AS a young girl Joan Donkin helped her father, Norman, in his cellar carpentry workshop at their home in Durham City. She enjoyed working with her hands, little knowng then how much it would stand her in good stead throughout her life.

Today, she retains the practical ability with screwdriver and saw and happily puts up shelves and tackles other woodworking jobs, as well as decorating and wallpapering her home herself.

Earlier this month she returned to her native North-East for a ceremony at Durham Town Hall when she was installed as a member of the 400- year-old joiners’ guild, becoming a Freeman of Durham City.

“Becoming a member of the joiners’ guild seems very fitting, especially since my heavenly boss started his life alongside his father in a carpentry shop,” she says. “I like to think that working with my dad helped me become the DIY enthusiast I am today.”

Joan was born in 1947 to Norman and Ada, and went to school in Durham City before leaving the region for Liverpool in 1965 to train as a teacher.

It was during her time there she met the Fab Four. She invited them to meet the special needs children with whom she was working.

“The children said they would love to meet The Beatles, so we said we would write to them and see what happens. Nobody ever thought they would reply, but they did and they came to the school,” she says.

“They didn’t really know how to handle these children but they spoke to them. It was a nice gesture.

“There was no maharishi and no drugs. They were ordinary young men, just ordinary Liverpudlians. I met all of them and got their autographs.”

After leaving college in Liverpool Joan did voluntary service overseas, spending 18 months in Papua New Guinea, where she spent time living with native tribes.

“That was life-changing, working in the jungle with the cannibals. The children who came to the mission school there, their parents, without doubt, were cannibals.

“It is somewhere without cows and sheep or wild animals so they used to eat one another from rival tribes,” says Joan, a committed vegetarian.

“They were not terribly friendly with one another because they were a source of meat and they would go out and kill to eat.

“The safest way of not eating humans was to not eat meat, so when people ask why I am vegetarian, I say it is because of when I lived in the jungle I was with cannibals.”

In the 1970s Joan became an education officer at Coventry Cathedral and it was there she had her first contact with visiting members of the Swedish Lutheran Church.

She travelled to India with the Anglican Church to help build schools on the pavements of Calcutta for children of poor families living in cardboard homes, and it was there she first met Mother Teresa.

Joan says: “She was very small, but very determined, and very humble and very stubborn, otherwise she would never have achieved as much as she did. But she was a very spiritual person, and a very loving and compassionate person.

“She never minced her words. I remember a visiting doctor asking what he could do to help and she said straight away: ‘Can you start today?’”

When she returned from India, contact with the Scandinavian clergy was renewed and in 1980 Joan agreed to work for a Swedish bishop as an advisor on using the arts in worship.

She was made a deacon in 1987 and continued her work with children across 127 parishes.

After taking a masters degree in theology at the University of Uppsala she was ordained ten years ago and took up her present appointment as a Lutheran priest in a parish about 70 miles west of Stockholm For several years she has worked as a clown, especially with critically ill children, and has written a book on the subject and the use of humour in the church.

“At Coventry Cathedral I met two Americans who were clowns. I did a course and I realised I had really found my way,” she says. “I find it a brilliant way to expose people to Christianity.

“The theological clown has a different purpose from a circus clown.

Their job is to allow people to laugh at themselves in the mirror that the clown represents. And if you think about the whole story of Jesus Christ, it is a bit funny, isn’t it?”