VPaterson

Published at 00:00, Friday, 30 January 2004

EVERY day should be a miracle for Ethel Fisher because the 76-year-old Seaton woman was never expected to live.

The author of five successful books, famed for her poetry, prose and dialect, was born prematurely and given no hope of survival.

She had twin brothers aged one year and five months. One of the twins died of meningitis her mother’s shock and grief at the death brought on early labour.

She was born during the night of the day that her brother died. When the minister came the following day to organise the baby boy’s funeral, Ethel’s aunt asked him to Christen the newborn baby because she would not live.

But Ethel had determination even then.

Hers has been a life she might consider ordinary but her ability to tell a yarn, to find the humorous and quirky in every situation, makes her a life definitely less ordinary!

She was born and bred in Seaton. She started life, the fifth of six surviving children, in a farm cottage on her grandad’s farm at St Helen’s, Flimby (just beyond where the New Balance factory is now).

She attended Flimby School and left when she was 14 - on the day her 42-year old mother died.

Her fondest memory of her mother is of a woman who believed in making the most of life.

It was this belief that prompted her to struggle to find one shilling a week from her husband’s £2 wage packet to send her daughters for music lessons.

It is a belief Ethel inherited. She learned to play the piano and was the only one in the family to keep it on. She also learned the organ and has been playing in church for the last 36 years.

She also plays the accordion. A neighbour, on leave from the army during the war, had lost his pass and needed money for the train back to his barracks. He sold Ethel’s father an accordion.

Ethel took it to her music teacher.

“Neither of us knew how to play it but we figured it out between us.”

Then there is the mouth organ! Each year, after harvest, farmers would have a kern supper. Everyone involved in helping in the harvest would be invited to a supper and would be expected to put on some entertainment. Many would sing and Ethel decided to learn the mouth organ to accompany them.

“It was just a matter of puff and blow and learning the scales,” she says.

Ethel’s childhood memories paint a picture of a by-gone era where money was tight but family life happy.

There was no gas, electricity or hot water in those days. Monday was wash day and also bath day for the children because the water had been heated in the boiler.

“We were bathed in old wooden dolly tubs - all six of us in the same water and all washed in carbolic soap.

“After our baths we were had goose grease rubbed over out chests to stop us getting the cold.

Then we would put on our clean night dresses. They were made from calico calf feed bags. We’d have the words ‘Pattinson’s Oats’ covering most unexpected places.”

Husband, Eric, who was sitting in on this interview, is quite approving about the goose grease.

“Good stuff,” he chimes in, “I used to rub in into my boots to waterproof them.”

Ethel says the children slept in beds filled with chaff from the corn and, later, feather beds.

At tea-time each night, six ordinary building bricks would be placed in the oven. At bedtime each child would be given a brick, wrapped in a half sheet from the Daily Express, which they used as hot water bottles.

They used to have chicken for Christmas dinner - a huge treat.

“We would all be screaming for a leg off the chicken and dad was tell us that it was not a centipede he was carving!”

After her mum died some of the fun went, too.

“We had moved to the big house then and had taken over the farm. We all had to help.”

One of Ethel’s jobs was helping drive the cows and sheep to market. The cattle market in those days was in Washington Street, Workington, where Kwik Fit is now.

She has two memories of these drives.

“On one occasion my dog was knocked down by one of the few cars on the road .

“I carried it to the bus station. Dad had given me 2d for the bus fare home but the conductor said I would have to pay for the dog, too. I didn’t have the money and I wanted to get the dog home.

“We argued all the way to my stop, I took the dog, got off the bus and then realised that in all the arguing I hadn’t even paid my own fare!”

The second incident is the old bull in the china shop cliche - or almost.

“One of our cows got into a bit of a ‘discussion’ with the owner of a china stall on the Workington market. Quite a bit was damaged!”

When she was 20 the family moved to Buildings Farm, nearer Seaton.

Ethel began a milk round with her horse and cart, with deliveries in the morning and the evening.

She fell in love with an occupant in Main Road, Seaton - a beautiful motor bike!

She became friendly with the owner, Eric Fisher, and the couple were married 53 years ago - and they have stayed together despite his pigeons.

“I loved the motor bike but I found I was supposed to help him look after the other love in his life, those pigeons!”

The couple still live in the Main Street house. Eric, 76, says he is still sleeping in the room in which he was born.

When she was a little girl, Ethel Fisher used to amuse herself by writing poetry.

“Sometimes I couldn’t find the right rhyme in the King’s English, but would find a dialect term that would rhyme. That is why I started writing in dialect.”

Cumbrian dialect is definitely her mother tongue.

“That was the language of the playground, although we were checked for it in the classroom.”

But when she started writing, it was only the lack of rhyme that sent her back to her language roots.

The response was so amazing, however, that Ethel has become a major champion of dialect.

Her books and tapes have been popular inside the county and beyond its borders.

Her dialect fairy tales and bible stories and her own hilarious poems have made her so well known that when the Queen came to Cumbria for a Maundy Thursday service in 1978, Ethel Fisher was included in the official programme.

Two of her books have won the Lakeland Book of the Year Award. The first was “We Ploughed by Moonlight”, an account of farming days before tractors. The second, Seaton Past and Present, reflects another part of her life.

She loves Seaton and collects everything she can.

She has scrapbooks filled with photos of village happenings and still attends everything armed with her camera. She has scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings; if it mentions Seaton, it is in her scrapbook.

She also has scrapbooks of old advertisements - anything predating decimal currency.

All three are important records of yesterday and the history being made today. Each year, or whenever it is requested, Ethel will open up the scrapbooks for charity.

She has an exhibition at the Seaton chapel on February 14.

“I don’t have anything to do with it, but I give them the loan of the scrapbooks, they display them and people pay to see them - raising money for the chapel.”

She couldn’t do it without her husband, she quickly adds. She doesn’t drive and he spends a lot of time carting the books around for her!

Her faith is a most important aspect of her life. She joined Sunday school when she was four and started helping out when she was 12.

She is a founder member of the Mothers’ Union and is president of the Seaton WI. She is also a member of the church choir and chairwoman of the Seaton Ladies’ Choir.

She is renowned for her skits and performances, as well as her poetry and prose.

She is part of a group known as The Fisher’s Follies.

“They don’t do so well at the high kicks now,” she says of the group whose ages range from about 60 to 80, “but they are still funny!”

Her latest book came out at Christmas and is already almost completely sold out.

“I never do reprints,” she adds, “Once a book is sold, it is sold. I hope that makes it more valuable in years to come.”

The Fishers have one child, their son Ronald, who lives in Buckinghamshire.

“When he was young he was - well - disdainful about my work. It was not until he was university age that he told me he thought I might have something!” Ethel laughs.

And it seems he has it too!

“He wrote a piece for our 50th wedding anniversary. He had been doing something at school about heritage once. He came home and asked, since he was the only child, whether he would inherit the Fisher fortune.

“We told him he would - but he would have to make it first!

“He wrote this piece bout going all over the world in search of the Fisher fortune and then realising that it was here all the time - it was his home and his family.”

Both the senior Fishers were thrilled.

It is impossible to describe Ethel Fisher’s life in anything smaller than a book.

This is a woman who has not been flush with worldly wealth.

Eric, a joiner, had to take early retirement after an accident - but they managed, she says.

This is a woman who loves her husband, her son and her God. She loves her village and, most of all, she loves life.

Ethel Fisher has a gift - the gift to share all her loves through writing that delights even those who find it hard to understand!

- For more of Ethel's dialect, click on the dialect link on the menu

Published by http://www.timesandstar.co.uk