Ruby Druce is unfazed when reminded that she is, at 108 years old, Ireland’s oldest person.
“Am I? I think I am,” she says. I will be 109 at the end of the year.” She gives a brief chuckle and then adds: “When your man above pulls the plug, off you go.”
The native of Castlefinn, Co Donegal hasn’t much interest in doling out advice on how to live a long life.
Although widely quoted when she reached 100 as recommending hard work, walking and a daily cod liver oil tablet, she seems much more interested now in talking about a duet she sang with Daniel O’Donnell and how she managed to hoodwink customs officers in her butter-smuggling days long ago.
The eldest of five children, she has outlived her husband Jim by 54 years and lost two of her siblings to the Spanish flu more than 100 years ago.
Born on New Year’s Eve, 1915, a few months before the Easter Rising, she has lived through two World Wars and two pandemics. She laughs when asked what medicine her father, shoemaker George Crawford, gave her to protect her from Spanish flu at the age of three. “Poitín,” she replied.
“The only time in her life she drank,” said her niece Carmel Harran, with whom Ruby lives.
George and his wife Lizzie lost their six-week-old baby Molly and two-year-old James during the 1918 pandemic but the poitín apparently worked.
And Ruby escaped Covid for a long time. “She got it last year but didn’t even know she had it,” said Carmel’s husband Martin, explaining that after a fall she was taken to Letterkenny hospital, where the family was shocked when a routine Covid test proved positive.
Visitors to Ruby are treated to a video of her singing The Homes of Donegal along with O’Donnell, when the singer fulfilled a birthday promise to come and visit her.
“He often rings on her birthday and last time he said he’d come and see her – and she said ‘as long as you bring Majella’,” said Martin. “She is a lovely lady,” interjects Ruby.
Having worked in Porters shirt factory in Castlefinn from the age of 14, she eventually left more than four decades later to look after her father.
George used to accompany Ruby and her sister Maggie on trips to the cinema in Strabane, the three of them making the 11km trip by bicycle at a time when it cost sixpence to see a film. The last time she went to a cinema was to see Downton Abbey in Letterkenny when she was 105.
Smuggling coffee and tea across the border from Strabane during the second World War was an adventure, and she later smuggled butter inside her clothes, hiding it if a customs car was spotted approaching.
She remembers on one occasion concealing the butter in a hedge and taking a long time to find it after the customs officers left.
A few months ago the 108-year-old moved in with Carmel and Martin, after another niece Margo Butler, with whom she had lived for a decade, was diagnosed with cancer, dying just seven weeks later.
“She lived on her own until she was 98. She used to walk the quarter of a mile down here every day for her dinner,” recalled Martin.
After a bad fall in which she broke her hip, Ruby moved into Margo’s Letterkenny home and throughout lockdown Carmel and Martin’s only contact with her was a wave from outside the window.
They tease her about being only 14 when she met saxophonist Jim Druce, although the couple didn’t get married until 1956, as she was caring for her parents.
Jim had a Honda 50 and she remembers going to Bundoran on it, but more recently she has gone farther afield, visiting her niece Claire in Toronto when in her 80s.
She has also been to Lourdes, where she seems horrified that people were stripping before being immersed in the baths. “I kept my vest on. I’m bad enough,” she recalled.
On the day of Ruby’s 100th birthday there was a special Mass and she was ferried from Letterkenny to Castlefinn in a Rolls-Royce for a function in the local hall when “the whole village turned out”.
She didn’t go on a spending spree with the President’s gift of more than €2,500, awarded to all those who reach 100.
“She gave it all away,” said Carmel. “She gave some to the guide dogs for the blind, something to Lifford hospital and some to the cancer bus (which brings patients to Galway). She said she did not need money.”
Ruby’s namesake, her great-grandniece Ruby Shields, bounces into the room with her brother Ben, in search of raspberry-ripple ice cream. The eight-year-old proudly points out she is exactly 100 years younger than the other Ruby.
“We reckon the man above has forgotten about her,” teases Martin.
“I am sure he wants me,” retorts Ruby snr. “But you’re not ready yet,” said Carmel.
Ruby Druce became Ireland’s oldest person following the death last month of Phyllis Furness. She died in Galway a few months after celebrating her 109th birthday.
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