Christmas Carole

CHRISTMAS Eve and no rest for the Reverend Carole Lloyd, priest-incharge of Chilton, near Ferryhill, and of its distant cousins in Coxhoe and Kelloe.

There are services at 4pm, 6pm, 8pm and 11.30pm with more, of course, tomorrow morning.

“I enjoy it very much, but I do wish there wasn’t such a conflict between church things and family things,” she admits. “The family does get pushed out a little bit. I suppose it’s worse if you’re a woman.”

She arrived at Chilton in June 2006, took on Coxhoe and Kelloe two years ago. “It’s not as if I’m travelling on horseback,” she’d said when asked about the challenge of such separate entities.

Amid sadness on all sides, however, her last services will be on January 2. For family reasons – ageing parents – she and Roger are moving to Swanwick, in Derbyshire.

There is unlikely to be an early replacement.

Again having to find cover for three vacant parishes is not the sort of Christmas present for which the poor area dean would have wished.

Carole is an engaging and enthusiastic Yorkshire lass, formerly an IT manager, has reinvigorated church life – especially among the young – and is much admired. In 17 years of the At Your Service column, St Aidan’s in Chilton remains the only church attended in successive weeks.

“I’m very much going to miss the warmth of the people here,” she says.

“Leaving at this juncture wasn’t in my plans at all, but plans don’t always work out.”

There is perhaps one comfort. Her new job only has immediate responsibility for one church.

AMONG her final services, temperature fast plunging into minus quantities, is Chilton Town Council’s carol service at St Aidan’s. It’s an occasion as traditional as turkey and all the trimmings, and every bit as enjoyable.

Mac Williams, chairman of Durham County Council, leads a veritable chain gang of civic leaders – “we know they’ve only turned up for the buffet,” jests Carole – Aycliffe and Brancepeth brass band is there, the primary school choir and steel band are there.

Four days previously, so the word goes, Spennymoor Town Council’s carol service had twice been interrupted by the clangour of the fire alarm. “We looked at each other, as you do, and then decided we’d better go outside,” says John Parkin, the mayor.

“It was bitter cold and as soon as we got back in, off it went again. Next year, we’re just going to invite the fire brigade to the carols and have done.”

Spennymoor has long been regarded as a town, of course. Chilton until a few years ago was generally supposed a former pit village, with a parish council and chairman. A few years ago it became a town council, and assumed a mayor.

If, as widely is supposed, the difference between a village and a hamlet is that a village has a church and a hamlet doesn’t, then what’s the difference between a big village and a small town? A Boxing Day debate, perhaps.

Margaret Walton, Chilton’s present mayor, says that she’s particularly pleased to see me. “To be honest,” she says, “I thought you were dead.”

IT’S perishing without – “rather chilly,” says Carole euphemistically – glowing within. The church is thronged like Chilton Club on bingo night, the kids like Christmas children the world over. “It’s wonderful to see them so exuberant and enthusiastic,” says Carole.

Each carol’s followed by a reading.

Carole herself chooses to read John Betjeman’s wonderful poem, simply called Christmas, which amid the last minute hurly-burly should still be Googled forthwith:

Provincial public houses blaze

And Corporation tramcars clang,

On lighted tenements I gaze

Where paper decorations hang

And bunting in the red Town Hall

Says “Merry Christmas to you all”.

Betjeman wonders if it’s true – “this most tremendous tale of all” – and carries the thought to his final verse:

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single truth compare –

That God was Man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine.

So why in a strange old world does such carolling in frosty air still work so well? “I think that people still enjoy the tradition, the singing, just being together with friends and neighbours,” says Carole.

“You can sense the atmosphere and the togetherness tonight.

There’s still something different, something very special, about Christmas.”

The buffet’s every bit as good as they’d supposed, the company convivial.

Christmas Carole drinks it all in one last time. “I suppose Christmas is a bit hectic for everyone, really.

I’m going to miss these people no end.”