Long to rain over us?

Kelloe is one of several Co Durham villages - and Prudhoe, across the Northumbrian water - which ends with "oe", known in linguistic circles as a dipthong. On no account, however - or at least at the risk of sustained ridicule amid the natives - must it be rhymed with "bellow". Rather it is pronounced as in Bella.

"I remember when I first came here, getting on the bus and asking the conductress for Kellow," someone says before last Sunday's service. "She gave me such a look..."

The conversation also offers the column the chance to dust down the very old joke about how Tudhoe - a few miles to the west - came by its name. It is because it's on t'udder side of Spennymoor.

Bless them, for they are lovely people at Kelloe Methodists, they all laugh in the right place. Kelloe instinct, as it were.

The church, dedicated to St Paul, was officially opened on midsummer's day in 1952. It rained. The Northern Echo appears not to have recorded the glad occasion, although we noted that Bing Crosby had made his television debut in a fourteen and a half hour fund raising show - a "telethon", then as now - that the Japanese claimed to have found Captain Kidd's £100m treasure, foot-and -mouth disease had severely hit the Great Yorkshire Show, Godfrey Evans had scored 104 for England against Pakistan and four Seaham Harbour lads had been fined half a crown apiece for playing pitch and toss in a wood.

At Kelloe, it might in parenthesis be added, they're domino players - and being good Methodists, with little more at stake than a bag of flour.

"You haven't lived until you've seen the domino drives up here," says John Bartley, the chapel steward. "There's more dominoes on the floor than there ever are on the table."

East Hetton Colliery still turned vigorously in 1952, a couple of quarries dug deep, the new church replaced a building ("falling to bits") at Old Kelloe. Kelloe once had a Welsh speaking chapel, too. "Me Uncle Billy used to talk about it," says someone else.

The new chapel was designed with a flat roof by architects who probably thought the earth was shaped similarly. After 50 years of entirely predictable weather, the folly has become manifest.

Work is under way to provide a fibre glass replacement, the main church full of buckets and bowls, lest the Great Flood become a reality.

"I wouldn't care, it's a real bonny church," says Alan Crathorne, the secretary, and clearly it is so. Handsome stained glass windows have progressively remembered the village's dead - "£8 a name the first time we did it, £147 the last," said Alan - mining memorabilia hangs on the walls.

There's a deputy's stick, a helmet ("the under-manager gave us it straight off his head," recalls Alan) and a lamp given by East Hetton miner Alf Hesler, one of the heroes of the Durham NUM. The East Hetton banner is away being refurbished, returning - they hope - in time for the Big Meeting next month.

Walter Scott, the colliery manager, is photographed with the Sunday School bairns on opening day. They'd raised £33, it's recalled.

There were 75 members in 1952, many others who shared that midsummer day's dream as they processed through the village to the new church.

Now there are just seven members, though ten people are present for last Sunday's 10.30am service, relocated to a small anteroom - an overflow, it might in other circumstances be said - barely big enough to hold them.

"We're a bit higgledy-piggledy," says a lady - as the column's dear old mum used to do - but in truth there is much benefit from the love thy neighbour intimacy of the occasion.

Eight have been there since the opening, the other two moved from West Cornforth when that chapel closed. "There's still a lot of good people, good givers, in this village," says John. "They just don't come to church."

The service is led by the Rev Susan Richardson, a probationer minister who offers no objection to notes being taken along the way.

"It'll be like being on trial except that when you're on trial, it's only the preachers' meeting which hears about your faults," she says. "Now it'll be half the North-East."

"She preaches for an hour and a half, mind," adds John Bartley, cheerfully. In truth she preaches for 17 minutes and does it memorably - a lucid mix of learning, informality and of knowing her audience.

St Matthew's gospel, she says, still seems amazingly relevant. "If it hadn't been written towards the end of the first century, it could have been written yesterday afternoon."

Susan, Trimdon lass, moves to Boroughbridge in the summer to be with her husband David who is also to become a Methodist minister, but will commute to her present patch. If Methodism's self-effacing firmament allows stars, we predict that the lady will shine brightly.

The service proceeds agreeably, hymns accompanied by a grey-haired lady called Joan on a little harmonium which appears considerably older than she is.

The creaking and groaning, it is to be hoped, are from the harmonium and not from the poor lady's knees. "It's awful," she says.

Almost to the second, the service lasts the exact Methodist hour, finishing with the wonderful hymn Tell Out My Soul. Afterwards there's a meeting to sort out this weekend's catering, all tuna and best ham.

It had been one of the most thoroughly enjoyable occasions for ages. Hail Kelloe, well met.