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the memoir
“My mother once told me that I was conceived to ‘Mandy’ by Barry Manilow, and I don’t find that hard to believe looking at how I turned out. I basically came out of the womb in a feather boa and singing about the Copacabana, and you shouldn’t be surprised by that if you’re making babies to Barry Manilow. He’s basically the homosexual Jesus.”
“Muggle childhood is always a terrible bore to look back on once you know about the Wizarding World. Can you believe then that my dream job back then was to work in the local Post Office? Completely tragic, honestly - and I think it all stemmed from the fact I was just nosey and wanted to look in people’s mail. If that had panned it would have been a big disappointment to find out that that was illegal and very much not part of the job description.
But I suppose that’s what you get when you grow up in a lower-middle class cul-de-sac in the seventies and eighties - life was fucking bleak, wasn’t it? Did you ever see that AIDS awareness advert they had playing on TV at four o’ clock in the afternoon - enough to terrify you straight, wasn’t it? I was eleven - I just wanted to catch up on my soaps for crying out loud. I’m still absolutely traumatised about Pat Sugden’s car crash in Emmerdale by the way, so don’t talk to me about it - also Bet Lynch in Corrie was my Queen, a true style icon and if I did drag, it would basically just be her. I’m aware getting off track, but I felt like it needed to be said.
I’m thankful for growing up in the kind of household that taught you not to pay attention to stuff like that. My parents just never paid attention to anything or anyone around them - they were happy and content, so they just lived like that, getting on with their own business and not bothering what the world had to say about it. They weren’t particularly abnormal - my dad was a bloody accountant, and my mum’s biggest life stresses were about whether the flowers in the garden would bloom properly - but they were happy, and that was all that mattered. I’m thankful for it, because it just makes dealing with everything a lot easier, doesn’t it?
A lot of my philosophies have come from my parents - I see that now looking back. My mum loved to natter and overshare to the point of making other people uncomfortable, and now I’m the same. My dad was so laid-back he might as well have been constantly horizontal, and I literally have no cares in the world. I was an only child and they were just my norms, and I never questioned it once. Makes you think about how lucky you are, when you’re reminiscing in your old age (I just turned 45 so I might as well be in a coffin), about all the good things your parents gave you, when it could have been so much worse.
Linda and Eric are good ones - they just took everything about me in their stride. My mum walked in on me age nine trying on her high heels and make-up and was only shocked for about twenty seconds before she told me red wasn’t my colour, and that she had a better suited pink. She was right of course, but that wouldn’t have stopped me from a bold lip - I think I’m just predisposed to the drama of it. My dad was also witness to these kind of antics, but just laughed and carried on reading his paper - it was all very liberal in ways you wouldn’t expect of them from the outside. They saw I was happy and that was enough - if they were worried about anything, it was going to be how other people made me feel. But they saw pretty early on that I cared about other people’s opinions about as much as they did, so I think that worry was quashed before it even became a proper concern.
I won’t lie the Hogwarts letter came as a bit of a shock, but they weren’t particularly fussed about it either. Dad laughed again when he realised it meant I’d be wearing “dresses” everywhere, because apparently that just made sense to him - the first Diagon Alley trip was a real experience, let me tell you - but again, they realised pretty quickly that it just made sense for me, and it just became an easy part of their lives. Owls were just things you could expect to fly into the kitchen every now and then. When I was home in the summer, I wrote with quill and parchment. It was all very easy, and so was my transition to the castle. I missed them both, desperately at first, but there was so much to see and do at Hogwarts as a muggleborn, how could you not get blown away by it all? It was the stuff dreams were made of.
Once I’d got used to it all though, I’d say my schooling experience was pretty average by normal standards. School was school - I never had the penchant for learning like my more ambitious classmates did - I know, would you believe me being a teacher all these years later, I’m still a bit in shock myself - but I enjoyed myself when I was doing what I enjoyed, and I had a good time. Clearly the subject that shaped me the most was Potions, and you’ll probably expect me to have some inspirational ‘I loved it from the start’ stories but
God it was really an uphill battle. And - okay - look - this probably isn’t the time for this rant that I have prepared, so I’ll only give you a snippet because I need to explain myself and you don’t deserve the onslaught of the long version - but fuck Severus Snape. Fuck that guy. He sucks. Sucked. Haha.
