Mrs Driffield is celebrating her 100^th birthday on Friday, ahead of a party with family on Sunday.

She still remembers the first person she poured a beer for when she started working as a barmaid, and the beer he ordered.

It's one of the many quirky memories she has of her life in Maitland. She thinks her barmaid years were by far the best ones.

She worked at the Metropolitan Hotel for a long time - and her love for that pub and High Street has never wavered, even after all these years. She also worked at the Bank Hotel in East Maitland.

The pub scene was different back then. Everybody knew each other and had a favourite drink they would always order. They also had their favourite bar stools.

"She loved being with the people - meeting them and chatting to them. It was different back then, everybody knew everybody," her son Tom said. "She was an SP bookmaker agent for a number of years. She used to do it at the hotel and then at home for a while after she finished up there as a barmaid."

Mrs Driffield, nee Etheridge, married Roger in 1944 in Wallsend and had two children - Tom and Pam. She still has strong memories of two major floods in Maitland. They lived in a two-storey house in Wallace Street, near Maitland Showground, when the 1949 and 1955 floods hit.

"Mum and dad used to put all of our furniture upstairs when a flood came and in the 1949 flood it never got upstairs," her son Tom said.

"In the 1955 flood it got up there. Dad wouldn't leave the house until the flood started coming around the corner and when it did we would go to East Maitland to stay with family there.

"After the 1955 flood mum put a whole pile of washing in her arms and went downstairs to put it in the sink. When she turned the tap on to wet the clothes a snake came out of the tap."

Two years after the flood her husband Roger won the lottery. He had gone halves in a ticket with the Metropolitian Hotel publican and they won 6000 pounds each.

The Driffields used their share to buy a block of land in Victoria Street, East Maitland, and their first car.

Over the next year Mr Driffield built the family home.

"He was a carpenter and worked weekends on the house. He didn't have any of the fancy tools we have today, he did it with a nail and a hammer," Tom said.

Mr Driffield died in 1997 and she lived on her own until four years ago when she began to require more support. She lives at Opal Aged Care Maitland. She has five grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.