Disclaimer: The ideas are mine, the characters belong to JK...

" We should all start to live before we get too old."

Marilyn Monroe

Chapter 7 - 1964

I met Rodolphus Lestrange in 1964.

It was Bella's Birthday. The family threw a huge birthday party when she turned 11 years old.

Eleven was an important milestone in our world. It is the age at which young witches and wizards receive their letters from Hogwarts. I was taught that the quill of acceptance detects the birth of all magical children and registers their names on the Book of Admittance. The quill registers the precise moment at which the child took his or her first breath. When I became older, I had a chance to see that quill for myself. It was a remarkable artefact.

Bella was born at night, at 22 hours, 48 minutes and 8 seconds of a cold October day in 1953. Her letter arrived in 1964, at that precise moment. It was brought to our home by a small boreal owl. The bird hooted melodiously when she dropped Bella's letter on my sister's bed. Andromeda and I were both there with her that night. To this day, I remember the excitement. When I close my eyes, I can almost feel it all over again.

The parchment smelled like a fresh rusk biscuit. I remember feeling the purple wax seal with the tips of my fingers: the large letter "H"; the lion; the eagle; the badger; and the serpent.

"Dear Miss Black," Andromeda read the letter aloud to us for what was probably the tenth time, but we didn't mind. We wanted to hear it.

The three of us were awake for hours that night going over the list of required textbooks and materials. We had read some of A History of Magic during our lessons, and Professor Waffling had walked us through Magical Theory since we were very young, but I could barely wait to flip through the pages of One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi. Andy was excited about the Fantastic Beasts book, and Bellatrix could not wait to get her hands on A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration. I remember how fascinated she used to be with the idea of transforming one thing into another, creating life out of thin air and making it disappear inside an inanimate object. She actually became quite good at it. Bella always excelled at the hardest subjects.

That night we got into a lively discussion about all the things she would need that were not listed in her letter.

"A bottle of green ink," I remember saying, impressed that I was with the beautiful thin calligraphy written in green on the parchment.

"Purple too," Andromeda added, "and a beautiful pen quill with a Peacock feather"

"A leather backpack like the one Father has in his office, with silver clasps shaped like serpents!"

"A portable clipboard for your star charts!"

"And a large supply of chocolate frogs!"

We went on like that for a while. I remember how much we laughed. I didn't know it then – I couldn't have known – but there wouldn't be many more moments like that in the future for the three of us. Before long, Bellatrix would start school, and Andy would follow. At some point, when we were still children, my middle sister would cease to feel like one of us. We would grow up. Our problems would grow with us. There would be so much hardship, so much that should have remained unsaid…

In the years that followed, we would see so much sorrow, pain and grief. But we also saw a lot of good. A lot of beauty and wonder. A lot of love. I remember how much we used to laugh together, the three of us. How much fun we had… When I became a mother, my greatest sorrow was that I could not give my child that. I desperately wanted Draco to have brothers and sisters of his own, but it wasn't possible. I shall always feel sorry about that.

He never had an evening as I had with my sisters at that time. We kept coming up with the most extraordinary suggestions of what Bella should take with her when she went to school. There was no limit to what we could come up with in our minds.

"An owl!" I suggested, after a while, barely containing my excitement. Bellatrix shrugged.

"I never cared for pets. But I wouldn't mind having a new broomstick…"

I fell asleep on my sister's bed that night, while Andromeda and Bellatrix discussed the finer points of the latest racing broomsticks, and how likely it was that Bellatrix would be able to sneak one of those into the school with her. Mother reprehended us the next morning, telling us we were all a little too grown up to sleep in the same bed like that, especially Bella, but there was so much to do in preparation for her party, that we were not scolded for long.

The garden looked beautiful. Several tables had been placed at the easternmost end of the garden and the house-elves had strived to produce an exquisite banquet. I had never seen so many things I liked all at once like that. There were mountains of sweets almost as tall as I, everything, from chocolate frogs to cauldron cakes, liquorice wands, pixie puffs, sugar quills, glacial snowflakes, pepper imps, and some I had never even tried before! Bella's cake had multiple layers, and it looked like a chocolate version of Hogwarts castle, complete with a Quidditch pitch, a dark forest made of cotton candy and a lake.

The best part of the party, however, was that I got to get a glimpse at several of the kids that would attend Hogwarts with us in the next few years.

Lucius was one of the first to arrive. I think that's the first time I laid eyes on him. I remember noticing he had yellow hair, like me, but in his case, the colour fits nicely within his family. All of the Malfoys had yellow hair, and in fact, Lucius looked a little like his father, Abraxas, one of my father's oldest friends. Lucius was older than I was, closer to Andromeda's age than mine. He was skinny, tall for his age, and painfully shy, like a little bird. Lucius was wearing elegant dress robes that looked a little funny because it's funny to see a small child wearing such serious clothes. Funny and cute. I came to learn that in the future when it was time to find child-sized dress robes for my own son.

That was also the first time I met Raven. We became friends a few years later, when we were both sorted into Slytherin on our first day of school, but that day I merely watched her from afar. I admired the blue velvet of her dress and the beautiful necklace around her neck. She had an older brother, Corban, but he was away at Hogwarts, already well into his first year when that birthday party happened. I had a crush on Corban for the better part of my first year. Whenever he approached us because he needed a word with his sister my heart would skip a bit. I was so embarrassed by that! I used to turn bright red.

Evan was there, although we had met several times before since he was a cousin on my mother's side. Frank, also a distant cousin, arrived shortly after Evan, but his parents didn't stay long. Alecto, Igor, Gareth, Avery,… So many people that I would come to know so well were introduced to me for the first time that evening, in the garden of the house in which I was born, and back then, I had no idea what would become of any of us. It's strange to think of them as children now. We've all done so much. Sometimes I wonder if the war did that to us, or if the seeds of everything we've done were already inside us there, at that party, when we were running around tables full of sweets and listening to our parents' conversation in the grass.

The person I remember the most was Rodolphus Lestrange.

He was as old as my eldest sister, tall for his age, and not very outspoken. His hair was long and dark, and he had sideburns that made him look like a young man from the 19th century instead of a child in the 1960s. His scarf was tied around his neck with a Slytherin pin, and the silver of the tiny snake contrasted nicely with the colour of his eyes. It was quite normal for us to wear Slytherin colours, even before we had been sorted properly. We all knew we would end up in Slytherin. It's strange to think about this now, but even little Sirius had a Slytherin scarf that my father had gotten for him, although Sirius didn't seem to care much for the present, even then.

Rodolphus remained by his father's side most of the evening. His brother joined the rest of us in our games, for a while, but Rodolphus seemed content to watch from afar. All the kids that were turning eleven that year acted like that. They were too grown-up for games, they said, they'd be going to Hogwarts soon… I did the same when it was my turn a few years later. It was just the way of things.

Perhaps, had we known what was coming, we wouldn't have been in such a hurry to grow up.

A/N: Thank you for reading... Please review and let me know what you think.

I am looking for ideas of what other events in the girl's childhood I should cover... If you have any suggestions of moments you would like to read about, please drop me a line in the reviews.

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