Hi, everybody, thanks for all your reviews and the many views for the story. Now enjoy chapter 4.

Problems

Howard Fitz was really annoyed by now. This was the second time Jane had massively complained about Dudley Dursley. The boy was a true terror. He really wasn't mature enough to be put into a class with other children and the first-years' lessons were really tame compared to the higher years' classes. The children still got to play a lot and learning was mostly done in a fun way. But sending the boy back to nursery school also wasn't a real option. He had read through the reports and wasn't pleased at all about the deficits the child had. His parents really did a bad job raising him properly. The boy didn't know what limits were and had never been told 'no' in his whole life it seemed. The other children in his class had started to fear his tantrums because he tended to lash out and hurt them.

Seemingly that behaviour pleased the boy and he didn't care about his teacher telling him off all the time. If nothing changed he would have to have a serious discussion with the boy's parents. This couldn't go on. Just why the boy was like that he couldn't fathom. His cousin Harry was a really nice child. While he wasn't as much of a perfect child as in the beginning, he had relaxed some, he would never hurt anybody intentionally and was always trying to be nice to others. Harry made mistakes, but they weren't meant to harm others and he always massively apologised for them as if he feared to be punished for little things like accidentally breaking a glass or bumping into one of the other children while playing.

This really looked like something was really wrong at the Dursley home. Perhaps he could have Keith investigate discretely. He lived in the same street after all. There was simply no harmless reason that two boys from the same family were so different in everything. Not to mention their looks. Harry was very small for his age and just not underweight as the school nurse had called it. Keith had got instructions what to look out for when Harry chose his breakfast and lunch. The boy tended to eat portions that were too small for his age. It was getting better, but it also indicated that he wasn't used to getting properly sized meals. Which could be because his cousin always took away his part of the food at home and wasn't told off for it. Which would fit with Dudley's behaviour in Jane's class.

Dudley was completely overweight. How any responsible parent could feed a child so much that it looked like that boy was beyond him. Sure, children that were a bit pudgy were normal, that got better once they got to play with other children more, which was made sure of here at school. There were reasons for putting many hours of PE on the timetable for the first-years. First it kept the children happy and balanced and secondly it helped them to be fit. Well, if Dudley's behaviour didn't change significantly in one month he would call his parents in. This couldn't go on.

Harry was silently sitting at the kitchen table and doing his homework. Currently he was doing Maths. They had learned the numbers up to ten and their homework was colouring the blocks on the paper as many times as the number next to them showed. Of course they were all mixed up to make it more difficult, but he was sure he could manage. He knew that Dudley hadn't done his homework, but he didn't want to disappoint Mr Brackwood. He had told the whole class how important doing your homework in time was for learning and Harry had been told to do what his teacher told him.

He could see his aunt looking at him sometimes when she came into the kitchen to get snacks and sweet drinks for Dudley who was in the living room watching TV. He didn't know why she looked annoyed with him, but as far as he knew he hadn't done anything wrong. He hadn't asked any questions, had done the chores she had given him before starting his homework, and he made really sure to not let any colour get onto anything but his homework sheet. Finally he was done and smiled. He put his paper into the notebook for Maths and into his backpack. Then he took out his alphabet tablet and the homework for English and started counting vowels. Their homework was looking at the words under the pictures and counting how many times the vowels A, E, I, O and U were used respectively.

The first picture was an elephant. There was one A and two E's in the word. The alphabet tablet he had had the vowels coloured in blue and the consonants in yellow. It was really easy to see which was which this way. There were ten pictures overall and he carefully wrote down how many vowels were in each one. Then he was done and put the paper into his English notebook and put that also back into his backpack. He was happy to have finished his homework for today. He took the backpack and carried it to his cupboard. Aunt Petunia didn't like when his school things lay around when he wasn't doing homework.

The next morning in class Harry couldn't find his finished homework. Where were the two papers? He looked everywhere, but he couldn't find them. He didn't understand why they weren't in his notebooks. Just when he was close to panicking, there was a knock on the door and Dudley's homeroom teacher came inside.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, but there seems to have been a confusion of homework sheets. Harry, your cousin had your homework sheets and handed them in, but we had completely different kinds of homework being in two classes. Do you by any chance have his?" She asked kindly, handing Harry his missing homework.

"No, I'm sorry, I only noticed that my homework had vanished and I didn't know how because I had put it into my notebooks and those into my backpack after I had done them yesterday. Thank you so much for bringing them back," Harry said smiling.

"You're welcome, Harry. Well, I will return to my class then. Sorry for disturbing you," She said addressing Keith.

"It's no problem, I am glad you found Harry's homework, he was really worried where it had gone to," Keith said, forcing himself to keep smiling to not startle the children.

It was clear to him what had happened. Dudley had thought that he could get out of doing his own homework by stealing his cousin's. He knew that Harry diligently did all his homework and would never simply skip doing it. Thankfully the two classes used different papers for homework, therefore that idea wouldn't work. But it was really concerning that Dudley's parents didn't stop something like that. It was only harming Dudley in the long run. From what he had found out so far, Harry was hated at his home. His aunt barely tolerated him and more than once he had heard her call Harry a freak. He could only assume that she had been Harry's mother's sister and been jealous or afraid of magic. Therefore she had declared it freakish and Harry, being a wizard himself, was also a freak. It was really unfair for the poor boy, but there was nothing he could really do.

