VIRGINIA Ramsey, a cheery, morning-all sort of a Methodist minister, has in front of her a row of seven or eight bright burnished bairns. It is 10.25am on Remembrance Sunday.

"Usually I'm very happy to play around with you but for 20 minutes today I want you to be good for me. This is a very solemn service," she exhorts.

The bairns respond immaculately, those 20 minutes altogether more attentively observed in Cockfield than the eleventh hour silence which is formally to follow. With trepidation and on tiptoe, we shall return to that matter a little later.

Cockfield is in west Durham, famed for its fascinating fell - a listed ancient monument - for the football team which reached the 1929 Amateur Cup final by a pretty circuitous route and as the home of Jeremiah Dixon, who helped draw a line in America.

It is also notoriously cold, an element inescapably observed by the inspector sent from London in 1869 to examine the causes of the village's typhoid outbreak.

"The village and the land adjoining it occupy not only a high but a very open and exposed situation, swept by every wind that blows," he wrote, and wasn't over impressed with the sanitary arrangements, either.

Sunday had begun with holy communion at St Mary's, much of the lovely church 800 years old, Grade IIH listed, described by officialdom as a "little gem" and like all gems, an expensive business.

The surveyor's quinquennial report - "quinquennial report" is a church term, meaning recurring nightmare - has found necessary repairs and renewals which will cost £80,000 and that, they sigh, is before anyone gets up onto the roof.

The surveyor's report sits at the back of the church. As if by crumb of comfort, it concludes that the Grade IIH listing was well deserved.

Susan Rigg, one of St Mary's churchwardens, is confident that with aid of grants, they'll find the money. "We have tremendous support in the village. They mightn't come to church too often, but they're very loyal in other ways."

A pie and pea supper had raised £235, which is an awful lot of pies and peas, a Methodist bazaar had comfortably cleared £1,000.

Since the church is between vicars, the service is led by the Ven Derek Hodgson, 73-year-old retired archdeacon of both Auckland and Durham, who carries the rather Scottish title of interim minister.

Ten others are present, none of them male and none of them young.

Organ accompaniment is provided by a little box of tricks beneath the pulpit, so that the leader is not just archdeacon emeritus but a sort of ecclesiastical disc jockey as well.

Once there was also a choir, parish records noting that in 1812, the choristers' ale cost a shilling. Twice the church has been extended to meet a population which peaked at 2,639 in 1921, a 1910 plaque acknowledging a £60 grant from the Incorporated Church Building Society on condition that seats in all parts were free.

Clearly the church is still cherished, however, a little working group meeting weekly to ensure that it remains pristine for its purpose. In 1703, St Mary's employed three women cleaners, paying one shilling and fourpence between the lot of them.

"We're very positive, we'll never give up," says Jenny Neasham, the other churchwarden. "Derek has done a wonderful job for us, really held us together."

Archdeacon Hodgson preaches on a Remembrance Day theme. "We are history," he begins, "or at least, that's the impression we get from the younger generation.

"For them it's the people of the present who matter, no matter how much they have contributed to the process of hate."

In January, interim ended, he will welcome the Rev Jane Grieve, presently curate of Barnard Castle, as priest-in-charge of Cockfield and of the yet more westerly parish of Lynesack. Mrs Grieve has written a book on church fund raising, which may prove a useful qualification.

The Methodists host the united village Remembrance Day service, a congregation of 50 or so - from a village of 1,500 people - including the redoubtable Edwin Coates, who for more than 50 years, led the Cockfield Male Voice Choir. The church is attractively refurbished.

Those 20 minutes before everyone heads down to the war memorial embrace three hymns, the reading, which includes the line "If God is for us, who can be against us?" and a short address.

The day, says Virginia, is about remembering for the purposes of good.

Between 40 and 50 are huddled around the 11 o'clock cenotaph, the wind whipping off the fell and straight down the front street as it has since man first settled there in the Iron Age, and thought civilisation a bit parky.

The minister leads the cenotaph service, the silence and the careful prayers. One of the wreaths is blown at once from its plinth. At the going down of the sun and in the morning...

Cars drive past imperviously, their drivers perhaps supposing it to be a picket line; men cross the road on their way to allotment or to ale house, essaying invisibility; the sounds of Sunday morning football, conflict of an altogether different sort, are borne on the wind from historic Hazel Grove.

There are no medals, no black berets or brass bands, no sad faced standard bearers nor men in high office. Those around the war memorial faithfully observe the still-poignant moment; others just pass it by.

Lest we forget? There are many, and by no means only in Cockfield, who may have forgotten already.

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