When I needed advice, someone to rant to or just a place to sit quietly as a teenager, I would slip out the back door of my house, walk through a little gate in the garden and step into Auntie Milly’s kitchen.

She told me stories about growing up on a farm in Norfolk, hating her job as a cleaning maid in a manor house and slapping the face of a horrible manager who always talked down to her. She may have had very little in her pocket, but she was adamant to move to London to carve out a more exciting life for herself.

Stories like this gave me the gumption and drive to push for a career that made me bubble with passion and pride.

I also learnt the concept of generosity and selflessness from her.

It's a unanimous trait among her generation who experienced the enormities of World War II. In one hand, they were asked to give up their pots, pans and iron gates to be melted for weapons, and in the other hand their brothers, fathers and partners. When life turns into a warped dream like that, anything after it is a bonus.

Anytime anyone needed anything she would reply with a firm "You can have it". There was never a speck of possessiveness, privilege or greediness.

But perhaps her greatest lesson was that life doesn’t have to be cookie-cut to be wonderful, and it never is.

Auntie Milly's son died early in life (I’m going to say this in my whisper voice because it still doesn’t feel right talking about it: he in fact committed suicide) but she and her husband, Uncle Bob, showed no bitterness. They had each other, they had us, and loneliness was not something she was going to give in to. For her, it was just how life turned out and she pushed through it as best she could.

The strength she presented throughout her life floors me to this day.

Auntie Milly and me: why everyone needs a best friend 60 years older than them