Sorry, that was mean. Except - I’m also not sorry? Whatever -
That whole “fuck the world” monochromatic morose vibe he had going on is cute when you’re a teenager but tragic when you’re in your late twenties and are meant to be shaping young minds to go out into the world. Even as a baby student I was not impressed with his whole vibe - like the Dungeons, seriously? Could he be more like a movie villain if he tried? Anyway, this is all beside my main point - he made kids who shouldn’t hate Potions, hate Potions. I hated Potions, and it was his fault - I was good at it, I had a kind of natural flair that you can’t deny, but he was such a monumental arsehole that I couldn’t hack being in that classroom with him.
I don’t really hate people. Well, you know except from the obvious - Voldemort was clearly a monumental knob head, and I really don’t think I’m ever going to shake my muggle aggro I have for Thatcher - but you get the point. Bar the obvious people, I don’t carry around that much lingering hatred for people. But he was one of them - he made me dislike something I wanted to enjoy, and I couldn’t deal with that. It’s a niggle that I held onto past Hogwarts. But we’ll revisit that later.
Socially, I thrived. Hufflepuff was truly the crowd for me, and I had an absolute whale of a time growing up with all the characters that ended up in that house with me. I was never bothered by my inherent differentness in my muggle school, but I did enjoy finally becoming the centre of positive attention. Wizards just didn’t have the same sort of hangups muggles did, I thought then. My latent homosexuality became very blatant as I entered the teen years, but it never caused me a problem. Whoever thought putting teenage boys together in a room separate from the girls to stop sex from happening by the way was 1) a fool and 2) clearly missing out, because
oh the times we had in that Hufflepuff dorm room. As a teacher now I wouldn’t touch any of the boys dorms with a ten foot pole, knowing what I got up to in there - those House Elves, the poor creatures, the things they’ve seen and had to clean.
I left Hogwarts with not much idea about what I wanted to do, but a good group of friends and some brilliant memories. The timing was good though, as I’d reached that point in my life where I started wanting new things, and it seemed the perfect time to go and explore a bit more of the world than I’d known in my two homes. First I headed to London, with some sort of thoughts about getting some part time work - which I did, in the odd bar here and there. It was fun for a time, but as soon as I got bored (which I inevitably did after 6 months), I knew it was time to move on to a different place and different things. I had a few good friends that wanted to check out what was happening over the pond, and I joined them, nabbing myself a work visa (still, with absolutely no idea about what I wanted to do while I was there) and settling down just outside of Manhattan. I knew it wouldn’t be a permanent move, and that I’d eventually go back to my family, but the years I spent there kind of shaped my life.
I’d had a few flings before, but it was there I fell in love for the first time - his name was Joey - which, I mean first of all, I was immediately smitten the minute he introduced himself, because what kind of ridiculously cute name was that? He was younger than I was by a good few years, but mutual friends of my flatmate introduced us at a party, and he shook my hand, told me his name, and pushed his hair out of his eyes and I was
gone. God knows what my friends must have thought - I was usually the life and soul of parties, and that night all I wanted to do was follow Joey around trying to impress him. Turns out I barely needed to - he was apparently as immediately stuck on me as I was on him. We started properly dating not long after that.
Joey was a much gentler soul than I - he certainly had a lot less to say than I did, which I found very attractive because I need to
speak - I don’t know if you’ve noticed this about me, but I’m very talkative - that was sarcasm - but I have a lot of things to say all of the time, and it was important to me to have someone who listened. Which he did, always, with a smile and genuine interest, never once complaining that I was too loud or too much at once. He never had to say much, but he made me feel special in a way I’d never felt before without voicing it. The whole relationship was special - easy. We met early in ’95, and by ’96 we were living together in a small, ratty looking apartment that was overall a bit shit - but we just didn’t care. We were in love, and together and
happy. It was good.
