A YORK nun who has dedicated her life to children and young people celebrated her 100th birthday on Boxing Day.

Sister Constance, a sister of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM), celebrated the milestone with a birthday tea party and a Mass taken by the Bishop of Middlesbrough, the Rt Rev John Crowley, at the Bar Convent, Blossom Street, yesterday.

A trained teacher, Sister Constance first came to York in 1930 to teach at the Bar Convent Grammar School for a year before working at different schools around the country.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939 she started teaching at a small school at Ascot, Berks, called St Francis's School.

It was bombed in 1941, but a makeshift classroom was set up in a nearby hall and when the school was rebuilt Sister Constance returned with the children, completing 27 years there.

She now lives at St Joseph's, in Blossom Street, a nursing home run by the IBVM, after she returned to York in 1989.

Sister Constance said her life had been spent helping young people and children, because that was what God wanted her to do.

She said: "I take life as it happens to me, as God sends it to me.

"It's all part of God's plan and it will go on until my end, whenever that is."

And she said her work had kept her young at heart.

She said: "I've always seemed very young.

"When I was 80 people said I was 60 and so it goes on."

Sister Constance was one of seven children, six girls and a boy, born in Essex. Of her five sisters, four became nuns.

Her one surviving sister, Ida, 96, is a Carmelite nun, but was unable to make it to the party.

However, one of her nephews, Chris Sanders, was able to travel to York from Scotland for the big day.

Updated: 11:17 Thursday, December 27, 2001