Magic Flutes

A tendency to blame Lithuania increased amongst the staff of the Byker orphanage as Guy Farne reached the age of three, four, five . . .

‘Though you can’t really say there’s any actual malice in him,’ said Matron, bandaging the leg of a fat girl he had bitten in the calf. ‘I mean, Maisie was bullying little Dora.’

This was true, but the staff found it cold comfort. It was also true that when Billy was carried in with concussion because Guy had knocked him against a brick wall, he had been tying a tin can to the tail of a puppy that belonged to Matron’s sister. And that Guy had stolen a gold watch from a corpulent governor’s back pocket only to present it immediately to the aged boiler-man who had a birthday. True, all true – but when Guy reached his sixth year Matron decided that enough was enough and looked about for a suitable victim.

Her choice fell, as in the manner of fairy stories, on a poor widow named Martha Hodge.

Mrs Hodge had lost her husband when very young in an accident in one of the shipyards; since then she had fostered, very successfully, one little girl with partial hearing for whom she had found a job with a kind lady as a housemaid and another girl who was now working happily in the country. Matron accordingly wrote a letter in her neat copperplate to Mrs Hodge, suggesting that she might like to foster another child and reminding her that the three and six paid weekly by the parish had now risen to a munificent five shillings, enabling those who took up fostering to make a reasonable profit.

Mrs Hodge had not found this to be so, but she nevertheless put on her hat and coat and on arrival at the orphanage told Matron respectfully that she was willing but it had to be a little girl.

‘For without a man to help me, Ma’m, I divn’t think I can deal with a wee lad.’

Matron repressed a sigh and said she saw her point. ‘However, if you’ll just look at the boy now you’re here?’

Guy was led in, glowering, and stood before her. At the time of this encounter he was six and a half years old. Entirely without hope or expectation, he looked at Mrs Hodge. Small for his age, with the extraordinary air of compactness that characterized him, his chin lifted to receive the information that he was not acceptable, he waited. His knees, scrubbed to a godly cleanliness, shone scarred and raw; his naturally springy hair had been slicked down with several applications of vaseline and water and stuck relentlessly to his scalp.

Mrs Hodge looked at him and felt frail and tired and more mortal than usual. Force emanated from this strange-looking boy as visibly as beams from a lighthouse. It was impossible; she would never be able to cope with him.

The boy waited. His eyes, strangely and slantingly set above high cheekbones, were a curious deep green which sent Mrs Hodge in search of images that were beyond her: of malachite, of the opaque and clouded waters of the Nile.

Silence fell. Only the sudden descent of his left sock as the garter snapped revealed the tension that the child was concealing.

It was entirely without volition that the words Mrs Hodge now uttered issued from her mouth.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll have ’im. I’ll give it a try.’

She had turned to the Matron as she spoke, and it was a few moments before she turned back to look at the boy. When she did so, she had to catch her breath. The child had not moved from where he stood, nor did he smile, yet he was utterly transformed. The mouth, sullen no longer, curved upward; the clenched fists had unfurled, and everything about him, every line of his body, seemed to express joy and a wholly unexpected grace. Most movingly of all, there had appeared in the strange green eyes a glimmer of the purest, the most celestial, blue.

It was then she suspected that she did not stand a chance.

The first month that Guy spent in Martha’s ‘back-to-back’ in the narrow, cobbled road beside the shipyard passed in unnatural quiet. Every child knew that fostering or adoption was on a month’s trial. Memories of cowed and defeated children returning with their bundles to the orphanage had been burned into Guy’s mind when he was scarcely four years old. On the last day of February he packed his belongings, crept downstairs and said, ‘I’m ready.’ It was always thus with him – to anticipate the worst, to be prepared.

‘Ready for what?’

‘To go back,’ said the little boy.

‘Go back?’ said Martha. ‘Whatever for, you daft boy? Don’t you want to stay?’

Guy did want to stay. By the time he had made this clear, his eyes undergoing that characteristic change from green to blue, Martha found herself knocked backwards on to the horsehair sofa, with broom sent flying and hairpins clattering on to the floor.