She escaped a rough Birmingham estate to return to Galloway with her husband and four young daughters.
Then survived cancer by chance to see her six children grow up, marry and produce an armful of grandchildren.
And for 20 years she has helped people research their families’ past to find out more about their ancestors.
Aye, Dalbeattie’s Erica Johnson has certainly packed a lot into her 64 years, two decades of those serving as a member and convener of Dalbeattie Community Council.
But her life hit a real bump in the road in October, she tells me, when she and hubby David were struck down by Covid.
“Friends we had not seen for 15 years came over from Spain to visit,” Erica explains.
“They only stayed two nights and by the time we started to feel ill they had left.
“It was the Delta variant and was like the worst flu possible – and then some.
“It started with a headache and not feeling right and a bit uncomfortable.
“Then I started to get a little cough at lunchtime and by teatime I was feeling really rough.
“We rang NHS 24 to get a test and were told the nearest drive-through centre was Carlisle Airport!
“There was a walk in centre at Brooms Road in Dumfries so we went there and both tested positive.
“It was horrible – I was quite delirious.
“The last thing I remember was getting back into the car after the test.
“Next thing I was sitting watching the telly three days later.
“After five or six days we were beginning to be on the mend but still very weak.
“I have had quite a few illnesses in my life but I’ve never been as ill as that.”
Erica had got her two jags by April 2021 – but an administrative error meant that by the time she had a date for her booster it was too late.
“Everybody – get vaccinated, it’s not a mild disease”, she says.
“But I think by spring the worst could be all over as the virus mutates into a heavy cold-type illness.
“They test everyone who goes into hospital for any reason and they will be picking up Omicron in a lot of these.
“These people are not there because of Omicron – they might simply have a badly broken leg or have been in a car crash.
“They will need to change tack on Covid – we can’t still be headlining Covid deaths in five years’ time.
“I have a sneaking suspicion that they quite like having the power over us and shut us up in our houses. That’s my gut feeling anyway.”
Erica, I discover, was named after her dad Eric Wilson, a Dalbeattie boy who moved to England with his family to Lancashire aged 15.
“My dad’s uncle had a business in Blackburn and his father went to work there for him.
“Many people from Scotland moved south for work in the 1930s – there’s still a big Scottish Society in Blackburn.
“My dad met my mum, then Lillian Dinham, on a night out in Blackburn when she was 17.
“It was incredibly romantic.
“They were at a dance and he was 11 years older than her.
“Their eyes met across a crowded room and my dad was completely smitten.
“I was born in Blackburn the youngest of five children. To put it politely, I was unexpected!
“My mum was nearly 40 and my dad was 51 when I came along.
“The next youngest sister was ten years older than me.”
Family bonds to Galloway ran deep and the Wilsons were frequent visitors to the home country.
“We had a small towing caravan and we would come to Sandyhills every Easter,” smiles Erica.
“We would leave it there all summer and come backwards and forwards whenever we could. To my dad it was an escape.
“His business was run from the house in Blackburn so to come up here was a bit of a break.”
Eric ran his wee business in the same way as Blackburn’s traditional Scotch Drapers in times past, collecting money round the doors in weekly instalments.
“People would go to him to be measured up and my dad would organise to have suits and coats made-to-measure for them,” recalls Erica.
“They would pick the fabric and the style and he would send the details on to the factory in Leeds and the suit would come back two weeks later.
“Every Friday night he would go round the doors and collect the money.
“In every home there would be wee payment books in the sideboard with a wee pile of money on top for whatever item the folk were paying up.
“That’s how it worked in those days – it was the only way people were able to afford things before the days of credit cards.
“If you didn’t have the money for something you didn’t buy it.
“Winter coats for ladies and men back then were expensive.
“My mum helped my dad in the business and I can remember helping him count the money.
“He would build a pile of shillings as high as a pound’s worth and I would have to make piles the same height.
“He had runs all over Blackburn and employed other people to collect money too.
“And because of his business he knew all the streets and the shortcuts like the back of his hand.
“But he was always a Dalbeattie boy at heart and always wanted home.
“When my dad was 62 and I was 11 he retired due to ill health and the family moved up here.
“He had not been well for quite a while. Unfortunately by that time the poor man was very ill.
“I was quite happy to move – most of my friends were scattered all over Blackburn.
“I had always loved coming up to Dalbeattie and was quite familiar with it.
“I spent quite a lot of time at my dad’s cousins’ in the town, Edgar and Agnes Gordon.
“They had a grocer’s shop on Maxwell Street opposite the pub.
“My dad was born on Water Street, the wee road that leads down to the car park behind the town hall.”
Erica settled well in Dalbeattie, made friends, got on fine academically.
