Chapter 181

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To: spencer.

From: .uk

Dear Spencer,

I'm now staying at Seamus' place for the rest of the summer. His Dad has hurt his back and Dean and I are helping out on the farm until either he's better or the weekend before Hogwarts goes back. Mr Finnegan will be okay, he's expected to make a full recovery. He's had some minor magical healing but Mrs Finnegan explained to us that because he doesn't have his own magic to help out the healing he will mostly have to heal the nonmagical way.

I'm going to miss the August sailing of the Queen Elizabeth 2, but Seamus and Dean didn't know my plans so they wouldn't understand why I needed to leave early. I feel it would be unfair to tell them and I owe Seamus and his family for the help they've given me over the last two summers. There is a sailing in September but it's three weeks after Seamus and Dean go back to Hogwarts, so I'll be on my own for longer than I'd planned and a kid my age hanging around during the day will stand out more then because everyone else will be in school. I've tried to purchase a plane ticket to America but none of the travel agents will sell me one and I can't book on-line without a credit card. I should have tried the Polyjuice or an aging potion and pretended that I was buying the ticket for my son Harry to return home to his mother or something. I still could but I'd need to find a new travel agent to do that, which I will have time to try after we finish helping out here.

I think that I want to stay near here until I need to get to Southhampton, I've thought about asking the Finnegans if I can stay. I'd be prepared to keep helping out on the farm but I'm worried about drawing too much attention. Their farm is in the nonmagical world and it's against the law to keep a thirteen-year-old out of school to help on the farm or in the family business, and the neighbours have been coming to help out when they have time so they'd notice if I stayed. It would also look strange that Seamus went back to school and one of his friends from boarding school stayed to help out. The kind of strange that will be talked about.

I don't think that anyone would come here looking for me when I don't go back to Hogwarts and the Amulets should protect Dean and Seamus from anyone trying to learn my location from reading their minds but I'm worried that just the fact that they're both wearing protection from Legilimency might be suspicious enough to send someone to question their parents to find out why. Of course they couldn't ask that directly without admitting someone had tried to read their sons' minds but the Thomas' are muggle, they wouldn't have any recourse even if they were allowed to remember being asked.

I certainly agree that Hogwarts should teach some nonmagical subjects, even if it was just simple stuff like English and basic math. My grades improved enormously this year after my summer school taught me how to structure an essay and a bit more about persuasive writing and grammar and stuff. I already had a pretty good vocabulary from the reading I did and writing to you but Dean and Seamus say that English has really helped them learn the words they needed to say what they wanted to say. Ron was annoyed at them at the start of last year for talking too bookish like Hermione so their everyday spoken vocabulary must have improved.

I think that Hogwarts and the wizarding world in general go out of their way to be as separate as possible to the nonmagical world, so of course they're not going to take education advice from the nonmagical school system. The British Wizarding World is controlled by the old pureblood families and the way they look down on muggles and muggleborns as inferior means that they aren't willing to listen to their ideas of improving the way things are done. I mean every muggleborn and most halfbloods know that it's easier to write with a pen than a quill and your writing is tidier with lined paper, but the professors won't mark any essay not written with a quill on parchment, and then they mark us down for poor handwriting. Likewise, it would be easier to get our homework done of an evening with better lighting than wall scones and candles. I sometimes wonder if the staff at Hogwarts or the Board of Governors who set their curriculum are trying to drive the muggleborn back into the nonmagical world. It didn't work in our year, after last summer Dean, Seamus and I started casting balls of light over our heads while we were working, and most of the rest of Gryffindor either asked to learn the charm or watched us cast it until they could do it themselves. Madam Pince wouldn't let us use them in the library but that's okay, I preferred studying in the classroom that Seamus, Dean and I appropriated. There are a lot of empty classrooms, it's a wonder that more people don't set up their own group space.

