AS if a remembrance of the rich man, the camel and the eye of a needle, the gateway to the Poor Clare convent is a narrow one. Unable to pass through it, a small bus halts outside. Fourteen smiling women emerge quietly - for such is their way of life - into the last darkening afternoon of the year 2000, the year of Jubilee.

"Enterprise Travel" it says in the side of the bus, but though its journey has been barely 200 yards, the occasion transcends mere enterprise. It is historic, epochal, properly unique. The travellers are from the Carmelite convent, neighbours on the other side of a high wall since the Poor Clares built their Darlington base in 1858 on land sold, cheaply, by their sisters under the skin.

Both remain contemplative, enclosed orders. For 142 years until last Sunday the two houses - good neighbours in every other sense - had never, ever, met. A public service had never been held in the Poor Clare chapel.

"Our way of worship is usually separate from the folks," says Sister Frances, the Poor Clare Abbess, rather quaintly.

"They should have just made us human cannon balls and shot us over the wall," says a tiny Carmelite, joyful in her excitement.

"A once in a lifetime occasion" the invitation had said, though since it may never happen again, or for another 1,000 years, it was more special, even, than that.

"I suppose that it must have been my idea," says Sister Frances - small, sandal-clad, wholly charming (if such a thing may be said of an abbess), though she is anxious to stress that the community was first consulted before she wrote - wrote - to the next door neighbours.

Because they have the same ideals they understand each other from afar, she adds, though perhaps not afar as the eye can see.

Members of Darlington's churches have also been invited, gathered first in a little side-chapel - the Poor Clares, happily, still run to central heating - then ushered into what is termed the choir, the main church building reserved for high days, holy days and once in a lifetime occasions. Numbers exceed expectations. Elderly nuns carry wooden chairs two at a time, their physical strength perhaps a symbol of a spiritual fibre, too.

Even the photographer is offered a chair and stays for the whole service, truly a first time for everything.

"You can't stand all the time, that's for sure," says Sister Frances.

It's a carol service followed by vespers, the evening service that in religious houses is the sixth of seven daily offices, and preceded by the distribution from brown cardboard boxes of a gift, a calendar and a candle, to all present.

Like the lengthy order of service, the calendar has been printed at the Carmelite convent - in-house as it were. Thanks to their printing press, the order in Darlington is largely self-sufficient.

"You are terrifically welcome to this extraordinary occasion," Sister Frances tells the congregation, and for once in its hyperbolic history the word "extraordinary" becomes an understatement.

"I'm sure that our joint prayers will work wonders," she adds, and is greeted by a ripple of laughter that perhaps isn't quite what was intended.

A small procession is led by a Carmelite postulant - a candidate for admission - carrying a candle, and by "Mary and Joseph" who are postulants at St Clare's.

There being a certain physical difficulty in recruiting a Joseph from two convents, the carpenter of Nazareth is portrayed by the most surprising bearded lady in the annals of central casting.

For the little nativity tableau near the crib they are joined from somewhere by a white-clad Archangel Gabriel, "you can tell she's an archangel because there's tinsel in her hair," someone whispers.

The question "Where on earth did she come from" may not in the circumstances be inappropriate.

Nineteen Poor Clares are present, a fifteenth Carmelite left behind. "Baby sitting," one of the sororiety mischievously explains. Sister Colette, another Poor Clare, died at the end of September. she was 106.

The two sides of the choir facing, we sing carols like O Come All Ye Faithful, Of the Father's Love Begotten and, ever-more appropriately, In the Bleak Mid Winter. Sister Frances sits at the back with Sister Margeret, the Carmelite Prioress.

Before vespers, one takes the other's hand and leads her, smiling with all her countenance, to the sanctuary. A single mass candle burns on the altar. Vespers is a rather more subdued affair, particularly for non-Catholics and rotten singers, though essayed with great beauty by those with different credentials.

It ends with the two Mothers Superior arm in arm, the lights fading to leave the Mass candle a light shining in the darkness. Others embrace at last; the Carmelites - over the wall, as it were - most evidently excited. The more hermetical of the two orders, until fairly recently they weren't even allowed into the outside world for medical treatment.

"The doctor says our trouble is we're not allowed to speak our mind," one of them had joked.

Probably they've not been in the paper since being canvassed in the 1983 by-election, the candidates required to remain on the secular side of a heavy grille.

Is it true, asks a Church of England priest, that a nun got into trouble for inadvertently putting her finger through the grille.

"Oh no," says a laughing Carmelite, "it was her foot." Victoria Wood would have been proud of the timing.

Soon, however, they're back on the starship Enterprise, back to their own solitary order of things, the rest of us invited to tea and mince pies, served by a nun in a rather fetching apron, in either of the two parlours.

Since New Year's Eve falls on a Sunday it's a recreation day, anyway - a game of Scrabble, perhaps, or simply the chance to talk amongst themselves. There is also a recreation period every day except Friday, the 55 minutes until 6.30pm.

Christmas Day and Boxing Day had been recreation days, too, followed by three days of prayer and by preparation throughout Saturday for the great, great day that was to follow.

They expected it to be joyous and it had been, says Sister Frances. "Something good for people to look back upon."

Good enough to suppose that on some other great celebration they might again share community relations? "I don't think we are expecting another one," says the Abbess, as the new year snow falls thickly around the convent of Poor Clare, and the rest may be contemplated in silence.

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