When I was a child, my mother and I would sit down at the kitchen table every Friday night with my crayons and fancy note paper and write a list of things that we were going to do that weekend. Every Friday I would get so excited at the thought of how we were going to spend the next day. I would pin the schedule up above my bed and force myself to go to sleep so morning would come quicker and I could spend the day with my mum. That list of things to do wasn't a coventional list of activities, it was a collection of impossibly hopeless dreams.

My mother promised me we could lie in a field of wildflowers at night and catch as many falling stars as we could. We talked about lying in great big pools of cherry blossoms, tasting sun showers, twirling around our village and dancing under the sprinklers that watered the grass in the summer. She promised that we could have a moon-lit picnic on the beach and that we could catch dandelion seeds to make wishes and all our hearts desires would come true. We never go to do any of those things. There was only one thing that my mother promised and followed up on. She promised me that for my seventh birthday, we could go and have a party in the garden.

On that day, my mother, my sister Petunia and I sat in the garden surrounded by daisies and delicate yellow buttercups and we ate freshly baked bread, piping hot from the oven and smothered in homemade raspberry jam. I can still remember the smell of fresh grass, the taste of the bread and the sounds of chirping birds in the trees. That day we all made daisy chains and draped them over one another. That memory is the most vivid memory of my childhood, not because it was the only promise that my mother kept, but because the very next day she told me that she was leaving.

She told me that she was too big a person for such a small town. She told me that a free spirit couldn't be kept chained to one place forever. My father just let her leave us, so that next day, my mother floated out of my life nd my father was never the same again. Petunia, who once was exactly the same as our mother and I, became cold and angry. She rarely smiled and she became very bitter towards me. Both Petunia and my father blamed me for my mother leaving because I was the youngest. Before I had arrived, they said, my mother had been perfectly fine, though I knew that she had always been the same. Nevertheless I felt so guilty and my dreams were shattered.

Then I got my Hogwarts letter...