A church service with the Chaldeans of West Acton

I joined the Chaldeans in church on the morning after the night that the rebels in Syria took control of Damascus. We weren’t in Aleppo or on the plains of Nineveh but cocooned in a warm church at West Acton in London, where a community of Christian migrants from Iraq has settled in recent decades. Many came to this country during Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime or after facing persecution from Islamists and militias after the invasion of Iraq.

Outside, rows of bare pollarded lime trees were silhouetted against the sky, like Arthur Rackham illustrations, between semi-detached Mock Tudor houses with timbers let into the plasterwork of the facades. Inside the modern church, borrowed from the western-rite Catholics, clouds of incense rose while oriental chant, using quarter tones, ebbed and flowed, sometimes to a lilting dancelike rhythm.