Magic Flutes

His violence and aggression now took a different direction. In the orphanage he had fought against the world, now he fought for Martha Hodge. When she explained that kicking, biting and twisting the limbs of children who had fallen foul of her in some way just would not do, he taught himself to box. While applying first aid to the bloodied noses of his victims, Martha wished she had held her tongue. Whether or not Martha, long widowed and still comely, would have wished the fishmonger to kiss her when he came up the cobbled lane with fresh herrings was never put to the test, for no sooner had the tradesman’s arms encircled her waist than Guy shot out from the coal bunker and – forming himself into a human battering ram – sent the unfortunate man sprawling.

School, for which Martha had thirsted like a spent hart for the thicket, provided scant relief, for despite returning with his behind in weals from the cane, Guy still seemed to have enough energy left for hours of mayhem before she got him into bed. Nevertheless, it was from this small, red-brick building between the slaughterhouse and the glue factory that deliverance came. Two years after Guy had come to her, Martha was sent for by the headmaster.

‘He is a devil, Mrs Hodge,’ said Mr Forster. ‘A thoroughgoing, copper-bottomed fiend in hell.’ He embarked upon a recital of the damage that Guy Farne had inflicted in his short time at Titley Street Board School. ‘However . . .’

Martha, lifting her head at the ‘however’, was then informed that her foster-child had a remarkable capacity for learning: had, in short, more brains than any child that had passed through Mr Forster’s hands in twenty years and could, in his opinion, win a scholarship to grammar school.

She came home, burst into tears and was discovered thus by Guy. Though disappointed that what she wanted of him was something as humdrum as a scholarship, when he was prepared to raise an army or build a fleet, Guy applied himself. Going out with her rolling pin one day to rescue a neighbour’s little boy who was pinned against the sooty brick wall of the shipyard, Martha discovered that the child was warding off not Guy’s threatened blows but his determination to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics; then she knew that the battle was won.

When he got his scholarship, there was a street party and Guy, now sporting a black blazer with a tower on the pocket, went to the Royal Grammar School. Soon he became, as such children do, bilingual in English and Geordie. His passion was for science, but he had an ear for languages and the kind of maths-and-music brain that gives tensile strength to this type of high intelligence. He still fought at the slightest provocation, but now there were sports to channel his energy and though he was too wary to make friends, friends – cautiously – began to make him.

The scholarship to Cambridge was a surprise to no one except Guy himself. He went to Trinity for natural sciences, and Martha, just as she had braced herself through the years of his childhood for the reappearance of his lost parents, now prepared herself to let him go, without complaint, out of her life.

These preparations were unnecessary. No one was ever to come forward and claim kinship with Guy, nor did Guy himself now show the slightest signs of turning his back on his past. Though he spent the long vacation getting such work as he could to help pay for his clothes and extra expenses, he returned every Christmas and Easter, changing as the train steamed over the Tyne Bridge into his old ways and old dialect as easily as one changes coats. At nineteen, Guy Farne was still on the short side, still trailing his extraordinary strength and compactness as though his muscles were of a different clay. The springy dark hair, the pointed ears which Martha had bandaged to his skull in vain, combined with his high cheekbones to give him that puckish, foreign look that in the orphanage had been laid at the door of the Lithuanians, but his wide mouth and strong chin recalled a simpler, more pastoral heritage. Guy’s eyes, during those years at Cambridge, were seldom without the glint of blue which signalled the well-being of his soul as he came into his own in scholarship, in sport and friendship. Only women he left alone, knowing – as men whose sexual power has never been in doubt do know – how to wait.