As Marigold approached the end of her fourth month, she started to string vows together and repeat constants. It wasn't quite speaking, but she was exercising her tongue and getting used to making noises which could become words. The moment that she realised what Marigold was doing, Petunia was quick to start encouraging her to say 'mummy'.
Marigold had also learnt to roll onto her front, and Haydon was sure she could roll onto her back as well, she just didn't want to. Petunia was fighting a constant battle of pillow barricades to make sure that Marigold got some time to lye on her back each day. When she was forced onto her back, Marigold took to pulling her foot towards her mouth and gumming at her toes.
Moving into her fifth month, Marigold started showing signs of magic: creating small bubbles of light to play with and pulling things she wanted towards her.
At first, the Dursleys tried to ignore the signs that their precious baby girl was magical preferring to blame the incidents that they saw on Haydon. Despite being in denial, there was a new distance in Petunia's actions with her daughter as she stopped breast feeding and moved to powder, and spent less time holding her during the day.
As the fifth month of Marigold's life came to an end, she preformed magic to pull one of her teddies to her while Haydon wasn't in the house and that was the last straw for the Dursleys. Vernon was quick to deny Marigold, refusing to call a 'freak' his own child. While Petunia needed another incident of magic before she admitted to herself that Marigold wasn't going to be the perfect baby that her son was.
Petunia took to leaving Marigold to her own devices, leaving her alone in her room, unless she was crying incessantly for attention. Unwilling to abandon Marigold in the same way that her parents had, Haydon took to slipping away as often as he could so he could attend to Marigold in her room. He would read her stories, encouraging her to play with her soft toys and to move. Anything he could think of that didn't involve a lot of noise but would keep Marigold engaged.
With Petunia and Vernon's detachment from their daughter, for the first time Haydon wished that he could spend more time at the house. Unfortunately, his first year at school coincided with Marigold's fourth month of life.
Petunia had been hesitant at allowing Haydon to go to school since it would have been within her rights to hold Haydon back a year as he was born at the end of July so he could have started Primary School when he was six, instead of five. In the end, she decided to let him go because Haydon looked older than five and she didn't want to cause gossip to stir about how she took care of her nephew.
In the lead up to enrolling him in Primary School, Vernon and Petunia had leaked gossip and rumour into the neighbourhood about Haydon's personality and disposition. They stated that he was mentally unstable, prone to lies and violence; that he'd been damaged in the womb by his drug abusing mother. They called him mentally challenged, retarded and a delinquent.
So, before he'd even stepped foot within the school building for his first day, the teachers were prone to not believing him and they seemed to have formed a pack with each other to simply ignore him 'for his own good'.
Having heard the rumours about him and seeing the way that the teachers looked at him when he was dropped off for his first day, Haydon made a decision about how he was going to act until he found a teacher that he might actually be able to trust.
In class, he kept his head down and remained silent even during group parroting sessions – simple listening and then repeating the words or sounds softly to himself later. He'd gotten very good at reading long before he entered the school, but due to the Dursley's strict stance on his presence in the home, the only time he truly talked was when reading fairy tales to Marigold, so he needed more practise.
Since reception didn't have a lot of structured lessons – writing and worksheets – he used the free time of roll playing to set himself up in the 'cosy book corner' or on the colouring table. While at the colouring table, he practised his handwriting using the basic words that he saw around the classroom so as to not arouse suspicion, or he worked on draws by sketching objects in the room. Either task kept him out of the way of the other children in the classroom and under the radar of the teachers.
His silent nature in class meant that he made no friends with his classmates, and there was no chance for him to try and make friends on the playground when he was out of sight off the teachers. Dudley was a bully, and he used his age, larger size and group of friends to intimidate anyone who even looked like they might want to speak or interact with Haydon.
Whenever he could, Haydon snuck into the library so that he could remain out of trouble during break times. If he couldn't get to the library at breaktime, Dudley always targeted him and as consequence he'd end up in detention because the teachers assumed that Haydon had started the incident.
Each classroom in the school had age-appropriate books for the children to read in the 'reading corner' because there was no library in the school building itself. Instead, the primary school and the high school across the road (Stonewall) shared access to the public library which was located next to the primary school. The gate that separated the primary school from the library was left closed but unlocked, which meant that the primary students could go to the library during their breaktimes as well as during 'library time' which was timetable in for each class once every fortnight.
Haydon used the time that he could escape to the library within school hours to his advantage. The librarian paid him £1.50 to help her check books back in and return books to shelves, on top of the weekend hours and the three after school hours that he also worked for the same rate. When he wasn't returning books to shelves, or finding books for people, updating the online log with new books or taking off old books, he spent time either reading or speaking with the handful of college students who frequented the library for their study time.
During the breaks when he wasn't able to make it to the library, Haydon would seek refuge in the music room. The music teacher left his classroom unlocked so that students who owned a musical instrument could come in and play it, while also giving those who didn't own an instrument the opportunity to practise on the string instruments or the piano that he kept out. He locked away the woodwind and brass instruments because they needed to be blinked and sterilised after being used by a student which means he needed to know when they were used.
At first, Haydon was just practising scales and learning how to read the music sheets, but after half a year he felt confident enough to start using the beginner books that the music teacher kept in the classroom to begin learning how to play and compos a melody. He focused his attention on learning the violin, piano and accordion since each of the instruments required a different skill to play. In the future, he wanted to also pick up a wind instrument like the clarinet, flute or baritone but he wasn't sure how he would be able to learn to use such instruments when the school restricted access to them unless it was for classes.
Due to his at home reading and learning, Haydon was already a very advanced student on entering school and his continued visits to the library and speaking with the older students in the library, found his progress only accelerating even more. his maths and English had been at a year six level when he first entered the school, but by the time of the Christmas holidays he'd started working through high school level maths and English. His study of science wasn't as extensive as his English, but with his dedication, he was able to bring it up to a year five level by the time Christmas had come around. The rest of the subjects that he studied were outside of the primary school curriculum – government, law, sociology, psychology and detailed history through the decades, so he was setting his own pace for those subjects without comparing himself any curriculum.
Despite how advanced he was, Haydon's report cards did not reflect it. Even though Dudley was three years his senior, Petunia was comparing Haydon's grades with her perfect little boy. Considering how unfocused Dudley was, Haydon had to drop his grades so that he was at the bottom of the class in everything but music and art. He was fortunate that the Dursleys didn't care about the creative subjects and so he was able to show his true potential in those two classes. showing that he could achieve high grades in art and music suggested to the teachers that he was the type of student who learned through images and sounds, instead of the written word. The sort of learner who didn't excel in mainstream education until they made it to A-Level or university and so were able to pick their own method of learning.
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