At 106 years old, Isabella Brearley does not mince words.
She may not have known every name in the room at her birthday party Saturday — five generations of family showed up for the occasion — but she did have one piece of advice for all of them: "follow your road."
"My advice to anybody is if they think, 'that's the the road I'm going to take,' take it," said Brearley, who turned 106 on Sunday.
"If you take the other road, you'll wish all the way along that you'd gone on your first thought," Brearley added. "Follow your road because that's where you're meant to be."
Brearley, who now lives in a retirement home in Ancaster, has lived by her prescribed mantra. With five generations of family surrounding her, and her arm in a sling because of a broken collar bone suffered just days earlier, she wanted to tell one story, a story she knows very well. It was about how she moved away from Aberdeen, Scotland, where she was born in 1909, to move to Canada, and eventually settle in Hamilton.
"On my fourteenth birthday, I was sitting in the kitchen with my mother and I looked at her for a minute and I said, 'I'm going to tell you something, you're not going to like it, but I'm going to tell it to you so you're prepared,'" started Brearley. "I said to her 'I am 14 today, but four years from now I will be 18. And as an 18-year-old woman I have the right of choice.'"
"'I will not stay here'," Brearley said. "And she looked at me and she said. 'How do you know?' And I said, 'I know, I can feel it. This will not be my staying place. I will go when I am 18.'"
Brearley's mother was not convinced.
"She said, 'Over my dead body.' And I said right back, 'If you have to be dead, I promise to bury you.'"
Brearley, true to her word, left for Canada when she was 18.
"And the only one that came to say goodbye to me, at that station, in that big place, and that big train was loaded with friends bidding people goodbye, all alone," she said, pointing to her chest. "And at the last minute my mother ran in and grabbed me and she said, 'Let me at least kiss you good bye.' I never forgot the words, 'Let me at least kiss you good bye.' I jumped on the train and I said I'm not changing my mind."
She has never looked back. She married William Brearley shortly after she arrived in Canada.
She started one of the first nurseries to take care of children while women worked shortly after the Second World War, said Sandra Patterson, one of Brearley's three children. She fought for seniors rights while she aged, and recently started painting.
A small celebration for Brearley will be held Sunday, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the fireside room of the Meadows Long Term Care Centre in Ancaster (12 Tranquility Ave.).
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