Together sown

THE sun shone like it was the middle of August. In the rectory garden there were scones with strawberries and cream, butterflies in the buddleias, wondrous views across and beyond Cockfield Fell, beneath which so much history lies buried.

No matter that the Salvation Army band played Tell Me the Old, Old Story, as if they’d been reading these columns all those years and concluded that there really was nothing new under the sun. No matter that by far the greatest team the world has ever seen was kicking off the football season at precisely the moment the outdoor service began.

How easy to suppose that everything in the garden was lovely, and how terribly mistaken.

Cockfield’s in west Durham. The fell’s a scheduled ancient monument, farmed for 2,000 years, mined for coal for 600. There were 365 shafts, it’s reckoned, one for every day of the year. A century ago, less, it was a network of railway lines and of tramways, of smoking chimneys and steaming locomotives. Production ceased in the Sixties.

Now it’s an area for walkers, historians, industrial archaeologists.

Grazing’s still controlled by men known as field reeves, £1 a year for a sheep, £10 for cows and horses. It says nothing about pigeons. There are lots of pigeon crees.

Jane Grieve, the energetic and highly regarded priest-in-charge of St Mary’s and of other village churches nearby – “going down a storm,” someone says – was for four years previously a curate in Barnard Castle, a few miles south-west. It meant that she knew precisely what she was coming to. “It’s lovely here,”

says Jane, “but I had no illusions that it was idyllic.”

Nor is it. Cockfield has a drugs problem. Folk talk openly of the supposedly secret sign – no need to do details – that identifies a dealer’s, whisper none too quietly how drugs may be obtained by credit card over the telephone, of how young lives are so fearfully endangered.

“Unfortunately there are a few young men in Cockfield with a horrendous mephedrone issue,” says Jane. “Together I hope that we can turn their attention elsewhere, break the cycle. I hope that I can make a difference, even little me.”

LAST Sunday’s service marks progress on the Glebe Garden, church land next to the rectory.

Natalie Connor, from Groundwork North-East, says that it was disused; Jane says it was a “wilderness”.

They’ve had £25,500 from the Lottery- funded Community Spaces fund, are seeking more elsewhere.

It’s to be a focus for the community, they hope, a fresh channel for energies, a symbol of regeneration.

There’ll be a memorial to the miners, a raised viewing platform the better to look over the fell, paths laid out with railway sleepers, big flower tubs evocative of the tubs which once carried coal down below.

“The weeds were seven or eight feet high,” says Natalie. “We brought in an employment team to clear them, but it wasn’t long before they were back again.”

They did it again. Natalie’s upbeat.

“It just shows how many nutrients there are in the soil.”

Once the church hall stood there, venue for two sittings of school dinners, for village dances, for the scouts. Jane says that the whole village, especially the school, has contributed “lovely” ideas on how the garden might be developed.

“I hope that this garden becomes a parable of how God looks out for our community.”

BEFORE the service there’s a little garden party, £150 raised for flood relief in Pakistan.

“Their need is so much greater than ours is,” says Jane, whose husband, David, is also a priest.

Among those present is the magnificent Allen Armstrong, 72, churchwarden at nearby Lynesack and in training for the Great North Run. “I did eight miles yesterday,” he says, bouncing about the place like a pogo stick.

There’s the Reverend Peter Holland, a year older and happily back on his feet after breaking a leg in a fall amid the winter snow up at Woodland. Still active, Peter’s been asked to conduct a baptism in Hurworth, near Darlington, the font in which he himself was christened.

“I’m chuffed to bits,” he says.

There, too, is the retired chartered accountant and prolific poet who in hundreds of letters to the Sunderland Echo signed himself Little Billy Craggs, but who now has moved inland.

He carries a book of his poems.

“Cockfield’s great,” he says, and may need look no further for a muse.

Emma Johnson, the curate, is facepainting the bairns. “We didn’t have a face-painting module at theological college,” she insists. “I had to teach myself.”

Some of the Salvation Army band are from the Middlesbrough West corps, some from Sherburn Hill, outside Durham. Great lads and lasses.

They play Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory; the Arsenal match must be recorded for when they get home.

IT’S a songs of praise service, the readings appropriately – symbolically – about wilderness and gardens, of thorn and thistle, of vineyards, of sower and of stony ground but of good seed, freshness and new growth. Jane’s looking westward.

“Thank you, Lord, for giving us such a place in which to live and work.”

Gardeners, she says, would tell how much hard work it is to create something of beauty, how easy it is for things to become overgrown.

“God loves his world and hates to see it spoiled. He wants to see it brought back into cultivation, to be a thing of beauty.”

It’s due officially to be opened on October 16. Paradise, it is to be hoped, regained.