The town’s high school was then a four-year secondary, with pupils going on to Kirkcudbright Academy for their Highers.
That’s what Erica did – but spent precisely one month in fifth year.
“We had to leave and go back down to Blackburn because my father was dying,” she says.
“I had been in Dalbeattie three and a half years.
“He knew that my mother would not settle up here on her own and he wanted her to be down near my sisters.
“My dad died in Blackburn two years later. It was quite long and drawn out.”
At 17, Erica left school and joined Lancashire Health Board as a waiting list review clerk, carefully logging how many people were waiting for operations and for how long.
“Then I ended up getting married to my first husband and having two kids, Michelle and Christopher,” she smiles.
“I stayed at home to look after them then my husband got a job in Birmingham and we moved there in 1979, when I was 22.
“My husband and I got divorced and then I met David, my current husband.
“He was from Birmingham and I knew his sisters but it was a couple of years before I met him.
“There was definitely a spark and an interest there and we finally got together in October 1985.
“David worked at Bristol Street Motors, a big Ford dealership in the city.
“He provided parts for the service guys and members of the public.
“We had four daughters – Jenni, Heather, Amy-Beth and Ellie.
“I have certainly done my bit for the population!”
“We decided to move back up here when Ellie, our youngest, was six months old.
“There had been a lot of trouble on the estate where we lived in Birmingham and a teenage girl we knew was stabbed to death.
“David and I did not want to bring four small children up in that kind of environment.
“We arrived in Dalbeattie on December 19, 1995 and what a time to move – it was total chaos, wrapping presents for the kids then packing them into boxes.
“Then in February 1996 it was Baltic and snow brought the power lines down.
“I have this vivid memory of burgers and beans over the coal fire in the front room.
“There were only six houses in John Street affected but nobody had phoned Scottish Power.
“Everybody thought somebody else was doing it!”
After she split with her first husband Erica had the foresight to gain a Mediaeval History degree from the University of Birmingham.
And not long after her return to Dalbeattie the qualification landed her a job in the archive centre at the Ewart Library in Dumfries – only for her life to be turned upside down when a malignant growth was discovered by chance at Christmas 2000.
“I was helping the public access archived records and interpret what was written in them,” Erica recalls.
“Mostly it was folk doing their family trees.
“But when Ellie was five I was diagnosed with kidney cancer in hospital.
“They found it doing an ultrasound when they noticed this lump on my kidney.
“They were actually looking for something else.
“I had thought I was in for a routine thing and was completely on my own when they told me I had cancer.
“They took my kidney away and I just hoped to God they had got it all.
“I was really lucky – it’s far too late if it has spread everywhere else.
“Now I just have to look after my remaining kidney and be careful with any infection.
“But I survived, I have ten grandkids and I’m fine.”
Erica recently left Dalbeattie Community Council after two decades’ service, she tells me, but continues to work part time at the archive centre.
Clearly, it’s a job she loves – and her enthusiasm for digging out details on the lives of long-dead people remains undimmed, even after 20 years.
“I get a real buzz from finding out stuff for people about their families that they had never known about,” she smiles.
“It’s amazing how many people look at census records but miss things because they are not used to working with them.
“I was asked to research Gilbert Broun, the last abbot at Sweetheart Abbey, who continued to preach there in the old Catholic tradition after the Reformation.
“Then there was Jock Law Hume, the violinist on the Titanic who was playing tunes to the last passengers as the ship went down.
“I discovered that his family hailed from the Haugh of Urr.
“He had a daughter and I helped his grandson, Christopher Ward, the youngest Fleet Street editor of his times, to write a book about him.
“And the family that owned the last slave ship in Britain, that sailed out of Liverpool, were the Todds from Lockerbie.
“I was asked to research the Todd family by six different descendents.
“People can be shocked by what their families have done but I always tell them you did not walk in their shoes or live in those times.
“You can’t really judge them – they did what was expected of them at the time.
“But there are far too many statues to old white men littering our parks and pavements.
“There are not any in Scotland to Jane Taylor of Belmont in Stranraer, a suffragette who travelled the length and breadth of Scotland and down into England trying to get people to support the franchise for women.
“She was amazing and far ahead of her time – but most people have never heard of her.
“She was born in 1837 and died in 1905 and still she never saw women get the vote.
“My grandfather Wilson was on Dalbeattie Burgh Council,” adds Erica.
“So there are parallels with me I suppose because I served on Dalbeattie Community Council for 20 years.
“My dad always told me that if you can do something you should do it because other people may be unable to.
“It gave me a focus outside the home when the children were small.
“Children when they are little can make you feel like your brain’s dead.
“You just live, breathe and sleep children!”
