PENSIONER Edith Sheldrick does not speak German, French or Spanish but when she travels abroad she can converse easily.

Mrs Sheldrick, 72, of Denton Street, Barnoldswick, speaks Esperanto, the world language, and attends conferences in Europe.

She has recently returned from an Esperanto congress in Spain.

Mrs Sheldrick began learning the language at about the time she retired as a legal cashier with a Barnoldswick firm of solicitors.

Her husband, Harry, a textile mill manager at Haslingden, had sadly already died, and she decided to learn the universal language as a "great exercise" after reading an article in a newspaper.

She said: "I had heard a little bit about Esperanto when I was about 12. Fifty years later I saw the article and thought: Right I will learn Esperanto"

She added: "I liked the idea of a world wide language. It is the language of peace and anything to do with world understanding and communications interests me."

She took up an Esperanto Association correspondence course and then started attending meetings not in Skipton, Huddersfield, York and Chester.

She attended Esperanto summer schoolsat the national headquarters near Stoke-on-Trent and has since visited Belgium, France and Spain to attend world gatherings.

Up to 3,000 people can be there from 80 different countries and all converse happily in Esperanto.

She said: "There are no interpreters whatsoever and we speak Esperanto all the time."

Mrs Sheldrick regularly corresponds in Esperanto with two families in Japan, three in France and others in Italy, Denmark, Belgium and Brazil.

Esperanto is an artificial language invented in 1887 by Polish philologist Dr LL Zamenhof.

It is characterised by a vocabulary based on Latin and word roots common to many European languages with a single unvarying ending for each principal part of speech and a regularised system of conjugation and inflection