THE first Sunday train to the seaside leaves Darlington at 9.25am, though it would be mistaken to suppose that because it is the first, there is nothing which precedes it. A great, grey, arthritically articulated freight train shuffled along in front, blocking the path as completely and as effectively as a six-foot, second form, bully.

The conductor apologised, sounded fed up before the shift had barely begun, blamed someone he called the signaller. What's that scripture about the first being last?

We made Saltburn with five minutes to spare, the Methodist church - happily - just at the back of the station supermarket (and watch out for the skate boarders). It was harvest festival, 10.45 start, and abundantly worth the journey.

For journey to distraction, read transport of delight.

Few churches in Christendom may have been so gloriously or so imaginatively decorated this autumn - the window sills overflowing, the organ pipes planted out, the pulpit wonderfully floribundant.

Everywhere were fruit, flowers and vegetables, miniature wheelbarrows overflowing with potatoes, parsnips and queues of peas and all to be redistributed to those in greater need. Cards by the displays read "Choir" or "Cradle roll" or simply "Congregation".

"Ah yes," said a chap collecting hymn books after the service, "we've toned it down in recent years" - and so, remarkably, they have.

"There used to be a theme," said Liz Chapman, "but now it's just a lot of incidentals."

The church, built partly in 1865 but principally 40 years later, was already comfortably filled when around 25 Sunday School children - "a generation ago it would have been 100," someone said - processed from the vestry, each carrying yet more for the harvest homecoming.

We sang We Plough the Fields and Scatter. Kathleen Bowe, superintendent minister of 16 Methodist churches from Runswick Bay to Redcar, announced she was going to ask something very difficult - "I'm going to ask you to think."

It is a familiar Methodist practice to begin the service with an address to the children but it could equally, of course, have applied to those of us many years their senior. She wanted them to think about what they'd most hate to be without - friends, food and family, they said, and a thoughtful grown-up added "false teeth."

"Good one, just think where you'd be without them," said the minister and maybe, she added, we could do without grumbling, too. "We'd all get degrees in that."

Then the little ones processed back to their Sunday School, led like a benevolent Pied Piper by an elderly chap, teeth gleaming, dancing and clapping with hands over his head like England's Captain Marvel the day previously.

Liz Chapman, who'd hate anyone to suppose she's more than just one of a very happy band, said the youngsters had fun, too. "We have sweets, singing, all sorts of things.

"If we don't encourage the youngsters we've had it, but if the adults knew what went on, half of them would want to come out with us."

Miss Bowe - 21 years a minister, originally from a farming family in Bedale, then addressed the merely young at- heart, wondered what we were bringing to God as an offering this harvest thanksgiving - friendship, maybe, the taken for granted ability to read, perhaps, admitted that her own green fingers were pretty mildewed.

"I think my offering this year would have been one dahlia," she said, but her sermon was as lively, as lucid and as loving as any is it possible to remember. A simply effective masterwork.

There were prayers for Saltburn's drug addicts, those for whom alcohol was too great a temptation, for the drug dealers "that their hearts may be turned from this trade". The harvest hymn which followed was little known, but had appropriate words:

We cry for the plight of the hungry

While harvests are left on the fields,

For orchards neglected and wasting

For produce from markets withheld.

Afterwards, Joyce Ingledew had the kettle on, Kathleen Bowe talked of how much she enjoyed her Cleveland patch - "a wonderful place to be" - the good folk of Saltburn spoke of nipping home for lunch and being back to show visitors around at 2pm. It still wasn't as bright and beautiful as it used to be, they insisted, but it was a wonderfully rich harvest, nonetheless. Like railfreight, they deliver the goods.

* Principal Sunday services at Saltburn Methodist church, Milton Street, are at 10.45am and 6pm. The Rev Kathleen Bowe is on (01287) 632770.

Published: 13/10/2001