Flower power

One of them recalls the day the town was bombed

THE Germans, it's said, were aiming for Manchester when they managed on Christmas Eve 1944 to drop a Doodlebug on Tudhoe. Apologists suggest that the flying bomb's real target was Newcastle, but that wouldn't have been a very good shot, either.

Tudhoe is outside Spennymoor, County Durham, St Tuda thought to have been a seventh century Bishop of Northumbria who fell victim to the plague.

Agnes Tuddowe was a 15th century prioress of Neasham Abbey, near Darlington, notwithstanding the potential handicap of her illegitimate birth. Since only the most censorious could have supposed it poor Agnes's fault, the bishop issued a "super defecta natalium" and that made things right side of the broomstick again.

The V-1, at any rate, fell on Tudhoe cricket field just after 6am, thought to have been fired from a Heinkel over the North Sea. The pavilion was destroyed, the vicarage badly damaged, more than 1,000 windows broken. Eleven were injured; none, mercifully, killed.

In Middlesbrough, an Observer Corps member - son of Tudhoe's vicar - had spotted the buzz bomb overhead. "That one's aimed at our place," he said, never imagining how fearfully prophetic the joke would be.

Highly censored, The Northern Echo of December 27 reported merely that a flying bomb had landed in a field in the north of England, and that boys from the orphanage had cleared up the mess.

"There were a lot of ruined Christmas presents and turkeys full of glass, but there was a team spirit," village historian Tony Coia once recalled. "We were winning at the time, we just got on with it."

The day they Doodlebugged Tudhoe was recalled last weekend, Jean Hyslop's floral representation one of 50-odd displays in a quite wonderful flower festival to mark the 150th anniversary of the parish of St Charles, Tudhoe, which serves the entire Spennymoor area. The church itself, costing £8,000, opened in 1870.

There were displays to acknowledge the Salvin family, founders and benefactors, to salute the Queen's coronation, to recall the Pope's visit to York in 1982.

What probably not even those ingenious ladies and gentlemen could quite capture was the moment when the Tudhoe contingent caught a first glimpse of the Popemobile, nor what their feelings were when they discovered that its occupant was not, in fact, His Holiness but Mr Jimmy Savile (as then he was) in a white tracksuit.

Several displays were supported by churches of other denominations. Another depicted the three-storey St Mary's diocesan orphanage, right down to heads on pillows and players on the adjoining football field.

Run by the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, the orphanage closed in 1963. "Without exception (former residents) speak with fondness of the old place," said Tony Coia's 1983 parish history, though those at Tudhoe Academy - which preceded it - may have had more painful memories.

Charles Waterton, to become a renowned naturalist, explorer and author - his home at Witton Park is said to have been the first formal bird sanctuary - was a pupil in the 1790s.

"Literature had scarcely any effect on me, though it was duly administered in large doses with a very scientific hand,"

he once wrote, "but I made vast proficiency in the art of finding bird nests."

Those in charge clearly felt that nests should be left strictly to the birds. Young Waterton was frequently birched for his troubles.

WE'D last attended St Charles's just three years ago, when the parish priest was the hugely popular - and no less charismatic - Father Dermot Burke. It was the day of the consecration of the new Pope.

"It seems a little surprising that the energetic Fr Burke hadn't been asked to spare a few hours a week to be Pope as well," the column observed.

"If the latterly enthroned Cardinal Ratzinger were God's Rottweiler, as unkindly has been supposed, then Fr Burke may be God's golden labrador."

Fr Burke is now semi-retired to his birthplace in Donegal, Ballysomethingorother.

His replacement, every bit as engaging and every bit as Irish, is Father Harry O'Reilly, formerly at Darlington and South Shields.

Fr O'Reilly offers cake and coffee beforehand.

Fr Burke, back for the celebration, admits that the last column didn't do him any harm at all. "If I'd been on the transfer market, I'd have gone for millions," he says.

Ascension Day Mass is celebrated by 87-year-old Father Vincent Mullaly, retired to nearby Middlestone Moor after 27 years as parish priest at Lanchester.

St Charles's is nearly full.

"It's lovely to come into church and see the love and care with which it has been decorated," he says, and so it is.

Even when considering the lilies of the field, who toil not neither do they spin, it would be hard to imagine something as florally glorious as this.

Peggy Clark, one of the main organisers, is in Blackpool - "dancing," they say, and probably the light fantastic - Mary Wilcockson, another leader, has been in Tudhoe all her life, baptised, confirmed and married at St Charles's.

Mary's mother had come to Tudhoe Orphanage when just four, both her parents killed in the Hartlepool Bombardment.

Her mother lost an arm. Mary taught at St Charles' school.

"We knew a flower festival would be possible but this just wonderful, beyond my wildest dreams," she says. "In a way if just reflects this church - lovely atmosphere, lovely people."

Afterwards, the hospitable Fr O'Reilly again puts the kettle on, joined by Fr Burke. "I told you that new Pope was a good 'un," he says.

Fr O'Reilly insists that it's his parishioners who do all the work. "They give me a pretty easy time, really. They're very proud of what they've done this weekend and quite rightly, too."

Many stop behind simply to admire all the displays. Things seem to be going like a.well, going awfully well, anyway.