The Magician of Privet Drive

The knock came again, and Dudley fell off the sofa.

Harry had got as far as his knees when the inner door burst open and Uncle Vernon skidded in, in his pyjamas, tearing the paper off the long thin parcel he’d carried about with him all day. It was a rifle.

“Who’s there?” shouted Uncle Vernon. “I warn you, I’m armed!”

For a moment there was nothing but the rain. Then the whole door fell inwards, hinges and all.

A man was standing in the gap. Harry’s first thought was that he must be standing on something. There was nothing under his boots but the doorstep. He was simply twice as tall as a man ought to be, and nearly as wide, and most of his face was lost in a wild black beard and a tangle of hair. Out of the middle of it all looked two small, bright eyes, and they were crinkled up in a smile.

He ducked under the lintel (it took two goes, one for his head and one for his shoulders), picked the door up off the floor and pressed it back into its frame like the lid on a jar. The storm went quiet at once.

“Sorry abou’ that,” he said. “Yeh wouldn’ have a kettle? I’m soaked through.”

Nobody answered him. The giant didn’t seem to mind. Uncle Vernon had backed into the doorway to the other room, with the rifle held out in front of him. Aunt Petunia had appeared behind him in her nightdress with a candle, and was trying to get further behind him still, and Dudley had fled behind her. Harry was on his knees at the far end of the sofa, outside the little circle of light. The giant peered round, made out a large boy in the candlelight behind Aunt Petunia, and beamed at him.

“There he is,” he said. “Harry. Yeh’d have fitted in one o’ me hands, last time I saw yeh. An’ look at yeh now. Robust as anythin’.” Dudley whimpered and scrambled backwards. Harry decided to speak.

“Sorry, I’m Harry, actually.”

The giant whirled round.

“Blimey. Beg yer pardon, Harry. Couldn’ see a thing in here. Good ter see yeh again.” He wiped his hands on his coat and peered at him. “Ah, that’s more like it. Yer dad all over.”

He bent down, and Harry saw with alarm that the bright black eyes had gone wet, though he was still smiling. “’Cept the eyes. Them’s Lily’s.”

Nobody had ever told Harry that he looked like anybody.

“You are trespassing!” said Uncle Vernon, much higher than he meant to. “I’ll have the law on you! Get out!”

“Oh, give over, Dursley,” said the giant. He reached across, took the rifle out of Uncle Vernon’s hands, folded the barrel back on itself like a penknife, and handed it back. Uncle Vernon looked at the bent rifle. He squeaked, he dropped it, then he ran back into the other room and shut the door, leaving Aunt Petunia and Dudley to fend for themselves.

“Now then. Harry.” The giant was patting the pockets of his enormous coat. “Got summat fer yeh. Might’ve sat on it at some point, mind, but it’ll taste the same.”

It was a flattened box, and inside it was a large, sticky chocolate cake, squashed flat on one side, with “Happy Birthday Harry” on it in green icing, in the sort of lettering he liked to see on the covers of books.

“Happy birthday,” said the giant. “Yeh came late on. Kept yer mum up.”

Harry looked at the cake for a long time. It had come four minutes too late to wish on. That didn’t seem to matter very much.

“Thank you,” he said. And then, because it seemed the next thing to ask: “Who are you?”

The giant chuckled. “Fair question. Rubeus Hagrid. Keeper o’ Keys an’ Grounds at Hogwarts.” He took Harry’s whole arm and shook it. “Now, about that tea.”

He bent over the empty grate. Harry couldn’t see what he did there, but when he straightened up there was a fire in it, a proper roaring one, where all evening there had been nothing but an empty sardine tin and some damp. Warmth rolled across the floor and over Harry’s frozen feet. He stared at the flames. He knew all about making people look the wrong way. He had been looking the right way the whole time, and he had no idea how it was done.

Then Hagrid sat down on the sofa, and it gave way under him.

Out of his coat came a copper kettle, a packet of sausages, a poker, a teapot, some chipped mugs and a bottle of something amber, which Hagrid had a swig of before he began. Soon the whole shack smelt of sausages, and Dudley’s nose came round the edge of his mother.

“Don’t touch anything that man gives you, Dudley,” said Uncle Vernon through the door. He could smell the sausages too.

“By the looks of him, he don’ need it,” said Hagrid, and passed the first six to Harry. “This one’s a sight scrawnier,” he added pointedly, in the direction of Aunt Petunia and the door. Harry had never tasted anything so good in his life.

