Betty May Sims was raised in a house in Andersons Bay Rd, Dunedin, and when the war broke out she was working as a civil servant for the child welfare department.
"It was horrible, I didn’t like it one bit," Mrs Hudson said.
She decided to join the army, and wound up in the signals unit at army headquarters in Wellington, where she worked coding and decoding overseas messages.
It was a very responsible job and they worked very hard, holding to the utmost confidentiality to prevent giving away the "whole shooting match".
She enjoyed the job because it felt meaningful and helping to win the war.
While the Dunedinites had not known their way around Wellington either, they eventually figured it out and all four went to see the show together.
It was clarinettist Artie Shaw, then the highest-paid jazz musician in the world, who had come to Wellington to play a secret show for troops.
"He was tremendous," Mrs Hudson said.
The young marine she went with was later killed at Tawara in the Pacific.
Mrs Hudson was 20 at the time.
"That was a heartbreak."
After the war she married her husband Ian, whom she met in the signals unit.
They worked on different floors and one night at a staff party she found her husband-to-be swaying "very, very nicely" in the breeze.
It did not take long to realise they both attended King Edward Technical College together in Dunedin.
One thing led to another and the next thing she knew she was married with her first boy on the way.
She had two further sons and now has a plethora of children and grandchildren, including at least one great-great grandchild.
Always interested in music, she has sung and acted in various capacities, including a stint at the globe theatre — and still sings whenever she is asked to.
Yesterday was her 101st birthday, which she celebrated by going out for a Chinese meal with her two youngest sons.
Mrs Hudson’s advice for youth was simple: "Just keep going to bed at night and getting up in the morning."
