Damian, Damien and demons.

Mum was aged thirty when she had me. She’d already lost her first-born son, which sounds like a form of carelessness, as if she’d put him in a reed basket and a river had carried him away when her back was turned. Or he was stillborn, which was equally true. He was born and he was still. An Irish nurse christened him with a sprinkle of tap water, Michael, named after the Archangel. I’m not sure Mum signed any consent forms, but things were more flexible then with regard to religious rituals. She would have appreciated that, and Mum made friends wherever she went. The nurse being Irish, and Catholic, they would have been soul mates. Mum had a number of miscarriages. There was the story of Mum fainting and a baby in the toilet pan, and my eldest sister Jo having to phone the doctor’s surgery. That was one of the more graphic episodes in a place called the future.

But Mum also had two daughters and a son before she got it right, and I was born. I’ve a friend that claims she remembers looking out of the pram and taking her first step, and the bounce in her step, like Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. I remember Neil Armstrong. I remember the moon, but I’ve never been there. I was at my birth and I wasn’t in the same kind of way. Nowadays, there’d probably be a video of me emerging from between my mum’s legs bloody and defiant.  

The Cuban Missile Crisis and the world about to end in nuclear Armageddon wasn’t, yet, my fault. Mum had a bit of practice at childbirth so she knew the drill. Expectant mothers were whisked away to Rhu, Helensburgh to give birth in a dedicated set of huts called wards, and collectively a Maternity Hospital. There were only allowed back to civilisation when they had a baby in their arms. Mum was taking part in her very own Carry On film with doctors in white coats and nurses drilled by a spinster matron, with an overly elaborate headdress in lace to give her height and status, running her finger along the edges on beds in the delivery suite.  

I refused to take part and rather than take my cue of strong lights, camera, action, and a slap on the arse as a reminder, I preferred to die, rather than put up with the embarrassment. The journey from Delivery Suite to Dying Suite was no more than a set of curtains whisked around a bed, away from the other breast-feeding mothers of healthy neonates. Mum refused to let me sulk.

She fed me drop by drop, with a cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth, she patrolled the corridors carrying me close, endlessly telling me she loved me. Not sleeping. Not eating. Battleship grey of the wards and ward sisters and nurses falling away until there was only us – and other mothers, watching and waiting and knowing that for the grace of God that could be them.

My middle name was Damian, named after a heroically righteous priest who died of leprosy and was later beatified by Pope John Paul II.  Father Damien, a Belgian priest of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary, which is quite a mouthful. Which is probably why the spelling of Damien was phonetic and lost in translation in the registrar’s office.

Father Joseph Damien De Veuster was born in Louvain in January 1840, one of eight children. He left school at thirteen to work on his family’s farm, which makes it sound as if he’d a choice. He’d be already working on the farm, but after turning thirteen he worked exclusively on the farm. When he was eighteen he joined the Sacred Heart Fathers. The same order as his brother. His two sisters joined the Ursuline order of nuns. The De Veuster family farm was therefore prosperous enough to support these vocations.

Damien had a few months to go before his ordination when he volunteered for missionary work. He replaced his brother, who had grown ill, and joined a group of missionary priests that set off for the Hawaiian Islands (or Sandwich Islands are they were then known) in 1863. His parish was around 1000 square miles of rough terrain. It included the leper colony on the island of Molokai. A prison set on a peninsula, with cliffs behind it and rough seas in front of it, the sick die and nobody leaves. Leprosy is and was often a disease of poverty and references are made to it in the Bible.

In Hollywood versions such as The Robe no one dies of leprosy, but the leading lady has to wear a face mask, until it falls away to show her more beautiful than before, with even more make-up on. Then we find she has been cured after bathing in the shadow of Christ. She can then go show herself to the Rabbis in the synagogue.

Father Damien to begin with had to shout his confession to another priest on a small boat moored offshore. He was in voluntary isolation. And remained that way for sixteen years, until he died on the island, having contracted leprosy himself in a way that sounds contemporary and familiar. His work was his life and his life was his work.

Around five percent of our senses are dedicated to smell. Suppurating wounds are difficult to look at, but the reek of 200 Roman Catholics of the 600 leprous bodies thrown together in a small hut converted into a chapel, would try the patience of a saint. But other helpers came to join him.

A fellow clergyman, Dr Charles Hyde, an evangelic American did not mourn the loss of Father Damien. He described him in an Australian publication as, ‘a course, dirty man, headstrong and bigoted’. Even more damning, the disease of leprosy came from his ‘vices and carelessness’.  In other words, he was having sex with his parishioners. But this was not a first-hand account, but hearsay.

Robert Louis Stephenson, son of builders of lighthouses, and staunch Protestant came to Damien’s defence in an idiosyncratic way. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  Mr Hyde tramples a young girl, when he disappears into a doorway, Dr Jekyll emerges to smooth things out and provide compensation for the victim. Stevenson visited Molokai after Damien’s death. The Scottish writer’s admiration were summed up in his work of fiction, but also the record that he’d found it ‘a harrowing experience, an ordeal from which the nerves a man’s spirit shrinks’. In Mr Hyde he buried that darkness.