AT one end of the bitter-cold front street, squalls lashing the windows and wind of the route one variety, stood a pub called the Comedian, re-branded by a former landlord who was also a popular workmen's club entertainer.

A visitor might be forgiven, nonetheless, for supposing that the real comedian was the person who named the ridge-top village Sunniside. And last shivering Sunday, they said, was the nicest day they'd had for ages.

Sunniside is on a hill in south-west Durham, two miles and several hundred feet above Crook and at least two top coats colder. Nor should it be confused with the Sunniside which is west of Gateshead, though doubtless it is, all the time.

Once it was surrounded by pits - East Hedleyhope, Thornley and Wooley, pronounced locally not as in jumper but as in hoolie, perhaps, and with more O's than a million.

Once, they say, there were ten or a dozen shops, a school, a church, two chapels and a reason for the Comedian, formerly the Sun, to be sub-titled the middle house.

Now there are just two pubs and an elderly red post office, two sets of goal posts - if not, as the politicians might say, a level playing field - and three long terraces, some with brick outhouses still solid across the back street.

The netties have large house numbers painted on the doors, presumably lest anyone go on the wrong information. There's also a community centre, created when four houses in Flag Terrace were knocked together on a job creation scheme in 1978.

One of the scheme's instigators was Sue Ennals, daughter of the then Health and Social Services minister, who lived with her boyfriend and baby in Gladstone Terrace. "I never really was part of my father's lifestyle," she said at the time, and was last heard of in Sri Lanka, where the views may be less spectacular but you don't have to go to bed in your socks.

"The village has changed and the people have changed," said 78-year-old Albert Spencer, an ex-miner who got out because he liked seeing the sky while he worked.

"In the olden days people would know each other right along the terraces, look after the fire for another if they were going out.

"There's a lot of strangers in that wasn't in and things have been modernised, but we've lost the school, the chapel, lost almost everything, really."

Against that background, a new memorial - a permanent reminder of the constant fight for life - was dedicated in front of the community centre on Remembrance Sunday in the garden created with £50,000 from the National Lottery millennium fund.

Sunniside already had a war memorial, in front of what was the Miners' Institute but now in a private garden. There was talk of moving it to the new site - "a hot issue" says Julie Ward, "some people were really very angry at the thought of moving it" - but finally the village agreed to a second.

It's carved in stone by Phil Townsend, features poppies, barbed wire - "a motif of such a terrible time and such a terrible waste," he said - and the lines about the going down of the sun.

Fewer than 30 villagers, however, had faced the elements to attend the short service. One or two more stood on doorsteps, like they used to do when the carnival was going past.

"You managed, then," said folk one to another, and each agreed that they had managed. "Why, we try," said Ivy Robson, the centre secretary.

The dedication was led by Norman Smith, a Church of England lay reader, Stanhope Silver Band accompanied the hymns and provided the Last Post, Julie Ward read one of Vera Brittan's First World War poems and former Parachute Regiment man Colin Hayton laid the first wreath, his salute still steady, his back still straight for the Queen.

The garden also has wood carvings by Phil Townsend and his community centre pupils, though on Sunday it was inches deep in mud - all arts and clarts, it might almost have been said.

Aferwards there were refreshments in the centre and a chance to look at the splendid Sunniside tapestry, created five years ago. There's your grandad's, someone said, and there's Christopher's and there's the Ellerby's bus.

Whatever happened to the Ellerby's bus?

Julie Ward, best Paddington Bear hat for the occasion, lives in Gladstone Terrace with her partner and two children. A few doors up there's a house owned by a Dutch family, who visit Sunniside for holidays.

"My heart lifts, it really does, every time I drive over the hill and see the village," said Julie, who with her partner runs the Jack Drum Theatre Company.

"It's a fantastic place for the kids to grow up, reminds me of the village where I grew up in Wiltshire. You just had so much freedom; here the kids can go out all day with their sandwiches and no need to worry where they are.

"All right it can get a bit cold, but in Sunniside you know that you're alive."

A community artist, she is working on a film about the place, is planning a village history and has helped produce a children's comic - The Giggler - which features the Beast of Sunniside, based on the Durham puma. Julie claims to have seen it twice.

In the community centre someone handed over £20 to pay for the tea and biscuits; in Front Street - number 120 dressed already for Christmas - a chap in a woolly hat reckoned an awful lot of money had been wasted. Few would have agreed. If the village is also fighting for real life, then Remembrance Day marked a significant advance, the battle if not the war. Sunday was Sunniside up.