Written for the Wiseacre's Wizarding Equipment stage of the Diagon Alley Fic Crawl Challenge at the HPFC Forum. A timed challenge (this took about an hour) looking at a character or situation in a new light.

Hope you enjoy it.

Dear Wizards and Witches,

You won't know my name, though you'll have heard of me. You'll only have heard bad things though, one particular point of view. That's why I'm writing this. You should know the truth – the good and the bad – about me and my family. I hope your so-called newspaper has the courage to print it.

My name is Petunia Dursley, and I am Harry Potter's aunt.

Yes, you've heard of me haven't you? Heard of me and condemned me. How could you treat a child as you did? Your own nephew? And Harry Potter? How could anyone treat Harry Potter as you did?

Let me explain.

My name was Petunia Evans. I lived with my mother and father and my sister in a town in the north-west of England. The place isn't important. We weren't rich by any means, but we got by. Mother used to clean some of the big houses on the hill when my sister and I were at school, and Father worked as a clerk in the factory. Not on the assembly line; we were better than that. Our house was small, but clean and comfortable, not in the best part of town, but not in the worst either.

My sister was fifteen months younger than me, and her name was Lily. You've heard of her of course: Lily Evans who married James Potter and became Harry Potter's mother. Oh yes, you've heard of her.

Lily and I, being so close in age, were always together. Mother didn't like us playing with the other children in the street, so we played together in our little garden or in the bedroom we shared. Lily was the best at making up games, at telling stories, at taking us in our imaginations far far away from our cramped house and dingy little town. I loved her as I have never loved anyone else.

But she was always a bit different, was Lily. Strange things happened when she was around. Once I broke Mother's best vase – quite by accident – and I was so scared that she would be angry and upset. Father had bought it for her for her birthday, and I knew there was no extra money to replace it. I was crying and crying when I thought of what Mother would say –and even more of what Father would say when he got in from work – and Lily put her arms around me and said, "Look. Look Tuney, it's alright." And I looked and it was alright. The vase was in one piece again. It didn't make any sense.

That was just one time. There were many more. Spilt milk mopped up without a cloth; the time she got a new blue dress and she wanted green and in the morning it was green; the rabbit that the vet said would die that got better and lived two more years – so many things.

The she met that boy. Severus his name was. You've heard of him too. Severus Snape. A poor boy from the wrong end of town, wearing the oddest clothes. They met in the park, and right from the start they left me out. He took my sister away from me and talked to her about magic and a whole magical world that normal people – he called us Muggles – knew nothing about. He filled her head with nonsense, and the two of them laughed at me. I couldn't forgive them for that.

I threatened to tell Mother of course. Spinners End he came from. Mother would never approve of us being friends with someone from Spinners End. Lily just laughed and said even Mother couldn't stop them being friends. They were special, they were magical. She was a witch and Severus was a wizard, and me, I was just Petunia; nothing special about me.

I was going to tell Mother and get her to put a stop to it, when the strange woman in tartan and black came to talk to Mother and Father about Lily. She told them Lily was a witch, that she needed to be trained in magic, that she should go to a special school – Hogwarts – to learn all about magic. Of course, our parents had noticed the odd things that happened when Lily was around, and they were delighted, absolutely delighted. The fact that I'd passed the Eleven Plus and got into the Grammar School was forgotten – though they'd been so pleased about it just a few months earlier. "We have a witch in the family." Precious Lily, clever Lily. Who would have thought it? Lily was a witch.

So Lily went away from me, off to Hogwarts. Off to a new world I couldn't be part of and couldn't begin to understand. She came back at holiday times of course, and when she did Mother and Father made such a fuss of her. They were so delighted to hear what she could do – though she never showed us any magic, oh dear no, she said she wasn't allowed to until she came of age – at seventeen. (What nonsense – seventeen? In the real world we come of age at eighteen, and it wasn't so long ago that it was twenty-one. Why, my sister would come of age in her world a bare three months after I did in mine, and I was over a year older!) But Mother and Father pored over her spell books with her, and paid for the outlandish clothes she had to wear and listened to her going on and on about her strange friends as if they could never get enough of it. Me? Well, they paid me enough attention I suppose in term time, but no one ever got excited about my O level results as they did over Lily's so-called OWLs. . No one bought me fancy clothes – I had to get a Saturday job if I wanted more than school uniform and cousin Nancy's hand-me-downs. It was pretty obvious Mother and Father cared for Lily so much more than they did for me. They denied it of course, said that they loved us both, that they made much of Lily in the holidays because they saw so little of her, but I knew it wasn't true. I was never anything more than second best.

