‘They come at two or three in the morning’

Rangoon

The first few rows were taken up by the more ostentatiously pious of the congregation, elderly women mostly and a few schoolgirls wearing last year’s Holy Communion dresses. To their left, sitting in front of a statue of the Virgin, was a phalanx of nuns wearing the starched and forbidding habits long ago abandoned by their trendier sisters in the Western world. Behind them sat middle-aged husbands and wives, the latecomers and the doubters, and your correspondent, sweaty and portly and dressed unbecomingly in T-shirt and shorts, the necessary uniform of the foreign reporter posing as a tourist in totalitarian Burma.

Far above us starlings and pigeons fluttered between the beams of St Mary’s Cathedral, whose solid red-brick walls had withstood a terrible earthquake and the Japanese invasion during the second world war. As we queued for communion I noticed that I was the only Westerner there. But I was greeted with smiles of welcome and urged to the front of the line, a kindness I politely declined but which those around me continued to insist on.