At 77 Sally Godet is still at work, bottling and selling jams.

She reckons she has produced between 50,000 and 60,000 jars of Sallie’s Bermuda Preserves since she started the company in the 1990s.

She is always amused when people remark that it must be really difficult.

“It’s not,” she said. “All you need is some gloves to stop your hands from getting sticky – and the radio on or some audio books playing, because it does take time.”

Having good fruit is key; most of what she uses comes from her own back yard.

She learnt how to make preserves and jams while a child in Surrey. Knowing how to garden and preserve food was vital during the post war years as England continued with food rationing until 1954.

“If you did not grow your own food you did not have as much,” she said, explaining how she learnt the skills from her mother, Hilda Harris.

Mrs Godet still remembers how the grocer would stand at their back yard with a list of the things they could have, as per rationing regulations.

At five years old, she was given a small plot of land to grow whatever she wanted.

“I think I grew flowers and vegetables,” she said.

When she finished school, she reluctantly became a secretary.

For a while she worked in the Conservative Party Central Office in London under a series of conservative prime ministers that included Harold Macmillan and Sir Edward Heath.

“When one prime minister left we would all stand at the bottom of the stairs and clap when he went off,” she said. “I can remember doing that for Macmillan.”

She never met any of the British leaders but said the experience "gave [her] a tremendous interest in politics”.

“As a woman you have a vote, so you must vote. So many women don’t understand that even now. If you don’t vote, you can’t complain about the result.”

She met Scott Godet, a Bermudian teaching in England, in 1965 when she was 21. The couple will celebrate their 54th anniversary this year.

They moved to Bermuda in 1990 to be closer to Mr Godet’s elderly mother. The yard of their Paget home was spacious, and full of invasive trees.

The Godets had a great time whipping the grounds into shape.

“I like to organise things,” Mrs Godet said. “We planted over 50 cedar trees in the back yard. The first ones we planted haven’t done terribly well. Then we got some slightly different varieties of cedar trees, and I have a better strain that I planted a lot of.”

They ran a guesthouse, St Helier Bed & Breakfast, out of their home for several years.

“We had a lot of fun with that,” Mrs Godet said. “But it was a lot of work.”

Three months after moving to the island, she joined the Garden Club of Bermuda and found many like-minded friends.

In the early 2000s, she helped organise an open house of historic homes and gardens. The programme raised between $10,000 and $12,000 each year for the Garden Club's horticultural and environmental scholarships.

“In 2002 and 2003, we opened three houses a week during a six-week period,” she said. “We had 80 volunteers to do the flower arranging and to show people around the gardens.”

The programme has since stopped.

“There aren’t the people these days who want to do a lot of volunteer work,” said Mrs Godet, who is a past president of the club

She still loves to garden, but now has gardeners to help keep everything under control.

“I love bougainvillea and poinciana,” she said. “I like trees. I am proud of having tidied my garden up from what it was. I have a lot of fruit trees.”

Mrs Godet has found the lockdowns and social distancing during the pandemic very difficult.

“The first year, 2020, I grew a lot of things,” she said. “We managed to sell quite a few plants. People would come to the house and we kept social distance. Since then, we haven’t done an awful lot. I slightly lost heart I’m afraid.”

The Godets have two children, Martin and Catherine, and four grandchildren.

Sallie’s Bermuda Preserves can be found at the Craft Market in Dockyard or at Flying Colours on Queen Street.

Lifestyle profiles the island’s senior citizens every Wednesday. Contact Jessie Moniz Hardy on 278-0150 or jmhardy@royalgazette.com with the full name and contact details and the reason you are suggesting them