My name was down for Eton, you know, I can’t tell you how glad I am I came here instead. Of course, mother was slightly disappointed, but since I made her read Lockhart’s books I think she’s begun to see how useful it’ll be to have a fully trained wizard in the family…

Justin Finch-Fletchley, CoS, p. 73

The young woman in unique costume was wandering around the East Wing of the Old Hall, apparently looking for a bridge across the moat.

“Good morning, madam,” I said, averting my eyes from her conical hat. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for the front door,” she replied. “I didn’t realise there was more than one house at this address. I’m looking for Mr Justin Finch-Fletchley.”

Justin held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, madam. I am Justin, and this is my brother Roland. Nobody lives in the Old Hall any more, so there is only one house really.”

She shook his hand. “I am Professor Charity Burbage. Thank you so much for answering our letter. No Muggle-born has done that for ten years.”

“You’re welcome,” said Justin, who knows very well that one should answer letters promptly. “I’m a little surprised that my reply reached you. I didn’t expect owls to be so... trustworthy.”

I had no idea what was going on. Ignoring a swan that was squawking at her vast handbag, Professor Burbage gravely told Justin, “Our owls are extremely trustworthy and accurate; they can be sent anywhere in the world. So tell me about yourself, Mr Finch-Fletchley. Would you like to come to our school?”

“Yes, Professor,” said Justin. “It sounds amazing.”

“I shall need to discuss this with your parents. Are they home?”

“Mother should be in the house. I believe Father is in the stables.” Justin pulled out his mobile phone and asked Father to come up to the house. “The real front door is on this side, Professor Burbage.” He led the way along the moat, around behind the Old Hall, which is a National Trust treasure but uninhabitable, past the Elizabethan herb gardens and down the wide driveway to the double front door of the New Hall, where we have lived for the last three hundred years.

“By the way, how do I address your parents? Is it ‘Lord and Lady Finch-Fletchley’?”

“Our mother is actually ‘Lady Eleanor’,” I said, although the Mater isn’t at all the sort of person who takes offence when strangers address her as “Mrs”.

We showed Professor Burbage into the drawing room, where Mother was busy at the Macintosh, converting old photograph albums to digital copy. A heavy footfall on the back-stairs told us that Father was on his way, so we retreated up to our sitting room on the second storey.

“So what was all that about?” I asked Justin. “How do you know that woman, and why does she want to meet our family?”

“I don’t know her,” said Justin. “Three days ago, an owl trained like a courier-pigeon brought me this. At the time I thought it was a joke.”

He brought a letter out of his escritoire, the high-quality yellow parchment printed with a childish lime-green script. It did indeed look like a joke: an absurd coat of arms advertised an institution named “Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry,” and the brief letter invited Justin to become a pupil there.

“Even jokes deserve an answer,” he said, “and I also thought it might be some kind of charity drive. So I wrote a cordial request for more information. But I wonder why it was addressed to me? It’s Mother who does the charity work around here.”

“Perhaps they want you as a kind of mascot. Did you notice its motto?” Justin has only a basic level of Latin, so I translated for him. “‘Never tickle a sleeping dragon.’ That’s certainly an odd motto for a charity. Perhaps we should not take this too seriously.”

We began to wish we had been invited to remain in the drawing-room, simply to find out what this was all about! It was half an hour before Justin’s phone rang again, asking us to go down to join our parents.

“This is very interesting,” Father greeted us. “Professor Burbage says Justin is a wizard. Did you know that, Justin?”

“No, Father,” said Justin, but I suddenly wondered if this was completely truthful.

“This is not a joke,” said Father, “and we are not talking about conjuring-tricks or amateur dramatics. Professor Burbage has just demonstrated to your mother and me that she is a witch, and she tells us that Justin is a wizard. She asks if we have ever noticed any incidences of Justin’s performing magic.”

Suddenly I did remember something – something so extraordinary that it must have been magic – but I waited for Justin or Mother to say it first. Neither spoke. Justin was trying to hold his fidgeting; finally he looked up.

“Father, I do remember a very hot day, a few years ago, when an elderly tourist at the Old Hall was desperate for a glass of water, and there simply wasn’t any to be had. I felt it would take far too long to trek back to the kitchen in all the heat, and while I was complaining to myself, I suddenly found I was holding a tumbler full of ice-cold water. It felt so natural that I just handed it over to the lady without thinking about it. But after the tourists had moved on, the tumbler melted away, as if it had never been there.”

