Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious because they just didn't hold with such nonsense. This was not to say, however, that they were a pleasant sort of people. In fact, there was not a single person in Surrey that could really say they enjoy the families company.
Mr. Dursley was a grotesquely big, beefy man with hardly any neck and a very large mustache that took up most of his round face. Mrs. Dursley was thin, quite nearly too thin many would say, and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion, there was no finer boy anywhere. In truth, the boy was exactly the product of the two parents. A truly vile child to say the least.
But they also had a secret and it was their greatest fear that someone would find out. The Potters were hellishly abnormal to the Dursley's. To be associated with the Potters would truly ruin their perfect reputations. Mrs. Dursley preferred to pretend she didn't have a sister because her sister and her good-for-nothing husband were as unDursleyish as it was possible to be. The Dursleys knew that the Potters had a daughter, but they had never even seen her. This girl was another good reason for keeping the Potters away; they didn't want Dudley mixing with an abnormal child like that.
So, when Mr. and Mrs. Dursley woke up on the dull, gray Tuesday our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country. Mr. Dursley hummed as he picked out his most boring tie for work, and Mrs. Dursley gossiped away happily as she wrested a tantruming Dudley into his high chair.
None of them noticed the large, tawny owl flutter past the window.
At half-past eight, Mr. Dursley picked up his briefcase, pecked Mrs. Dursley on the cheek, and tried to kiss Dudley good-bye but missed, because Dudley was still having a tantrum and throwing his cereal at the walls.
"Little tyke," chortled Mr. Dursley as he left the house. He got into his car and backed out of number four's drive.
It was on the corner of the street that he noticed the first sign of something peculiar—a cat reading a map. For a second, Mr. Dursley didn't realize what he had seen—then he jerked his head around to look again. There was a tabby cat standing on the corner of Privet Drive, but there wasn't a map in sight. What could he have been thinking of? It must have been a trick of the light. Mr. Dursley blinked and stared at the cat. It stared back
Mr. Dursley quickly forgot about his strange trip to work. He was in a very good mood until lunchtime, when he thought he'd stretch his legs and walk across the road to buy himself a bun or two from the bakery.
He'd forgotten all about the people in cloaks until he passed a group of them next to the bakery. He eyed them angrily as he passed. He didn't know why, but they made him uneasy. This bunch was whispering excitedly, too, and he couldn't see a single collecting tin. It was on his way back past them, clutching a large doughnut in a bag, that he caught a few words of what they were saying.
"The Potters, that's right, that's what I heard—"
"—yes, their daughter, Hela—"
Mr. Dursley stopped dead. Fear flooded him. He looked back at the whisperers as if he wanted to say something to them, but thought better of it. There had to be a thousand strange families in their world who named their daughters so weirdly. Come to think of it, he wasn't even sure his niece was called Hela. He'd never even seen the girl. It might have been Harriet. Or Hinny. There was no point in worrying his wife; she always got so upset at any mention of her sister. He didn't blame her—if he'd had a sister like that… but all the same, those people in cloaks… He shook himself from the train of thought and tried to focus on his work. Drills had never been so hard to focus on for the Dursley man.
As he pulled into the driveway of number four that night the first thing he saw was a strange tabby cat. It was now sitting on his garden wall.
"Shoo!" said Mr. Dursley.
The cat didn't move. It just gave him a stern look. Was this normal cat behavior? Mr. Dursley wondered. Trying to pull himself together, he let himself into the house. He was still determined not to mention anything to his wife. Nothing from that terrible world could affect them.
How wrong he was.
For that night as, a breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen. An exceptional child was placed on the porch of the least remarkable people that had ever walked the planet. Hela Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside her and she slept on, not knowing she was special, not knowing she was famous, not knowing she would be woken in a few hours' time by Mrs. Dursley's scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that she would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by her cousin Dudley. She had no way to know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret, or at least trying to, all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: "To Hela Potter—the girl who lived!"
