THERESA ROBSON reports on the dawn arrival

A HUGE sign saying "Welcome to Lancashire" in Albanian hung over the doors of the reception centre at Calderstones Hospital.

As volunteers from the Women's Royal Voluntary Service and the British Red Cross nervously waited for the first coachload of refugee Kosovar Albanians to arrive, some had a go at pronouncing it.

It helped warm the spirits in the chill of a May morning.

Someone had heard that a contingent from local churches had arrived at the gates of Calderstones Hospital late in the night to place fresh flowers in the rooms where the refugees would be housed.

It was amazing what people thought of, someone commented.

Security guards, touched by the gesture, had allowed them in.

Elsewhere, someone had thought to hang balloons in a children's play area.

The kettle was on and plates of biscuits were being placed on tables.

Then dawn began to break and the sun crept tentatively around the corners of the austere red-brick buildings of the former mental hospital. The first coach could be seen making its way down the tree-lined avenue and the refugees, bedraggled and exhausted, clutching their meagre possessions and blinking their eyes in bewilderment, were soon stepping off.

An elderly woman wearing a multi-coloured headscarf hobbled slowly towards the reception centre. She was offered a wheelchair, but politely declined with a small smile as she motioned up to the sign.

A pregnant woman, a blanket around her shoulders, leant on the arm of a WRVS volunteer as she also made her exhausted way through the doors.

The men, dejected and forlorn, helped their womenfolk and children into the building. How did they ever come to this?

A child giggled with delight as a paramedic borrowed his football and dribbled it basketball-style like a Harlem Globetrotter.

At a press conference earlier in the day a journalist had asked how much the operation to house the refugees at the redundant Whalley hospital was costing.

Officials shrugged their shoulders. With so much time and effort being given for free, it was hard to tell. About £60,000 perhaps. No-one knew.

As the second coach pulled up, the child beamed at the paramedic as he handed him back the ball.

"If we can spend £350million on a millennium dome, who cares about £60,000?" I thought.

Then the child was gone - ushered through the doors by his mum for tea and buns.

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