A FORMER model and foster mum has celebrated her 90th birthday by raising cash for charity.

Laura McKenning did not want any presents, so she asked guests at her birthday party if they would like to donate money towards buying vital equipment to help patients at York Hospital suffering from Myasthenia Gravis (MG).

The mother-of-one, who has twice beaten cancer, has lived with this muscle-weakening condition for more than 20 years.

“All my muscles are affected by it now,” she said. “It just arrives at any time. Sometimes I can’t swallow and my voice doesn’t work, sometimes I can’t walk. Once my right eyelid closed and didn’t open for two months.

“It’s frustrating, but I deal with it. It’s no good bothering about the things I can’t do, I’ve got to do the things I can do.”

Despite suffering from MG, Mrs McKenning was determined to dance with her guests at her birthday party in Barstow House, in St Benedict Road, York, where she lives.

“My husband, Jack, and I used to do ballroom dancing together – we’ve danced together since we met when we were 15,” she said.

Mrs McKenning, who was born in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, but moved to York in 1958, was married to Jack for 63 years before his death five years ago, and the couple had one daughter, Anne.

But they were foster parents to many more children and eventually decided to run their own children’s home.

From 1961 to 1971, they ran a home for 12 children in Danebury Drive, York, and also ran a home in Scarborough for 24 boys in the early 1970s.

“The children I looked after still come to visit me now,” she said. “Their children and grandchildren call me gran and great gran and as far as I’m concerned they are my grandchildren.”

Mrs McKenning, who in the 1950s appeared as a model on the BBC programme Leisure And Pleasure, was also a bespoke tailoress and said that in the early 1970s she was offered a job by a young Sir Alan Sugar at his alterations shop in Clifford Sreet, York.

“I rejected it because I was a perfectionist and there just wasn’t enough light in the shop for me to do my job to perfection,” she said.

It was at this time that Mrs McKenning was also busy fighting the local authority’s plans to knock down houses in Bishophill as part of a redevelopment project.

She set up the Bishophill Action Group and spearheaded a campaign to save the houses – a battle that was won at a public inquiry in 1974.

“When I look back, I don’t know how I crammed everything in,” she said.