I couldn't wait to get away.

So I did. The minute my secretarial course was over, I applied for a job. Not a job in our little town as all my friends did, as was expected of me. I was going up in the world. I would make my parents be proud of me.

I wanted to work in London, but the prices of bedsits there were so high I knew I couldn't do that to start with. Still, I was determined I was heading south. I got a job in a little office in Surrey, just a four-man company with me in the office filing the paperwork, sending out the bills and making the tea. It was a start. A year later, I moved on to bigger and better things, to a secretarial job with Grunnings. You won't have heard of them of course, but they're a big company. They make drills. Look them up in your old "Muggle studies" (that's what you call it, isn't it?) textbooks if you don't know what a drill is. And at Grunnings, I met Vernon Dursley, the man who was to become my husband.

We got married when I was twenty, and for once I was the centre of attention in my long white dress with lilies and roses in my hair and in my bouquet. I put the bridesmaids in pink, despite Lily's objections that it would clash with her hair. I like pink, and it was my wedding. Lily was right – she didn't look good in the photos, the colour didn't suit her at all. Not that you could see much of her; somehow she was behind Vernon's sister, Margery, who was a big girl even then, in most of the pictures.

Lily brought her boyfriend to the wedding. A dreadful boy with untidy hair and crooked glasses, who looked at me with his head on one side as if I was the odd one, and laughed much too loudly. He was one of them of course. One of you. A wizard.

They got married a little while after we did, but I didn't go. To a magical wedding ceremony? It wouldn't even be a legal wedding, so what was the point? We kept in touch, sort of, with cards on birthdays and at Christmas, with odd little formal notes inside asking how the other was doing. If you'd read them, you'd never have guessed how close we used to be.

I fell pregnant after a year or so, and had Dudley, the pride and joy of my life. Of course, he won't mean anything to you. He's just "Harry Potter's Muggle cousin", another of the Muggles who treated your hero so badly, but you are wrong, so wrong. He is such a lovely boy, so handsome and clever, and he's doing so well in his job at Tesco's now. He has a lovely girlfriend, Sarah Jane. I do hope they might get married and make me a grandmother soon. I do so want to be a young grandmother.

You know the rest of the story, of course. My sister – never one to be outshone by me in anything – had a baby too. Harry. Such a common name. And she and her husband got blown away by your Dark Lord Voldemort, landing me and Vernon with another child we never wanted.

Not that we didn't want another child. I would have loved another of my own. Another handsome boy like my Dudley, or a sweet girl who would grow up to be my best friend. But something went wrong when Dudley was born, and they told me I mustn't have any more babies. So we made the best of it, and resolved to give the child we did have the best of anything.

And why should my sister's child spoil that for us or for him? Landed on us in the middle of the night without so much as a by-your-leave, and with a letter from your precious Professor Dumbledore threatening all sorts of dire consequences if we didn't take him in and look after him. But no money. Nothing to pay for what he needed. Children aren't cheap you know. (I've found out since that James Potter was rich and that Harry inherited a lot of money from him. No one thought of sending a bit of that money our way to pay for little Harry did they? Oh no.)

So we kept Harry because we had no choice. I knew enough about magic to know that we couldn't refuse to keep him. But we weren't going to make things worse for our own boy by taking him in. We fed and clothed and housed him, and if he didn't get the new clothes or the presents that Dudley did, well, why should he? He wasn't our own.

And we tried – we tried so hard – to make him normal. Magic took my sister away from me; it split our family up. Magic meant Lily died when she was only twenty-one. Harry Potter was my nephew. It was my duty to bring him up properly, to be normal – as a Muggle, you would say – to save him from the evil world of magic that took my sister away.

Of course, we failed there. You know that and you're glad of it. "The Boy Who Lived." "Order of Merlin, First Class." "The Saviour of the Wizarding World." I know all about Harry. He was as magic as they come and he did your world proud. Good for him.

Just remember us, please. The ordinary family who never wanted anything to do with you. Who had their home invaded by wizards and house elves and magic at all hours of the day and night. Whose son nearly died because of your mad Dementor things. Who had to run for their lives and start again because of a war that was nothing to do with them.

Who really only wanted the best for their own boy.

And try to believe that we're not as bad as you think we are.

Petunia Dursley