“I’m sorry,” Harry said, when he could speak, “but I still don’t really know who you are. You mentioned Hogwarts? What’s that?”

Hagrid put down his mug.

“Yeh don’ know what Hogwarts is.”

“No. Sorry.”

“Sorry?” Hagrid swung round on what was left of the sofa, and the Dursleys shrank back against the wall. “I knew yeh weren’ gettin’ yer letters, but I never thought yeh’d not even know abou’ Hogwarts! Yeh’ve nothin’ ter be sorry fer, Harry. Did yeh never wonder where yer mum an’ dad learned it all?”

“Learned what?”

Hagrid got to his feet, and seemed to fill the hut. “Ten years,” he said to the Dursleys, very quietly. “Ten years yeh’ve had him, an’ yeh’ve told him nothin’? Not what his mum an’ dad were? Not what he is?”

The inner door flew open. “Stop!” said Uncle Vernon. “I forbid you to tell the boy anything!”

“What am I?” said Harry.

“Yeh’re a wizard, Harry,” said Hagrid. “That’s what. Same as yer dad. An’ yer mum was as good a witch as I ever met. An’ with them two fer parents, I’d say yeh’ll be a fine one too, once yeh’ve had a bit o’ teachin’.”

There was no sound but the sea and the fire.

Harry’s hand had gone to his pocket, where the cards were, and he felt his face go hot.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not a wizard. I’m just a magician. I can do some tricks, but it isn’t really magic. I learned it from some books. Anyone could do it.”

He waited for the giant to look disappointed. Hagrid only looked puzzled, and then, slowly, pleased.

“Not that sort,” he said. “Though I’d like ter see it. I mean the other sort. The sort there’s no way of doin’. Yeh never made summat happen, Harry, when yeh were scared, or angry? Summat yeh couldn’ explain after?”

Harry opened his mouth to say no, and shut it again.

Things had happened. Buttons had popped off other people’s clothes when he was angry. Lights had flickered as he walked under them. Once, with Dudley’s gang after him for winning at cards, a wind had scooped him up and set him down on the school roof, and only this summer the glass at the zoo had simply stopped being there, and a snake had spoken to him. He’d been punished for every one of them, and he’d never been able to say how he did it. Some nights he had wondered whether he was going mad: a knock on the head from the car crash, turning up at last, ten years late.

He looked at Aunt Petunia. She wasn’t looking at the giant. She was looking at Harry, with the face she had worn on each of those days: tight and white and afraid.

She had never meant the card tricks. She hadn’t even known about them. He had spent years hiding what he could do with a pack of cards, and all that time it had been something else.

“Yeh see?” said Hagrid gently. “Now. I reckon it’s time yeh read this.”

It was the letter: the same thick envelope, the same green ink, addressed this time to Mr H. Potter, The Floor, Hut-on-the-Rock, The Sea. Nobody took it out of his hand.

It was shorter than he’d expected, for something that had come down a chimney forty at a time. There was a school, with a long name and a headmaster with a longer one. He had a place there. Term began on the first of September, and a list was enclosed. Harry read it through, and then again, and then he read the list, which included a cauldron.

“He’s not going,” said Uncle Vernon. He had come forward into the firelight, grey in the face and very angry.

“An’ who’s goin’ ter stop him?” said Hagrid. “A Muggle like you?”

Harry didn’t know the word, but he could tell from Uncle Vernon’s face that it wasn’t a compliment.

“We said, the day we took him in, that there would be none of it in our house,” said Uncle Vernon. “We said we’d have it out of him. Wizard, indeed!”

“Hang on — you knew?” said Harry. “You knew all the time?”

“Knew!” It was Aunt Petunia, and it came out of her as a shriek. “Of course we knew! How could you be anything else, with my sister for a mother? She had a letter just like that one. Off she went to that school, and back she came every holiday, doing things to the teaspoons, and our mother and father thought the sun shone out of her. A witch in the family! I was the only one who saw what she was. A freak! And then she met that Potter, and they went off together and had you, and I knew you would be the same. Just as strange. Just as unnatural. And then they went and got themselves killed, and you were left on our doorstep without anybody asking us about it!”

She stopped, breathing hard. It sounded as though she had been saving it up for ten years.

Harry had gone cold all over again.

“Killed,” he said. “You said it was a car crash. You said he was drunk.”

“A car crash!” Hagrid’s roar sent the Dursleys scuttling back to their corner. “James Potter, a drunk? There’s children not old enough ter read could tell him what happened ter his mum an’ dad, an’ yeh told him it was a car crash?”

“What really happened?” said Harry.