Professor Burbage and Father both nodded, as if they had been expecting a story like that, but Mother was sitting very still, not altogether happy.

Father stood up and shook Professor Burbage by the hand. “Professor, we’d like to purchase one of your trained owls. It would make a wonderful pet for Justin, and we’ll use it to send you a final answer by next Wednesday. What is the most convenient way to pay you?”

She nodded. “I recommend a tawny. They blend with the natural landscape because their claws are large enough to hide the messages well. If you have a credit card, sir, a tap from my wand now will ensure the transfer of the money at the moment the owl reaches your window.”

Mother looked horrified at this suggestion, but Father calmly brought out his gold card and allowed Professor Burbage to tap it. Then before we could even offer to show her out, she said, “Thank you for your time, Lord Finch-Fletchley and Lady Eleanor. It was lovely to meet you, Mr Finch-Fletchley and Mr Justin. I await your owl,” and then vanished into thin air!

After a second of startled silence, Father’s first words were, “Eleanor, are you not happy about this?”

“Am I happy about a threat to Justin’s future on this scale? I should say not!”

Father, Justin and I all tried to interrupt at once. Father held up his hand and indicated that Mother should speak.

“Justin is to go to Eton in September,” she said. “He has been down for Eton since the day he was born. Eton is a respectable school that will prepare him for anywhere he wishes to go and anything he wants to do. Bernard, we shouldn’t change a solid plan like that without a really excellent reason. And we don’t have an excellent reason. We have a stranger who has made a wild, left-of-centre, completely ludicrous suggestion. We can’t visit Hogwarts or meet its headmaster in advance; we can’t even read a prospectus or collect references. We have no absolute proof that Hogwarts even exists! The idea that we should take any of this seriously is the last word in absurd.”

Put like that, Mother had a point. I met all kinds of people at Eton, and they all benefited from its first-rate education. Justin couldn’t go wrong there. Why were we even thinking about sending him to a place that couldn’t give him A levels, wasn’t going to prepare him for University and might not even exist?

Yet the idea of sending Justin off to become a wizard had seemed so natural.

I asked: “Does Justin know where he wants to go? Justin, do you know what you want to do when you grow up?”

“I want to help people,” he said, because Mater is very involved in charity-work. “And I want to do something for England.” Pater used to be in the army, and both parents are now involved in local politics. “I’d also like to fly.” He knows that I plan to join the R.A.F. “And I’m interested in science. But I’ve no idea how that all comes together.” He was only eleven; how should he know?

“Justin,” said Mother, “do you understand how Eton can help you? It’s more than a school; it’s a whole culture. It’s said that Prince William will be going there a couple of years behind you. Do you understand what it means to be born to Finch Hall?”

“Oh, yes,” said Justin calmly. “I understand that I’m a second son.”

We were all shocked into utter silence. For the first time, our parents looked almost offended.

Our family has lived at Finch for around forty generations. In the days of King Alfred, our ancestors were technically thanes, as we owned seven hides of land on this estate. We survived the Norman Conquest by accepting our demotion; we swore fealty to our new overlords and served them as loyal franklins. When, soon after Magna Carta, the Norman baron fell upon hard times, it was a Finch who paid off his debts and married his daughter, and within twenty years, we had taken over the manor. The oldest part of the Hall dates from the time of King Henry III, who conferred the Finch arms and title. We survived the Black Death and made our wealth out of sheep. We built east and west wings out of stone. We survived the Wars of the Roses and built up our estate through purchase and marriage. We survived the Reformation, despite printing Coverdale Bibles in the attics and hiding a Jesuit priest in the wainscot. (We are not partisan; we favour justice.) Around 1600, when the Finch line was reduced to a single heiress, we survived the dearth of heirs male, for Baroness Finch married Sir Geoffrey Fletchley, who successfully applied to Charles I to appropriate the title, combine their names and quarter their arms. It was Sir Geoffrey who built the “new”, classical-style buildings, placing them behind the Old Hall and leaving all the medieval buildings intact; so we even survived modern architecture. We have survived enclosures (but spawned a couple of abolitionists), the Industrial Revolution (we bred five suffragettes) and the Second World War (although the stables were bombed). Pater is the fourteenth Baron Finch-Fletchley. We have always been here.

“Justin!” exclaimed Mother in horror. “How can you say such a thing? Who taught you to care whether you were born first or second or seventeenth?”

