MAY 8, 2005, 60 years to the glorious day when the lights went on again. The choir, the Am-Hams, sing There'll Always Be An England and We'll Meet Again and The White Cliffs of Dover.

Tomorrow, just you wait and see...

They also sing All Things Bright and Beautiful and it's impossible, even on church parade, not to recall the celebrated Dads' Army episode in which the platoon is trapped inside a church and the German officer demands to know the name of the wet eared one.

"Don't tell him, Pike..."

This is St Cuthbert's at Colburn, the ever larger village next to Catterick Garrison. "Soldiers have been demobbed here since Roman times," says Dr Liz Varley, the Vicar, a great A-Z of accents suggesting that they still are.

"Most of the military both then and now have passed through," adds the Vicar. "It's for that reason that they're always very much in our prayers."

Some of the bairns are waving union flags, a larger flag hangs over the back pew, Doreen Winfield wears a sequinned St George bowler, though not - of course - during the service.

A notice at the back is headed "Cease Fire", but it's only from the extinguisher company.

Peter King, the church's lay reader, is immediately across with words of warm welcome. Whatever the wartime advice about not talking to strangers, it happily no longer applies in the great majority of churches.

St Cuthbert's was consecrated in 1957, 12 years after VE Day, its internal superstructure resembling a rather grand Nissen hut. "I'm sure it wasn't accidental," says Liz.

Behind the altar is an extraordinary appliqu hanging, so huge that David Holt, the designer, had to complete it at his aunty's because she had a bigger house.

Sir Albert Richardson, the church's architect, was so impressed that he brought his friend Sir John Betjeman to see it. Whether Betjeman was moved to one of his splendid verses is uncertain.

Two weeks previously they'd not even thought about marking the anniversary, not even on the Army's back porch. "Liz was saying there were quite a few things on in May and I asked her if one of them was VE Day," says Ken Winfield, one of the churchwardens. "I was a bit surprised that it wasn't."

It's by no means a criticism. "Liz is a brilliant vicar, we think the world of her," says Ken, and the feeling's clearly mutual.

"I'm absolutely potty about them," says Liz, who gained her doctorate at Durham, was curate at Sedgefield, worked in London but was quickly back up to North Yorkshire.

"I feel like I belong up here now," she says, though her family were Londoners and her grandfather so passionate an Arsenal fan that the doctor warned that supporting the Gunners could seriously damage his health.

"He had a weak heart," said Liz. "They made him watch Leyton Orient instead."

The service is Prayer Book matins, as it would have been in 1945, shared with the folk of St John's, Hipswell - her other church - and with the local Methodists. "A return in spirit to the great days of 1945," says the Vicar.

Doreen Hart, a Methodist local preacher, recalls that she was an eight-year-old in a much targeted London suburb when the war in Europe ended.

She talks of the sirens ("I still hate that noise"), the horrific sound of approaching V1 rockets - "especially for a small child" - the two days off school by way of celebration.

"I think even then," she says, "we guessed the world would get better in the future."

Years later, she'd discovered a letter from her mother about VE Day. "Doreen went out on her cycle before breakfast. The children went to the recreation field where there were free rides and chocolate.

"After breakfast, dad dug up some more cabbage plants and the children went for their train rides. We sat at home in the afternoon, listening to the radio."

Doreen supposes that it all seemed so ordinary, so old fashioned. "They were things we didn't do when the war was still happening.

"There was a house at the end of the road where that evening they had a light burning in every room to celebrate that the black-out had been lifted.

"Let there be light, and there was light."

Ken Winfield - then 17, subsequently 22 years in the Royal Signals - hadn't many memories of VE Day itself.

"I remember the celebration, the feeling that your brothers and sisters would walk through the door at any moment, because it was all you ever thought about, but my father was a workmen's club steward and I was born over the barrel. I'm afraid I was rather inebriated."

We sing All People That on Earth Do Dwell and Praise My Soul the King of Heaven, hear the reading about a new heaven and earth, give thanks for courage and for sacrifice and for those who died that we might salute 60 years.

The junior church, barely able to comprehend much less to remember, read of Andersen shelters - "cold and very frightening" - and of being able to sleep in their own beds, with their own teddies.

Maybe it's still ordinary, maybe still old fashioned, but there's joy and laughter just as Dame Vera had promised there would be.

It's just peace that may take a little longer.

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