The anger went out of Hagrid’s face. He sat down heavily and looked into the fire, and for a while he didn’t answer.

“It shouldn’ be me,” he said. “There’s people could tell it better, an’ people who were there. But yeh’ve waited ten years, an’ I’ll not have yeh wait till September.”

“There was a wizard,” said Hagrid. “Years back, this is. He went bad. Bad as a man can go, an’ then a good way further. His name was —”

He stopped.

“I don’ like sayin’ it. Nobody does.”

“You don’t have to,” said Harry.

“No. Yeh ought ter hear it. You more’n anybody.”

He said it once, very fast, like a man pulling out his own tooth.

“Voldemort. There. Don’ ask me again.”

Harry didn’t.

“He got followers. Them as stood up ter him died, an’ yer mum an’ dad stood up ter him. Ten years ago this Hallowe’en he came ter the house where the three o’ yeh were livin’. Yeh were a year old.” Hagrid wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “He killed ’em both. Then he turned his wand on you, an’ it didn’ work. Nobody can tell yeh why. It left yeh that mark on yer forehead, an’ nothin’ else. Yeh’re the only one it’s ever failed on.”

Something stirred at the very bottom of Harry’s mind. He had always had one memory he couldn’t account for: a pair of eyes, a flash of green light, a pain in his forehead. He had thought it was the car crash. Now, for the first time, he wasn’t so sure.

“It was me carried yeh out o’ there,” said Hagrid. “Dumbledore sent me. An’ I brought yeh ter this lot, because I was told to.”

“What happened to him?” Harry asked. “To Vold — sorry. The evil one.”

“Nobody’s seen him since. Not from that night ter this. That’s why every witch an’ wizard in the country knows yer name. There’s some’ll tell yeh he’s dead. I don’ believe it. I reckon he’s still out there, too weak ter show his face, waitin’. But whatever happened in that house, it was you he went for, an’ him it happened to.”

He was looking at Harry with great warmth and respect, and Harry didn’t feel he’d earned either. He was a boy on a floor with a pack of cards in his pocket. But there was a fire in the grate that had come from nowhere, and a letter in his hand with his name on it.

“He is not going,” said Uncle Vernon from the doorway. He could not seem to stop himself. “He is going to Stonewall High, and he will be grateful for it. I have read that letter. Spell books, and wands, and — I will not pay good money for some batty old conjuror to teach him to pull rabbits out of hats!”

Harry very nearly laughed. He had four rabbits under his mattress at Privet Drive, and they hadn’t cost Uncle Vernon a penny.

But Hagrid had gone a dark and dangerous red, and drawn a battered pink umbrella out of his coat.

“Never,” he said, “insult — Albus — Dumbledore — in front — o’ me.”

Then he saw Dudley, who had taken his chance while nobody was looking and was biting into Harry’s birthday cake.

“That doesn’ belong ter yeh!”

The umbrella came whistling down and stopped, pointing at Dudley. There was a flash of violet light and a bang like a firecracker, and Dudley began to squeal, dancing on the spot with both hands clapped to his bottom. When he turned round, Harry saw a curly pink tail poking out through a hole in his pyjamas.

Uncle Vernon let out a shout, seized Aunt Petunia with one hand and Dudley with the other, dragged them into the other room and slammed the door.

Hagrid looked at his umbrella, and then at the door.

“That was wrong o’ me,” he said, and sounded it. “I was aimin’ ter make a point, an’ I’ve made a tail. It never comes out how I mean it.” He glanced sideways at Harry from under his eyebrows. “Yeh’ll keep that ter yerself up at the school, won’ yeh? I’m not allowed magic. Not like that.”

“Why not?”

“No reason,” said Hagrid loudly. “Look at the time. Shops ter get round in the mornin’.”

He took off the great brown coat and dropped it over Harry, who disappeared.

“Yeh can kip under that. If a pocket moves, leave it be.”

The fire burned low. Hagrid began to snore, and the sofa creaked under him in time. Harry lay in the warm with his eyes open. His head was so full that he couldn’t find the beginning of any one thought. His mother’s name had been Lily. Somebody had said it out loud, in front of him, as though it were an ordinary thing to say.

After a long while he took out his pack of cards, squared it by feel, and turned over the top card in the last red light of the fire. It was the nine of hearts. He had known it would be, because he’d put it there himself. That was the difference. He knew how that was done.

He didn’t know how the fire was done. For the first time in his life there was a trick whose workings he couldn’t see, and somebody had come a very long way, in a storm, to tell him he would be taught it.