“It was one of the tourists. When we were about nine and five, Roland and I were following Father around a guided tour. I heard one tourist say, ‘Aren’t those curly-haired brothers sweet?’ and her friend replied, ‘They are the Baron’s own sons. He has an heir and a spare.’ I think that’s the time I realised that Roland would inherit Finch Hall and be landed, while I... would do something else. Whatever sorts of things the unlanded adults do to earn a living, I’d do too, because I’m only the spare.”

Mother was close to tears. I could see her calculating whether we should close Finch Hall to tourists and let the National Trust restrictions go hang. “What a vulgar thing to say in your hearing! What a vulgar thing to think! Justin, you are not the spare; you are our son.”

“I know,” said Justin. “But that’s about family. We’re talking about one’s place in the world and whether culture matters. Among our sorts of people, the firstborn is special, and his place in society is obvious. But it isn’t so clear what a second son should do, is it? There’s no obvious place for a second son.”

Father patted him on the head. “You’ve no need to decide on your future today, Justin. You don’t ever have to make a final decision, because you can make a career-change at any time in your life, and Finch Hall will always be your home, as long as you live. But your mother’s right about one thing: Eton would prepare you for any of the career options you mentioned.”

“Of course it would,” said Justin. “But it won’t prepare me to be a wizard. And magic doesn’t go away. Since I’ll always be a wizard, does this change our plans?”

I glanced at Mother and saw that she had no intention of denying the reality of magic. She had good reason to know better.

Father had less reason, yet he said, “Agreed. Since we now know that magic is real, it’s a factor we have to take into account. As Justin is a wizard, we have to allow for that when we decide his future.” Father is like that. He is easy-going and interested in everything. Magic now looked really interesting to him, so he wanted to know all about it. But he was never going to overrule Mother; maintaining harmony at home meant too much to him.

“Yes, magic is a factor in Justin’s life,” Mother conceded. “But so is Finch Hall. We can’t escape that either. Would we send Justin to one of those rough London comprehensives where they throw their teachers out of windows and can’t be bothered with the multiplication table?”

“No-one has suggested – ”

“Of course not. No-one would suggest sending him among people so different from himself. He’d be bullied for his accent and sponged off for his money; and a school like that couldn’t prepare him for university, parliament, the armed forces, business or anything else he might want to do. But can’t you see, Bernard, that it’s even more ridiculous to send him to Hogwarts? Those magical people have a whole culture of their own, and it’s a culture about which Justin knows nothing. He’d be even more of an outsider there than at the rough London comprehensive, and he’d finish Hogwarts even less prepared for the real world.”

“There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the wizarding culture,” Father temporised.

“Things need not be wrong because they are different,” said Mother, “but it must be extraordinarily difficult for a person who wasn’t born into a culture of magic to adapt to it. Justin doesn’t need that kind of stress: he’ll be happier with his own kind.”

“But, Mother,” said Justin, “those wizards are my kind, just as much as the Eton boys are my kind. Don’t you see? I’m both. If I went to Eton, I’d always have to hide the magic part of me; but if I went to Hogwarts, I probably wouldn’t have to hide Finch Hall.”

I could see no end of reasons why it might not be as simple as Justin expected, but some of what he was saying made sense.

“I can see how this would be a difficult decision if it happened to Roland,” Justin finished. “But it didn’t, and I am a second son. Since I have to choose something, why wouldn’t it be a sound career choice – and suitable to my station – and useful to England – for me to choose magic?”

It was the word useful that hit Mother between the eyes. She knew exactly why magic would be useful.

Some six hundred years ago, Baron Finch tried to sneak a battlement into his renovations. His two towers, each joining a new wing to the original Old Hall, were just small enough that no-one had ever referred to Finch Hall as a castle. However, there were ramparts. When the Finches expected enemies, they were easily able to post a sentry and watched the army arriving.

Two years ago, the National Trust audit complained that the ramparts on the West Tower were unsafe under the mass of tourists who climbed them each year. The exact nature of their complaint – whether they were worried that some random tourist might fall off the crumbling ramparts or worried that the valuable historic ramparts might be destroyed by some careless tourist – was uncertain. However, one fine sunny day when there were no tourists, we followed Mother up the turret to inspect the problem for ourselves.

