As a six-year-old evacuee billeted in Ongar during the last war, Jean Easter would sit every Sunday in the town's United Reformed Church and muse, as children do, that the organist, Nellie Korf, was "very old".

Today Jean is a grandmother and still attends the church - and so does Nellie who, now aged 95, is almost certainly among the oldest church organists in the country, but when she met me at the front door of her bungalow home, I actually thought that she was Nellie's younger sister!

Looking not a day over 70 she shepherded me into a room cluttered with books and music and told me: "I'm just sorting out the hymns for Sunday but to tell you the truth, these days I can only play those I am able to remember because my eyes are not what they were."

She foraged around a bust of Beethoven, to dig out a pile of sheet music. "I suppose that I must be getting old, anything new and I'm flummoxed" she said with a hint of mischief, "I find it difficult these days to read this."

The old masters are Nellie's favourites. "Beethoven and Mozart are at the top of the list of course," she said. "With the exception of John Rutter, I don't think much of most modern composers."

As well as playing at the church twice every Sunday Nellie was the Ongar WI's pianist for 30 years until its close-down in January.

"I played for the Ongar Keep Fit classes until I got the push because of cut backs," she said. "I had my first lesson at five years old when I learned to play the violin and bit on the cello. I studied the organ when I grew up but the piano is really my instrument. You could say that music has been my life."

Music actually saved Nellie's life during the final throes of the last war. She was hurrying home through the black out on a cold January evening in 1945 when she remembered that she had meant to call in at the church to collect her smusic sheets.

"All I really wanted to do was to get home into the warm and have my tea," she said. "I almost decided to leave the music for another time but at the last moment I retraced my steps to the church, and it's a good thing that I did."

Nellie's diversion made her late by 30 minutes which meant that instead of being upstairs at her home at St James Avenue preparing to go out for the evening, she was downstairs finishing her evening meal.

At 5.50pm one of Hitler's V2 rockets sliced through the street outside completely destroying the upper floor of Nellie's house, sending the ground level ceiling crashing all over her.

"I didn't hear a thing!" she remembered. "One minute I was enjoying my tea and the next it and me were covered with bits of ceiling."

In reflective moments since, she might have mused over the irony that she was bombed by the Germans at all.

Nellie's father Christian Hermann Carl Korf was one of a large family and he arrived in London from his native Germany in the 1800s.

"He met my mother here in Ongar when one of her brothers took him home. They married in 1890 at what was then the Congregational church which today is our United Reformed Church and I was born in 1903 in a house in the High Street" she said.

Christian Korf died in 1921 and is buried in Ongar cemetery alongside Nellie's mother and elder brother who died in infancy.

When World War II broke out Nellie was working in the accountancy department at the old Ongar Rural District Council offices at Essex House in Castle Street. "I was there until Ongar amalgamated with Epping in 1955 and I moved along with it."

The church has always been the central lynch pin to her life. She was its secretary for 65 years and she is able to rattle off the names of its last 16 ministers.

In 1992 Nellie received the British Empire Medal for long service to the town. "When a letter arrived to tell me that I was to receive that, I had to sit down it was such a shock," she said. "I can't think why I was chosen for such an honour."

TALENTED ORGANIST: Nellie Korf, one of the oldest church organists in the country.

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