It was actually meeting Joey that led to me getting my first proper job! One of Joey’s cousins - Italian Americans and their cousins, I swear to God - owned an Apothecary and was looking for a new assistant. I’d obviously never had any training or experience, but I had a good NEWT under my belt, a penchant for blagging, and a family recommendation that he decided to take me on. I learned quick enough on the job, and it started me on a path I’d have never dreamed for myself in Hogwarts - I made contacts and experimented and learned from some of the best Potioneers in the world as they travelled through one of the busiest Wizarding cities there is, and I loved every second of it. I worked a few jobs after that one, climbing the ladder so to speak, helping out with Potion production and ingredient supplying and quality checks etc. - but that Apothecary was where it all started.
I honestly barely thought about the tiny island I was born on when the Second Wizarding War kicked off - I missed so much of the build up, and I’m really not one to keep up with the news that it kind of blind-sided me. I’d spent so much time out of the country, and these just aren’t really things I ever talked about with my school friends when I saw them - I mean, of course I’d heard hints,
implications, but the whole second coming of the Hitler-esque guy that wanted to wipe out muggleborns? It shook me up for a bit, and I didn’t really know how to deal with it. It was my friends back home that were having to deal with that, and all I knew to do was to stay well away - they all told me to anyway, I was safer where I was. I was able to contact my parents, and let them know what was going on - they weren’t too concerned, but they decided to take an ‘extended holiday’ out of the country to celebrate my dad’s retirement, just in case something might happen. It didn’t, obviously - the whole thing kind of blew past my family without leaving any impact. I guess I was one of the lucky ones. I’m thankful for it.
The war had passed and the community was healing by the time I made it back to Britain. I’d said my good-byes to the life I’d made in the United States, the friends and the love I’d had there - Joey and I officially broke things off in the September of 2000 after over five years together. It was…tough, for both of us. I think we could both just tell that our lives were heading in different directions and we couldn’t really do anything to stop it. We still cared for each other, deeply, but the stars weren’t aligned for us. We made peace with it and parted ways - amicably, I guess, because we both wanted what was best for the other. But it was too painful to stay as close as we were. So, the timing seemed right to officially make my move back home.
That part of my life was done, and by the time I was packing my bags I weirdly wasn’t all that sad - I felt light, like a huge weight had been lifted, because it just seemed too right. I wasn’t upset to see it end so much I was just happy to know it had happened. I was meant to go and meet and laugh and love with all of those people, and I was also meant to come back. It
must have been exactly the right time, because it was when I got back that I was told about the Potions job going at Hogwarts. I’d been helping out at some apothecaries here and there, lending my skills, and a mate who’d seen me work thought I’d be good for it. It took me by surprise, but only because I don’t know if I’d ever considered myself a teacher - let along a professor of Potions, of all things. I thought about all those dreadful hours I’d spent in those dungeons and almost didn’t pursue the job any further than that - because why would I want to go back to that? I hated it, remember?
But then it occurred to me that I clearly didn’t hate it all that much - I’d kind of made me career out of potions, and not only was I good at it, but I genuinely enjoyed it. That stifled boy in Professor Snape’s potions classes didn’t hate the subject, he hated the way it was taught - and it was true of all my classmates I used to bitch about Potions with. I was lucky that fate and my natural talent had brought me to a career I enjoyed, but I thought about all the people whose potential had been dampened by that guy - it was my natural instinct to bounce back from that kind of negativity, but I’ve always been a lot more resilient than other people, especially when I was younger. I was suddenly inspired because I felt like applying to this job and trying to do the exact opposite of what my old professor would have done would be just one massive ‘fuck you’.
So…yep. Spite drove me to apply for a job. And I got it.
Despite my lack of experience, my practice lessons went ridiculously well because I just got on with the kids in a way I’d never have expected - and of course, I just threw myself into it head first and blagged my way through it. But hey, it worked - I’ve worked at Hogwarts ever since and I’ve never looked back.
Things happen for a reason, and I can’t say I’m anything but completely happy with where I am today. I love my job, I love the kids I get to teach, the people I have around me day to day, and the friends I’ve made along the way. So I guess my main thought to end on is thanks to Barry Manilow - it wasn’t your best song, but it did the job well enough.
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