Privet’s had been able to forgot about their troublesome niece, but from the moment she broke out, escaped from that high security ‘special’ boarding school, and found her way to the home of her only living relations, the Privets, their lives changed forever.
“Excuse me, please,” said Harry, ever so mannerly when Mrs Privet opened the front door, “I am your only niece. Will you please put me up for a few days?”
“Its young Harriet, isn’t it?” said Mrs Privet, patting her nervously upon the head. “Are you on a school break?”
Ignoring the question while resisting the urge to kick the condescending woman in the shins, Harry smiled, and said, “I prefer to be called Harry, if it all right with you?”
“Yes, yes, that’s fine,” said Mrs Privet as she ushered Harry through the doorway, looking up and down the road, to see if anyone had been following her. The road, however, was deserted. “Please go into the front room,” said Mrs Privet. The cat made a mad dash past Harry, through the open doorway.
Harry entered the room. It reminded her of Hagswords – far too much stained glass and wood panelling for her liking. “Sit down, sit down, Harry, and make yourself comfortable,” said Mrs Privet. “I will go fetch you some lemonade, you must be so thirsty after your travelling. Then I will go tell your uncle the good news.”
Leaving Harry alone in the room, Mrs Privet returned to the hallway where she opened the small door under the stairs that led down to the cellar, a den of sorts. Calling her husband, she said, “Dear…. we have a visitor…”
“Who is it?” a voice called up from below.
“It’s your niece.”
BANG. There was a sound like a baldhead striking a beam in the low slung ceiling, and then there was silence.
“Did you hear me, darling?”
Mumbles from below.
“Darling?”
Mr Privet began speaking, and in a hushed voice, he asked, “Are you sure it’s our niece – THAT niece?”
“Yes, dear, it’s young Harriet – I mean Harry, Harry Rotter.”
“Harriet or Harry – you should know what sex they are.”
“He, she’s a girl, she just likes the name Harry – shortened, you know.”
“I don’t know if I know anything anymore,” Mr Privet grumbled as he made his way up the narrow staircase, “having to deal with your ‘unusual’ relations. Puffing and panting, Mr Privet emerged from the cellar. “Where is she, then?” he barked, looking up and down the hallway.
“I put her in the front room.”
“Our best china’s in there!” he hollered, storming down the hallway and then bursting into the room like an elephant was chasing after him. Inside, he found Harry carefully inspecting a piece of their hand-painted fine bone china.
“That’s an heirloom – but it’s not worth anything,” he muttered, eying Harry’s canvas shoulder bag with suspicion, while also trying, but unsuccessfully, to close the battered door.
“Not worth anything?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“No, not a penny…”
“Can I have it, then, as a keepsake?”
Almost choking on his words, Mr Privet fumbled to find others, words that might save his prized china.
“Mr Privet?”
“I... we...we can’t give it away… we promised your Granny, on her death bed, that we would always treasure it…”
Studying his face, particularly the sweat beading upon it, Harry searched for signs of deceit. “Okay,” she said, “it was just a thought.” Then scanning the room, she added, “There must be loads of things amongst all this rubbish that you don’t want.”
“No, no, everything’s spoken for,” Mr Privet squeaked in reply. Then changing the subject from their prized possessions, he asked Harry the reason for her visit.
“Oh, I have already told your wife,” she said, “I will be staying with you for a few days…”
This time Mr Privet almost choked on Harry’s words.
Mrs Privet, carrying a tray with a tall glass of lemonade upon it, entered the room, “Everything all right?” she asked, smiling innocently at them.
Meet the Son
Over the course of the next few days, Harry settled in well at number five Dorsley Drive. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for her relationship with Mr and Mrs Privet’s beloved son, Box. From the moment Harry laid eyes on his bespectacled face and wimpishly thin body, she had taken a dislike to her cousin. Box, in turn, had taken an equally passionate dislike to Harry, but he was simply no match for her steely cunning and dogged determination, to get the better of him no matter what, to make his very existence a living hell.
