August 4, 1998.
Knock, knock, knock. Filch rapped on the door of the quiet suburban home. He heard rustling around inside and then a young, hesitant-looking woman opened the door. "Can I help you?" she asked.
"I'm here for a Benjamin Smith," Filch said, as professionally as possible. He was wearing his best muggle suit. Not a great suit, but it was passable. (Wizards had had a habit of pretending to be comically incompetent at muggle dress, a social signaling mechanism that always irked Filch and other squibs.) "Your son, I presume?"
The woman looked startled. "Here for him? W-what do you mean?"
"I mean I would like to speak with him. And yourself, of course. I am the headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and I've come to offer him a place—"
"You won't take him away!" she suddenly shrieked. She slammed the door in his face. "Don't come near my family again!" Filch heard through the door.
Filch cursed to himself. He had known this would happen, of course. All the notes in Hogwart's guidebook on approaching Muggle families had warned about it. Parents were skeptical of magic existing. Some would staunchly deny that magic existed, genuinely believing it, and thinking the staff member merely a scammer. In these cases, the guidebook's suggestion was to show off magical skill that couldn't be faked by magicians and illusionists. For this, Filch had come with his Kwikspell wand. Nearly useless for day-to-day tasks, it could at least produce some mildly impressive visual effects.
There was another common class of parents, though. Rather than confident and clueless, this group was paranoid and frightened. Many muggle-borns exhibited signs of magic beforehand, causing weird and unexplainable things to happen around them. The parents would get scared, fearing things like that the government would come to "put away" an anomaly. Benjamin's mother struck Filch as belonging to this group.
Unfortunately, the guidebook's suggestion for this situation was the Confundus Charm. Filch definitely couldn't do a Confundus Charm, even with Kwikspell. So, he had come prepared to persuade instead. The woman was fearful, and so Filch would just have to present Hogwarts as the solution to her fears.
He knocked again. "Ma'am, I know your must be scared—your son has probably been doing scary things and you don't know what's going on—but this is what our school is for! We will help your son learn to control his magic!" he shouted, but he got no response. Well, reassurance had never been Filch's strong suit.
But threats had been.
"If we don't help, Benjamin's condition will only get worse! The government, or worse, might notice! And they won't be sending a harmless old man like me when they come to take your son away!"
(In particular, Filch's strong suit had been threats that were backed up by some other authority.)
There was silence, and Filch was about to say something again, and suddenly the door opened a crack and the woman's eyes peeked out.
"You—you really can help?"
"Indeed. We are just a standard boarding school. We will provide proper equipment and textbooks like these"—he pulled out The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1 from his jacket pocket—"that will help him control his magic."
She took the textbook and started quickly skimming through ti. After a few moments, she asked, "And… it's completely safe, is it?"
"Of course. Certainly much safer than continuing to allow his magic to manifest randomly and uncontrollably."
She paused, thoughtful, and then said, "may we meet with a current student at the school?"
Damn. Filch hadn't anticipated this question. He very well couldn't explain that literally every previous magic user had died, even if it had been a fluke.
He dodged the question. "Well, as school isn't in session now, I'm afraid that would take a lot of work to arrange." The woman's expression hardened. "But I'd be happy to show you some magic myself. May I step inside?"
The mother thought long and hard this time, but then she stepped aside and gestured him in. Phew, thought Filch. They were getting somewhere now.
Filch stood in the kitchen, Benjmain and his mother, who still hand'nt given her name, watching apprehensively. Filched rummaged through his pocket. He felt a sack of floo poweder for the travel; a portkey leading to Hogsmeade, from Hogwarts's stash, just in case someone called the muggle police and he needed to make a quick get-a-way; his Kwikspell wand; the wand of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, still there. Ahah! Filch pulled out the roll of spell-o-tape. Spell-o-tape was easy to use and produced some impressive results, but more importantly, it was useful around the household. If he could use it to fix a problem in the house, it might warm them to him. He glanced around looking for something broken. He was hoping to see something damaged by a magical outburst that he could fix—that would be particularly fitting—but he didn't see anything. Instead, a burnt out light bulb on the ceiling caught his attention instead.
"May I?" he gestured toward a chair. Mrs. Smith made a small nod of her head, still not looking particularly inviting, but Filch pulled the chair over. Silently hoping that they woudln't ask him why he didn't just magically lift himself, he stood on the chair and reached for the bulb. He wrapped the spell-o-tape around it The bulb suddenly shown bright. Muggle physics can't explain that, Filch thought, triumphantly.
"So it was loose, and you turned it back in?" the young Benjamin blurted out. Damn.
"Aha!" Filch cried, acting unfazed. "If you didn't think that was impressive, wait until you see my next trick! He grabbed an empty glass from the counter, pulled out his Kwikspell wand and pointed. "Aguamenti~" he cried. A single instance of the spell, imbued by its magical creator, discharged itself. (Filch didn't know—and didn't want to think about—just how many charges of Aguamenti were left.) The glass began to fill itself with water out of nowhere, and suddenly Benjamin and his mother both gasped out loud. He had guessed correctly that it would be an impressive spell. The water actually fills itself from the bottom of the glass, so it was a better choice than spells which produced visual effects coming from the wand—those could have easily been faked by muggle technology.
He held out the glass to the two. "Fancy a drink of water?" Benjamin reached out but his mother stopped him.
"You drink it," she said, a hint of suspicion still in her voice.
Sigh. Filch obliged and took the drink himself. Suddenly he felt huge relief that she had not taken his offer. The damn Kwikspell wand had produced water which tasted a bit rusty. He gulped the whole thing down and then sat the glass aside.
They were still for a moment, until finally his mother said, "when does term start?"
Filch smiled and sat down to begin talking logistics.