

When the ships came in at Dockyard, her mother collected the linens and other washables, which she shared with other Somerset laundresses.

"The ships were out in Grassy Bay and she used to go out and pick the laundry and bring it in," said Mrs. Horton. "She let everyone wash them, but nobody could iron.

"In those days you put coals into the iron and if it wasn't hot enough, you turned the head to the window to get wind to heat it up. I could just about lift it up."

She attended Huntleys School, which was run by a Mrs. Stowe.

"There were some children there called the Galloways and they used to fight every afternoon and get licks every morning," she said.

She learned to swim the old fashioned way up at what is known as Sandy Cut near Cambridge Beaches. "My grandmother took me out on her back and then she'd drop you were she thought you could stand, but when she dropped me, the water was too high," she said.

"I didn't appreciate it and she had to grab me up real fast. And I lived by water all my life and I ain't going in."

Dances were also a part of her youth and she said: "In my young days I used to go to dances and stuff in your long dresses, and people used to think that you ain't nobody unless you had on your long dresses."

As she got older, she moved to Ely's Harbour, Soundview Road, to Scott's Hill Road, on Beacon Hill and near St. James' Church.

When asked how she met her husband to be Henry Cann, she simply said: "Drunk!"

He was a gardener for the Fishers, who owned the place where The Upper Crust is now.

"This boy used to work for the Fishers and this day I was just in the window and this boy sung out and that's where I met my end," she said.

"I saw this little boy out in the planting ground." When asked if he was cute, she said: "I don't know nothing about cute!"

The couple married on a very blustery July 9, in 1934 at St. James' Church. "It was raining cats and dogs," she said. "But the guy that rang the bell, still rang the bell, so I had to go up the church. "Also the minister couldn't get up to the church.

"It was raining too much. We got married in the evening."

Shortly after they were married there was a storm, likened only to a hurricane. "The storm was so bad, we saw when the storm took the steeple down," she said.

The couple had nine children and one of her great-granddaughters is lawyer Koshea Scott-Millett.

Her first born and all but one of her children was delivered at home by a midwife, while her son Albert was born at the hospital around the same time as Stuart Hayward, she said.

But of her late husband, she said: "He drank too much and he was an alcoholic in the end.

"He'd be laid up on the wall drunk and one night when I was trying to get him, I had tell one of his friends to get out of my way."

Travel was simpler in those days and also there was no television. "I remember going to town in the two horse bus," she said. "In those days we never had no TVs in our houses, we used to get music from down the base."

She mainly worked inside the house, but occassionally she participated in flower shows near the Somerset Police Station.

"It was something like the Ag Show, my mother used to do flycatchers and macrame and all of that, I never did any of that, I used to play the piano. I travelled a lot, but I done my share of hard work."

Her sisters Barbara and Geraldine both worked at Loyalty Inn. "Barbara was a dancer with Winky Tatem," she said. In later years, Barbara taught dance and still teaches dance today at 98.

"Old [Godwin] Goody Smith, yeah he's dead and gone now, all those lot used to come up from down Flatts or whatever you call it. I don't know how they got up there, but I know they used to come up there."

And her brother James (Jimmy) Horton built Somerset Cricket Club.

Mrs. Cann has travelled extensively over the years, all across the US, Canada, the Caribbean, North Africa and Europe. Before moving into the Lorraine Rest Home, she lived in Boaz Island, but the steps were too much for her, as all the bedroms were on the top floor, although she was always out and about on the buses.

But she has noticed that there is rarely anyone to talk to in the nursing home, as she says: "All these people just sleep all day."

When asked what it was like to have reached such an incredible milestone, she said: "It doesn't bother me, I'm not even interested."

And on what she attributed to her long life, she wouldn't say, although her great-granddaughter Mrs. Scott-Millett reminded her that she had previously claimed that eating sardines daily had preserved her. Mrs. Cann would only say: "It was hard work, your grandmother did hard work!"