When Tiffany was nine, she longed to go to Hogwarts. She hoped she could be in Ravenclaw, which sounded by far the best House, though Hufflepuff wouldn't be too bad either. She could learn to play Quidditch, and maybe get a kitten who could be a real friend, not an unsociable, half-feral mouser like Ratbag, the barn cat at home.
And then she had her first real adventure as a witch, rescuing her brother Wentworth, who had been stolen by the fairies. After that, Quidditch sounded a bit childish by comparison.
When Tiffany was eleven, an owl brought her a letter from Hogwarts. She folded it inside a spare vest, just in case, and took it with her when she went to start her apprenticeship.
She knew her parents wouldn't understand why she needed to spend seven years of her life at a wizarding school. But they could understand the idea of vocational training, if Tiffany didn't go into details about what she was training to do.
And apprenticeship made sense to Tiffany, too. Her grandmother hadn't gone to Hogwarts, after all, and it hadn't stopped her being a good witch. You learned how to be a witch by working for an older witch, just as you learned to be a shepherd by helping your parents take care of the sheep. You couldn't learn something like that in a classroom. Even when he was three, Wentworth had been able to accept the concept of, 'You help me do my chores, and then we can play together afterwards.' Now that he was five, he was starting to be quite a helpful little boy, and Tiffany had told him it wouldn't be long before he was old enough to learn how to deliver lambs, because sometimes a child's hands could fit in where an adult's couldn't.
When Tiffany was thirteen, she came home. Her people needed her, with the Wintersmith freezing the world. And when she had defeated the Wintersmith – well, people still needed a local witch around, and there was no-one else to do the job, and Tiffany had already been recommended to take over one steading, and had trained the witch who had been chosen to take it over instead, and her steading was here, this place that was in her bones, she whose name meant land under wave. (She had found out later that it was also Ephebian for 'a god appears'. She preferred the Feegle meaning.)
When Tiffany was fifteen, an owl came with an official-looking letter from the Ministry of Magic, informing her that as of this summer, it was compulsory for all magical children aged between eleven and eighteen to attend Hogwarts. She threw it on the fire. If Hogwarts was now the sort of place students had to be forced to attend, it wasn't likely to be worth it.
Besides, she wasn't a child. She had been the local witch for two years now, and with the rise in Death Eater attacks on Muggles, her neighbours needed her protection now more than ever.
When Tiffany was an old lady, occasionally she dreamed of an alternative timeline in which she had studied at Hogwarts, and had gone on to be a magical researcher. The Tiffany in that other timeline seemed happy enough. All the same, Tiffany was glad to be right where she was.