They didn't really abuse Harry as far as he could see. Neglecting him definitely, but they didn't hit him or overworked him. While some tasks they set were above the level a five year old boy should do, they weren't so bad that there were action that could legally be taken. More than a warning wouldn't come out of it and that would only cause more hurt for Harry as his uncle was incapable of seeing reason and accepting any fault in himself or his family. No, if he wanted to do something, he would need to find a way that helped Harry, but didn't attack the Dursleys.

Jane was mirroring some of Keith's thoughts. She knew that Dudley hadn't simply erred in taking the wrong finished homework papers. Harry couldn't lie for the life of him and he had seriously thought that he had put his homework into the notebooks. And from there, more so as they had been in Harry's backpack, the homework papers could hardly find their way into Dudley's backpack if they hadn't been taken from Harry's things. It was really despicable how the boy now tried to take his cousin's work and pretend it to be his.

Dudley was not happy. He had thought his idea of making Harry's homework look like his would be a great one. He wouldn't get in trouble with his teacher and could still watch as much TV as he wanted to at home. Now he was told off again for trying to cheat and more so stealing his cousin's homework. He had even got detention over this. It was so unfair. He shouldn't have to work, that was something only his cousin had to do. Well, he would need a new idea. He would simply have to demand that Harry did his homework too. That way he could watch TV and still have his homework done. And the freak seemed to like doing homework, so it would be no problem.

Harry didn't know why his aunt had told him to do Dudley's homework as well as his. But the threat of not getting any dinner was making him comply. Well, the papers from Dudley's class weren't that hard to do. They were a bit different than his, but not more difficult. In English he had to connect the pictures of animals with the letter with which they began, in Maths he had to connect block figures with the numbers of how many blocks there were in them and for Science he had to get the leaves of three plants in his aunt's garden for him. His own homework was drawing a flower in his aunt's garden to the best of his ability and read one page in his reading book. He gave his aunt the finished homework for Dudley and then put his back into his backpack. He hoped that this wouldn't get him into trouble anymore.

For a while the practice of Harry doing Dudley's homework worked well for all those involved. It even had an unnoticed effect on Harry. By doing much more homework than the others his age, he learned more and better. He got a completely different understanding of the basics of his subjects. And he could only really do papers that didn't require writing a lot because then the teachers would notice that it wasn't Dudley's handwriting. Harry had a very neat handwriting by now, caused by a lot of practice, and Dudley's was untidy and difficult to read. And reading pages for the next class was also not possible to do as Harry was in a different class. As Aunt Petunia didn't like Harry having to hang around Dudley for long, she simply solved that problem by reading the pages out to him before he had to go to bed.

The problems started when the teachers became suspicious why Dudley wasn't getting any better at writing, calculating and reading. It was about six months into the year. Harry was really good by now reading full easy sentences and reading out a few of them in class. In fact Harry was among the top three students in his class in English, Maths and Science. He did fairly well in Music and Art and was energetic in PE. Dudley meanwhile was at the bottom of his class whenever he had to show anything that wasn't his prepared homework. He had no patience for art, in music he only created chaos and in his classes he wouldn't sit still for long periods of time. When he was asked to read out small passages in his reading book he stuttered through it, often confusing the words.

He could list the numbers from one to ten, but he still couldn't tell the whole alphabet by now. But one of the homework parts had been sorting cuts of the letters of the alphabet from a bag onto a coloured paper and stick them there with glue. Dudley's had been perfect and really neat. When Jane mentioned that to Keith and Karen, Keith wanted to see the papers that Dudley had handed in. After looking at ten of them in each class he was sure that they were Harry's work.

"This is Harry's work, I would bet. This is typical for his way of working. The boy is a perfectionist. Here, I have some of Harry's homework to compare it to. Look at the handwriting," Keith said and showed the two women Harry's file.

They looked over the papers and definitely they had been done by the same person. And nobody would say that Harry didn't know what had been covered this year, so he cheating wouldn't be a valid excuse. So probably the Dursleys had made Harry do his cousin's homework. That couldn't continue.

"What are we going to do?" Karen asked. "It's clear that the Dursleys must have told Harry to do his cousin's homework. Perhaps Harry even offered to help when Dudley had problems and then it ended in him doing all the work. Harry is nice enough to do that."

"I know, this is a problem. And from how unreasonable the Dursleys are confronting them on this would only end in Harry getting in trouble," Keith said sadly.

"We need to find a way to make them understand that this only hurts Dudley. He doesn't learn the basic things about reading and writing. They baby the boy so much that he is falling behind all of the other children in his class," Jane agreed. "But I also don't want Harry to pay for this. I remember too well how the Dursleys reacted when I told them that Dudley was bullying the other children in his class and on the playground. They steadfastly declared that Harry was the one at fault when he was nowhere near the place where I had caught Dudley and Piers tormenting Alicia and Nancy. Thankfully Howard knows what kind of boy Dudley is and didn't believe any of the Dursleys accusations."

Keith was thinking hard. It was clear that he needed to do something. The Dursleys would try to punish Harry for Dudley's wrongdoings. They would never blame their son for his faults that were caused by their unreasonable behaviour. But the teachers couldn't really take legal action. The Dursleys managed to keep up a normal façade in the neighbourhood and blamed everything that went wrong on Harry. And the idiots in the street even believed it. After all, Petunia and Vernon Dursley were respectable people that were burdened with their orphaned nephew. As if Harry could ever be a burden to anybody.

And done for this chapter, till next time.