We found that the ramparts were crumbling at an alarming rate, as if someone had deliberately pushed a few of the ancient stones down to the moat below. Mother says she lost her footing because she simply wasn’t expecting such blatant gaps in a historic barricade, so she suddenly had to grab Justin back from a dangerously unprotected ledge. She hadn’t realised that the floor had also become fragile, and the combined weight of her court shoes and Justin’s rugby trainers crashed right through the timbers. I grabbed Justin’s arm, and Mother plunged right through the ceiling –

Except that she didn’t. She should have dropped like a stone to the first-storey floor, and perhaps even smashed through that (depending on the force, the angle and the health of the beams) to the ground floor below. But before her body was half-way through, she neatly lifted up from the wrecked floor and sailed in a graceful arc high up over the ramparts, then slowly down again. She didn’t fall vertically, which would have landed her in the moat, but continued her diagonal arch downwards, far more slowly than any parachute would have allowed, until she was safely on the far side, squarely beside the kiosk in the tourists’ car park.

There was no point in yelling down to ask if Mother was all right because she was already tripping towards the ancient stone bridge that would take her to the lancet front door. Justin was shaking, and we decided to hold hands down the stairs.

Here is the most curious thing of all. When Father took a workman up the West Tower to assess the damage, they did not find any. The floor was completely repaired, with no gaps or even scratches, and the beam nearest to where Mother nearly fell was the soundest, least rotted beam in the whole Tower. Father couldn’t find any gap in the ramparts. All the stones were standing sharply in line, as geometrically perfect as they had been in the fourteenth century, as if there hadn’t been six centuries of wind and rain to erode the edges. The magic had repaired more than one day’s or one year’s damage: everything was exactly as it had been in the time of Richard II.

That is the only time I ever remember Justin doing accidental magic, although he tells me there were a few little incidents that I never noticed.

“But I did the least under-age magic of any student in my class,” he told me. “I suppose I didn’t experience many childhood frustrations.”

Mother knew why magic would be useful, so she agreed to the shopping trip at Diagon Alley. Our day rubbing shoulders with wizards – wonderfully eccentric as they seemed – convinced Justin that he had to go to Hogwarts. So Father cancelled his enrolment at Eton, and Mother, very reluctantly, packed his trunk for Hogwarts.

Iris the tawny owl brought us regular letters. Of course Hogwarts was a different culture, yet I was impressed by how much of it wasn’t any different from Eton. Whatever Mater had imagined, Hogwarts wasn’t at all like her hypothetical “rough comprehensive”.

Dear Mother and Father,

Hogwarts is a medieval castle with a jumble of towers and battlements. It would fall down if Muggle builders constructed anything to that plan, but magic holds it up.

I am so glad to have been allocated to Hufflepuff House, which has the best reputation for justice, loyalty, honesty and effort. In the extraordinary heraldry of wizards, our arms are a black badger on a yellow field (yes, yellow!).

My Head of House is Professor Pomona Sprout, the herbology teacher, and you can address any concerns to her at any time. So far I have no concerns. Professor Sprout is very solid in her field of expertise; she has already taught us about twenty species of fungi. However, my favourite subject is charms. The charms teacher was once a duelling expert and he is teaching us to make a banana dance.

Yes, the food is more than adequate. A few students have tuck-boxes from home, but really only for sweets; we can help ourselves to as much meat, veg and dessert as we like, and I never see what happens to the plentiful leftovers.

I am the only Englishman in my dormitory. My new friends are a Welshman named Wayne Hopkins and three Scots: Stephen Cornfoot, Zacharias Smith and Ernie Macmillan. So we all laugh at one another’s accents. Ernie is from one of those old wizarding families who have been magical for hundreds of years. He has taught me several useful little spells to open charmed doors and avoid trick staircases.

The library is huge: it reminds me of the Bodleian. There are some books first-years are not allowed to touch because they are so full of dangerous magic. We younger students are simply assigned to ordinary encyclopaedias.

The favoured sport at Hogwarts is Quidditch, which is played on broomsticks. We begin flying lessons next week. There are regular inter-house matches, just as there would be for rugby or cricket. Art and music lessons are optional, and some students spend their spare time helping with the magical animals or assisting Professor Sprout in the greenhouse.

Must go now because Ernie wants to teach me a card game called Exploding Snap.

Warmest love to everyone at home,

Justin.

Of course the masters at Eton wanted to know why Finch-Fletchley minor had been struck from their enrolments. I discovered that the best answer was simply, “I don’t know the precise reason, but our parents must have decided that Northside was a better option for my brother.” I think every single master asked me once, but none of them bothered asking more than once. Justin told me that Hogwarts is charmed to repel Muggle inquiries; every time anyone who knows about “Northside” goes to a wizard’s family member or to a data source for independent schools in Britain, he tends to forget what he’s looking for.