One of the reasons that tents are hard to buy is that if you wanted extra living space in a small room it would be easier and less of a breach to the statute of secrecy to have a magical trunk. A top-of-the-line multiple compartment trunk can have a small fully functioning flat inside it, and a library and a potions lab, and still look like an old-fashioned steamer trunk to anyone who sees it, unlike having a tent set up indoors. You still cannot attach a trunk to the floo network any more than you can a tent but trunks are made to last hundreds of years. They're completely weatherproof too, and can be secured so they cannot be touched or seen by anyone other than the owner so I could technically set a trunk in an out of the way spot and live in it but they cost thousands of galleons more than my tent and it would still be odd to be traveling around or visiting a campground without a tent. The other disadvantage is that each compartment is a room and I think that you would need to leave the trunk to go from one room to another, which would be the last thing you'd want to do every time you need the loo unless the bathroom, and loo were actually part of the bedroom, and partitioned off with screens and privacy charms.

I also asked Mrs Finnegan about people living in tents and she seemed surprised, she said that she's not heard of anyone living in a tent long term unless they had the type of job that involved lots of travel to places outside of cities and towns. She also pointed out that houses were a sign of prosperity to most people, and that bringing up a family in a tent would be considered a sign of poverty, no matter how fancy or comfortable the tent was. There's also the fact that with expansion charms even a small one-bedroom apartment or bungalow can comfortably house a large family, and that houses can be built with magic to last for hundreds of years with minimal maintenance, so a lot of the ongoing costs of a home-owner don't apply to wizarding homes, and thanks to the last couple of wars a lot of homes were passed down to nephews or cousins when the original owners were killed. As the last of the Potter Family, and the person credited with vanquishing Voldemort, Mrs Finnegan is sure that I probably own several houses somewhere, or I will when I come of age. I just wish someone would be able to tell me where they are or how to find them. I will ask at the bank but I think that my account manager would have already told me if he could have.

The other downside of living in a magical tent is that you cannot connect them to the floo network which is the only form of magical transport other than brooms and the Knight bus that minors or witches and wizards who don't have enough magic to apparate can use without help. I'm not particularly fond of the floo network, it's almost as bad as the Knight bus, you throw floo powder into the fire and step into it when the flames turn green stating clearly the address you want to travel to and spin around until you reach the fireplace you've asked for then it spits you out. Well it spits me out at high speed and Seamus and Dean both tend to stagger out and usually fall over but Mrs Finnegan can step out like she's stepping off an escalator . It only works in one country, so from the Finnegans I can only floo to other places in Ireland, but the magic is in the floo system and the floo powder, it doesn't use the users magic at all, so you could use it and flooing from the pub in Diagon alley or the Irish shopping district is cheaper and quicker that catching the Knight Bus, though walking into the fire place isn't any less scary at first than the bus ride I think it would actually be safer as long as the fire stays green and you state the address clearly and with intent. Though I think you pay a fee for having your house connected to the floo network like line rental for the telephone. You can talk through the floo too so it's also the easiest way to contact someone, if you don't want to wait for a letter to arrive. So, I guess it's the same as living in a tent in the nonmagical world, you couldn't have your own phone, except that payphones are a lot more common than public floo fireplaces.

I asked Seamus and Dean and Patrick about using magic before Hogwarts. Seamus said he started blowing things up or setting them on fire about the age of nine but the first spells he learned to control were only a few weeks before he came to Hogwarts for the first time. Dean said his magic wasn't so flashy but he managed to push away a guy who was picking on him about a year before he came to Hogwarts but didn't do much else and none of the spells in his books worked for him until he started learning them at school. (so also about 9 and a half). Patrick said that he's been making lights since he was eight but couldn't do much else until he turned eleven. Seamus and Patrick both said that their wizarding parents were pleased when they first saw them do magic, Patrick said he got a cake to celebrate but other than that they didn't treat him any differently. In fact, Seamus said his dad wasn't best pleased with him but that was more because of the explosions and the fire, not because he turned out to be a wizard. I remember that Hermione said that all the spells in the first-year charms book that she'd tried had worked for her the summer before Hogwarts but her birthday is in September so she was almost twelve when she started first year, maybe that made more of a difference than I realised.

Batman can travel so fast that he can break the time barrier and go back in time. I always thought that would be impossible but since finding out about Hogwarts I've found that there isn't much that wizards truly believe is impossible. I haven't heard of a method of time travel yet though. If you could travel back in time to see a particular event in history, what would it be?

Your friend always

Harry

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