Ten For A Surprise You'd Better Not Miss
Nymphadora was a surprise. It's one of her favourite things to tell people. She tells the butcher, and the Healer, and the lady who drives the bus into Manchester.
"Mummy and Daddy didn't know they were having a baby, and then I came along! I was a surprise!"
"I don't know why you told her that, Ted," sighs Mummy. Mummy does a lot of sighing.
"I didn't realise she'd go shouting it out to everybody," says Daddy.
"But I like being surprise," Dora pipes up, "Surprises are good. I was a good surprise,"
"You were a great surprise," says Daddy, and ruffles her hair, which is blue today. Nymphadora likes to surprise people by changing what she looks like. She's getting better at it too; last week she learnt to make herself look like Nadia who lives at number 46, and they played all sorts of tricks on Nadia's big brothers. Dora isn't supposed to change her face in front of grown-ups who don't have wands, or kids whose parents don't have wands. That rule is boring. When Nadia asks Dora how she changes her face Dora can't answer. She just can. It's like walking or speaking- sometimes she has to concentrate but it's just something she can do, something normal- except it isn't normal for anybody else. Dora likes being special.
The best kind of surprises are presents. Giving surprise presents is fun because you buy them in secret and have to hide them at home, and when you give them to the person they say, "Gosh!" and "I wasn't expecting this!" and "Thank you very much". And they smile. Getting surprise presents is better than giving them, though. Dora's best surprise present was the toy dragon she got for Christmas last year. It breathes real fire.
There are some types of bad surprises, like when Daddy puts carrots in the shepherd's pie when he says he wouldn't. Dora gets angry when he does that but Daddy says she has to eat some kind of vegetables. Dora points out that broccoli is a vegetable and Daddy says if she eats any more broccoli she will turn into a tree. (One day, Dora decides, she will learn how to make herself look like a tree. She'll turns her hair green and her skin rough and wrinkly, like the old man who lives around the corner). Sometimes the floor has bad surprises hidden in it, like being wobbly in a place it didn't look wobbly, or having a bit that sticks up to make Dora fall over. Naughty floor.
Children in stories have surprise birthday parties. Dora hasn't had one of those yet but she probably will. It'd make sense because she was a surprise when she was born. (Well, Daddy explained, he and Mummy knew Dora was coming before the day she was actually born. But not a lot before. And it was still a surprise). There will be cake and balloons and games and fireworks and lots of presents. Dora will do all her faces and skin colours and hair colours, and everybody will gasp and clap and say, "Wow! Dora's faces are so cool!". It will be the best surprise party ever.