Justin didn’t come home for half-term; he wrote glowingly of his school’s Hallowe’en party, but Hogwarts doesn’t really have a half-term. I practised giving vague answers when friends asked what had happened to my brother.

“He might join us later, but he’s busy with his own projects right now. He found his feet at that school up north; he’s made a real place for himself with that crowd there…”

Mother seemed very relieved by this answer. It confirmed her own hopes that Justin had “made a place for himself” at Hogwarts, even if it wasn’t at all the place she had once expected for him.

When Justin came home for the Christmas holidays, he told everyone that school was “super, thank you,” and somehow the relatives never asked any more questions. He didn’t come home for Easter because he was “swotting for exams”. The relatives were very pleased to hear that his school “took exams seriously,” and they didn’t think to ask any more questions. By then, of course, I was busy with exams myself. I was putting myself through eight GCSEs, and I didn’t intend to score lower than a B on any of them.

By the time we were both home for the summer, Justin’s new school was no longer news; people were more interested in my exams and most interested in their own summer holidays. Our family spent three weeks in Mali, visiting a clinic, school and agrarian project that comprise one of Mother’s pet charities, followed by three weeks cruising in the Greek islands. We came back to England in time to receive my exam results (I passed everything) and Justin’s book list for his second year at Hogwarts. When Justin returned from Diagon Alley with a really huge pile of very leathery books, he had brought his friend Ernie with him.

“I met Ernie in Diagon Alley. Can he stay for a few days?”

Young Macmillan held out his hand to me and said, “I am very pleased to meet you, Mr Finch-Fletchley.”

Macmillan stayed with us for ten days, and he was very much the right sort. He didn’t always know which fork to use; he spoke thick Glaswegian; he was completely confused about why we allowed tourists to swarm all over our private property; and he had never heard of the Crick Balloon Festival (which didn’t stop him enjoying it); but it was clear that his manners were the epitome of good breeding among his own people. He joined in with everything and took an interest in everyone. He learned to row around the lake and even had a go at riding a horse, which he claimed was much more difficult than riding a broomstick.

“Ernie really is a nice child,” said Mother to me. “If all Hogwarts students are so well-bred, Justin really won’t be very much disadvantaged by studying there. But I do hope the boys are fitting in some swotting this summer. There is a very long list of advance reading here.”

“Apparently Macmillan has read most of them already,” I told her. “He says his mother is a great admirer of – what’s his name? Gilderoy Lockhart, the author of most of their textbooks.”

“Really? I wonder if non-magical people like us can understand them?” Mother picked up a tome entitled Gadding with Ghouls. “It sounds lurid, but if ghouls are real, I’d rather Justin faced up to them.”

Despite the fine weather, the Mater spent the next several days indoors, doing nothing but reading Lockhart’s books. I read a couple of them myself. They were a light, easy read, and the author seemed to be a particularly valiant adventurer who swashed and buckled his way through an extraordinary quantity and range of perils and was full of creative though dangerous ideas for combating the Dark Arts. Mother was almost exhausted from the effort of simply reading about Gilderoy Lockhart’s heroics.

“Oh, my gracious!” she said. “I never knew there was so much danger in the world! But if it’s out there, thank goodness for people like Gilderoy Lockhart, who keep the rest of us safe. So is that what Justin is going to study?”

“Only from the textbook, I understand,” said Father. “They don’t deal with beasts with a high danger rating before the sixth form.”

Mother nodded. “That’s sensible. But I’ve heard a great deal of sense from Ernie Macmillan. You know, it really could turn out to be very useful to have a fully-trained wizard in the family.”

By the time we finally waved Justin off to Glasgow to spend the last few days of his holiday with Macmillan’s family, he knew that Mother approved of Hogwarts. It wasn’t what she had considered the “usual path” for her child, but what is the usual path for a second son? He can choose almost anything. I smirk now at the vulgar people who call Justin the “spare”. He belongs with Ernie Macmillan and the others at Hogwarts, and in some ways that gives him more opportunities than I shall have. Hogwarts is certainly proving a great equaliser between the two of us.

In the first week of September, Iris the owl brought a heavy parcel for Mother. Justin’s breathless letter began:

Dear Mother,

I have wonderful news. Professor Lockhart is our teacher! We’ve actually met him, and he teaches us Defence Against the Dark Arts twice a week.

He wrote one book that isn’t on our school syllabus, but I thought you’d like a copy, even though it refers mainly to items that can only be bought in Diagon Alley. It’s called Gilderoy Lockhart’s Guide to Household Pests, and the author has kindly signed it for you...