This clash of personalities put a terrible strain on Harry’s relationship with Mr and Mrs Privet, who had always prided themselves, in being open minded and understanding of the challenging behaviour of all growing children. And they tried; they tried so hard to ignore the many terrible things Harry perpetrated upon their son, their only son. And she did so much to him; like knocking him down the stairs, sprinkling salt over his porridge and removing all of the fuses from his electrical gadgets and gizmos that he so loved.
In the end, Box avoided Harry like the plague. If he was out walking and saw her coming towards him, he would dash into the nearest shop, to avoid being anyway near her. If there weren’t any shops nearby, he would scurry up the garden path of the nearest house, where he would begin knocking frantically on its door, like his life depended on it.
At home, Box began spending more and more time in his bedroom, where he installed bolt after bolt and lock after lock on its door; to protect him from Harry’s constant and malevolent interferences. Bang, bang, bang. Every night they heard the sound of him sliding the bolts shut, before he retired to the safety of his bed. He would do anything to avoid Harry, absolutely anything.
Harry, on the other hand, had no need for locks or bolts on her bedroom door, for who would dare to enter it without asking her permission, first? Although
she had the run of the house, and she certainly made good use of it, whenever it so suited, Harry also began spending more and more time in her room, but it was for a far different reason than her wimpishly thin cousin. Harry had things to plan, and to workout…
It was now several days since her escape from school, Hagswords, and although Harry had conjured up a mannequin, a replica of her, to try and hide the fact that she was actually missing, she knew only too well that its effectiveness would soon wear off. And when it did, it would only be a matter of time until the school authorities began tracking her down, following her trail until they found her at number five Dorsley Drive.
Harry had even considered using a spell of concealment, to disguise her whereabouts when the school authorities caught up with her, but she had decided that with all the comings and goings in and out of number five Dorsley Drive its effectiveness would surely be compromised. The only way she could be totally sure of effectiveness was to stop everyone entering or leaving, and she couldn’t do that, could she?
Bang, bang, bang, another night had arrived and Box secreted himself safely within his bedroom, away from his dreaded cousin, Harry.
In the quietness of her room, lying comfortably in bed, Harry was ruminating over the words she was reading in a book, an old book that she had found hidden, secreted away, in the library at school. “They are so stupid, in that school,” she hissed. “They call it a school for mysticism and magic, more like a school for tolerance and fear. Fear of hurting the feelings of all those stupid
Muddles and far too much tolerance of them than is healthy. And as for the Principal…Hmm, I’ll show him. I’ll show them all, including the Muddles, what I am capable of…” Harry continued reading far into the night.
Next morning, Box jumped out of bed, determined to rush through his ablutions at the same breakneck speed he had adopted since the arrival of his horrid cousin. He was hell-bent on dashing downstairs, guzzling his breakfast, swilling down his tea, grabbing hold of his satche
l and then heading off to school, and all of this before Harry awoke. After carefully, quietly sliding open the bolts on his bedroom door, Box opened it and peered outside, to see if the coast was clear.
“Hello,” Harry said ever so sweetly, less than three inches in front of his nose. “Did you sleep well?”
“I, I,” Box stammered, at a loss for words; shocked that she was there in the first place and even more shocked that she was speaking so sweetly. He slammed the door shut.
Knock knock. “Box, it’s me, Harry,” said Harry, in the same sweet tone that had unsettled him, so. “Box, are you coming out today?”
Box, however, believing that his end was nigh, that his evil cousin was about to finish him off once and for all, said nothing.
“Is that you, Box?” asked Mrs Privet, from the bottom of the stairs.
“No, it’s me, Harry.”
Mrs Privet, shocked that she was up so early, returned to the kitchen and began preparing the fry-up Harry insisted on having each morning. Then poking her head out of the kitchen door, she asked, “Would you like to go out somewhere nice, today, like the zoo?”
It was a Saturday. Harry had been so drawn into her reading, her studying of the old book she had lost all track of time. Her mind spinning into action, she replied, “Yes, I would love to… But only if Box comes along...”
At the kitchen table, peering out from behind his newspaper, Mr Privet called his wife over, and he said, “Now why did you have to go and say that?”
A