THE bride's family was in floods of tears as she made her vows, her voice over-spilling with emotion.There was an obvious joy in her eyes and not a hint of nerves as she lay herself prostrate before the altar as the Litany of the Saints was sung.

For Sister Mary Elisabeth was giving herself to God and she'd never felt more certain about anything in her life.

Five years after joining Darlington's closed order of the Carmelites, she was sealing her fate as a nun with vows of chastity, poverty and obedience.

Her family watched as she swapped her white veil for black, and while they were led to festivities in a room outside, she returned to her community of Sisters and then to the private sanctum of her cell.

The ceremony had been a culmination of years of prayer, silence and solitude. She'd entered the Order as a 19-year-old and could have changed her mind about joining a community of women who only leave the grounds of the convent when absolutely necessary.

But Sister Mary Elisabeth knew this was right from the very start, right from when she first felt all those differences from most other girls when she was growing up.

"When I was about four-years-old, my dad - who is an atheist - said I'd either be an actress or a nun so he must have seen something in me," says the 27-year-old sister from Middlesbrough.

"The life of a nun had always appealed, but it wasn't until after doing my A-Levels and on the verge of doing a degree at Leeds University, when a teacher asked me if I had a vocation in life, that I actually articulated my calling to religious life."

Sister Mary Elisabeth had never been as interested in make-up and boy-bands, as she sometimes felt she should have been as a teenager, so her family weren't surprised when she decided to become a novitiate.

"My mum and sister have always been very trendy and into fashion while I haven't at all. My sister was everything a young girl should be and used to enjoy putting on make-up and nail varnish, whereas I was more interested in beomg studious. My mum used to encourage me to go to the cinema with friends but I threw myself into work. It sheltered me a bit."

Looking back now, it's strange to think she could have been anything else than a nun. The newly "professed" sister giggles with two other Carmelites as they each discuss their "calling".

"It's a holocaust of your will. It's as if you are driven by God who is guiding you to Him," says Sister Mary Elisabeth.

"Being in the order and staying in it forever is the same as making marriage vows, about staying together in sickness and in health, being together after the glamour has gone. Well, it's exactly the same for us."

She says giving yourself to the Order is, in one sense, shedding the kind of individualism that drives some of us "outside" to perform and succeed in the material world.

"Carmelite spirituality is all about having a union with Christ. You can become like him and, as you decrease, he increases," says the sister.

"Because we are an enclosed order, it is as if we are hermits, living in hermitude. Our cells are quite basic and no one else comes into them. It is just you with God. We don't have our Winnie the Pooh duvet covers or any frills. We get a brown coverlet on our beds and the cells have stayed pretty much the same as they were in the 1500s."

For seven years Sister Mary Elisabeth actually experienced a convent life which was far more austere.

There were no newspapers or televisions and she talked to family through a metal grille for the seven and a half years she was at the Reading convent.

"It was an amazing experience. But it was perhaps more of a sacrifice for my family. It was really hard for them sometimes."

She says convent life has never been an escape route for her. She's not running away from the rigours of life. She's facing up to the worst parts of herself and endeavouring to change them.

"You find out a lot of things about yourself that you didn't realise or didn't want to know!"

Her colleague, Sister Mary Michael, says she felt herself searching for something and only found it in the Catholic Church. She had been brought up an Anglican but felt she'd come home in the Catholic order.

Having been a nurse in Sunderland for 26 years, she says it was bizarre how the calling came so unexpectedly.

"I was standing at Sunderland bus station waving bye-bye to my friend when I felt really powerful words inside me. I was shocked by them at the time because it was such an overwhelming feeling," says the 54-year-old, who has been a postulate for six months.

"I began shouting to my friend, 'I'm going to become a nun'. She was just open-mouthed. Looking back, it's as if God had decided to call me then and it became clear at that moment."

Sister Mary Columba's story is just as extraordinary. The 49-year-old nun saw a film called The Song of Bernadette when she was seven and cried all the way through it because she was so touched. Ever since then, she knew she'd join an Order and be different from all her friends with husbands and children. She had boyfriends in her late teens, but the sense of vocation never went away. As a civil servant in Newcastle in her twenties, she felt she could either stay on that treadmill forever or dare to do what she'd always wanted to do.

"I felt a little at sea when I was living life on the outside. People think you're peculiar sometimes when prayer is so important to you and you feel you're not living life the way you want to."

So she turned her back on life as she knew it and, to the shock of her family, joined her Darlington sisters. She felt no regrets or sense of home sickness at all.

"Some people have this idea that we're sitting in here, cut off from the world, but we're pretty ordinary really. We have the same feelings as every other woman. I'm still a keen football supporter and a number one Alan Shearer fan. You don't have to give up any part of yourself at all."