Ciss Platten is the only Reading supporter who will be at Wembley for Saturday’s showdown with Arsenal who was alive when the club last reached the FA Cup semi-finals, in 1927

Ciss Platten takes it steady as she walks to the solitary Reading supporters’ coach, parked outside the Madejski Stadium and bound for Blackpool. At 93 years old, you tend to go at your own pace.

Yet despite the aid of a walking stick – “I hate it,” Platten says – she remains fiercely independent. And loyally following Reading, at home and far away, is her all-consuming passion.

Platten will be the only Reading fan at Wembley who was alive when the then Biscuitmen last reached the FA Cup semi-finals. In 1927 they lost 3-0 to the eventual winners, Cardiff City, at Molineux.

On Saturday, 88 years on, the club – now the Royals – revisit the last four. Platten will be there; she wouldn’t be anywhere else.

For her, that the opponents are Arsenal has added extra spice to the tie. She is not the greatest admirer of the north London team nor of their manager, Arsène Wenger, a notoriously poor loser. “We call him ‘Arsène Whinger’,” Platten says. “Funny thing, it was in the paper the other day – ‘Whinger’. He’s always whinging, he’s always having a moan.” Platten laughs mischievously. As she does a lot.

Yet her distaste for all things Arsenal runs a bit deeper, right back to the late 1920s. Blame her father, Arthur. “I didn’t really know about football then but dad used to stand by the window on a Sunday morning checking his Pools coupon,” Platten says. “And he’d say: ‘Bloody hell, Arsenal have let me down again.’

“He was always grumbling about them. ‘That blasted team’ he called them. I think that’s maybe why I’ve always disliked Arsenal.”

In 1927, Platten was six years old and growing up in Sussex, near Arundel. At 14, she began work in a large country house. “I left school on the Friday,” she recalls, “and was shoved into ‘service’ on the Monday as a parlour maid. I used to get up at 5am every morning and did everything. And we didn’t have Hoovers in those days. It was just a dustpan and brush.

“When the cook went on holiday, I cooked as well. I was only 15. But I did do a nice roast and also pastries. It put you in good stead for when you got married. Kids don’t know what work is these days.”

It is a theme that Platten warms to, chuckling away. She still has a one-day-a-week job close to her home in Shiplake, near Henley-on-Thames, in south Oxfordshire.

“Just a bit of dusting and cleaning the brass,” she explains. “It’s a nice bit of pocket money, I don’t want to give it up. Some old people just sit around all day doing nothing. I can’t do that, I do all my own housework. And I wouldn’t want a carer.”

Tony Taylor is one of Platten’s regular “chauffeurs” for away matches, picking her up in Shiplake and taking her to the Madejski Stadium to catch the supporters’ coach to wherever. And then taking her home on the late-night arrival back at the MadStad.

On Tuesday last week, it was off to Blackpool at Bloomfield Road. Just the 483-mile round trip for an essentially meaningless Championship fixture, which finished in a dismal 1-1 draw.

“I dropped Ciss back home at about 3am,” Taylor, a 68-year-old retired teacher and fellow Reading die-hard, says. “And she said: ‘I’ve got to be up for 8.30.’”

Of course, naturally. Wednesday is cleaning day.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reading’s captain, Robert ‘Bert’ Eggo, right, shakes hands with his Cardiff City counterpart, Fred Keenor, before the 1927 FA Cup semi-final at Molineux. Photograph: Davis/Getty Images

Platten moved to the Reading area with her husband, John, in the late 1940s. They had six children – Janet, Sylvia, Anthony, David, Terry and Christopher. Ciss has outlived Sylvia, Anthony and John, who died 21 years ago, and has 16 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. “And two great‑greats as well,” she says.

At about 45 years old – when the older children had grown up and could look after the “little ones” – her love affair with Reading, at their former Elm Park ground, began.

“My husband used to go there,” Platten says, “and I’d say to him: ‘I don’t know why you stand in the wet and cold watching that.’ He got fed up with me going on then, one day, he said: ‘Why don’t you come along with me?’ So I went to Elm Park … and that was it.

“He then got old and miserable and wouldn’t go to the away games. So I said: ‘I’m not stopping in.’ I used to leave his food ready for him and I’d just go.”

Platten worked as a matchday programme seller at Elm Park until the age of 79. “Several people would let you keep the change,” she says. “You could make quite a bit extra really. But after counting up the money, I’d only see the last 20 minutes of the first half. I missed a lot of goals, which was awful.”

On her 80th birthday, in 2001, Ciss went to the Second Division play-off final at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, when Reading lost 3-2 to Walsall after extra time. She has attended all Reading’s big days out over the past 50 years, including the 4-1 victory over Luton Town in the 1988 Simod Cup final at the old Wembley. “That was great, wasn’t it?” she said. “One of my best memories.”

Concerts by Daniel O’Donnell, the Irish singer, occasionally distract Ciss. “He’s the only one I’ll miss Reading for,” she says. “We go to see him in Ireland. He’s lovely.”

Injury kept her in hospital for five weeks during Reading’s first stint in the Premier League nine years ago, when she broke her right hip in a fall at home.

“After the ambulance arrived and they got me on a stretcher, I was really groaning,” she says. “This lad said to me: ‘What’s the matter?’ I said: ‘I’m going to miss the games against Chelsea, Man Utd and Arsenal.’”

Platten has not missed a minute of this season’s historic Cup run, on the road at Huddersfield Town, Cardiff City, Derby County and Bradford City, or the 3-0 home win over Bradford in the quarter-final replay.

If the apparently inevitable occurs and Arsenal win on Saturday, Platten will just shrug it off and keep on watching the Royals. She has her sights set on 100 not out. “It would be great if we could do it,” she says of beating Arsenal. “We’ve got a chance. A lot of our fans just don’t have enough faith in their team. We’ve got a great goalkeeper [Adam Federici] and if the others help him, which they don’t sometimes, we’ll be all right.

“I’ll carry on following Reading until I can’t do it any more. Do you think I’ll still be doing this at 100? I hope so. I never think: ‘Oh, I can’t be bothered today.’ I can’t wait for the next game. It would be awful if I ever overslept.”

The Cup is full of fairy tales, the clichéd romance but it might be somehow fitting if Reading did overcome Arsenal and reach the final on 30 May – three days after Platten’s 94th birthday.

And if, in the aftermath of defeat, Arsène Whinger reverts to moaning mode, Platten will savour the moment even more.

Mischievous giggles will be heard all the way back down the M4. And all the way back up again for the final.