A Pocketful Of Posies

A Pocketful Of Posies

The grass was long and deep green, the summer sun was warm and the back garden of the Evans household was filled with flowers. Two of them were young girls, very different in their petals, but both flowers none the less.

Lily, who had just turned eleven, was screaming with laughter in the garden, running around and yelling something or other. Lily and her friend Tim were being pirates, very loud pirates, with long sticks as swords and the climbing frame as a galleon.

Her older sister, fourteen-year-old Petunia, who was wedged into a comfortably seat-shaped nook in the big tree at the end of the garden, hardly heard them. She was too engrossed in The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe, which had been her favourite book for years, and by now was battered and threadbare like a comfort blanket. The lady in the library - who knew both the Evans girls well - had recommended it for her several years ago. Mrs O'Hara was a kindly lady, who loved any child that loved books, and so she had become very fond of the Evans girls and always greeted them warmly on their weekly library trip.

She knew the girls well, and knew their different tastes. To Lily she suggested Swallows And Amazons, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson, and Lily devoured these eagerly, for she loved action and adventure and could never bear to be still for too long.

Petunia was the quieter girl, and to her, Mrs O'Hara gave Little Women, Anne Of Green Gables, and Little House On The Prairie. Petunia enjoyed these books, with their happy, hard-working and down to earth heroines, and she loved as well Mallory Towers and St Clares, where girls such as herself had wonderful adventures at boarding school. By far her favourites, though - and Mrs O'Hara knew it well - were the stories of magic. Mrs O'Hara carefully laid aside for her the Hobbit, and later, the Lord of the Rings. The Wizard Of Earthsea and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen became treasured friends.

Petunia wanted magic more than anything in the world, she dreamed of it and she ached for it, for the magic and for the brave, beautiful characters who wielded it in her books and her imagination.

As the light dimmed, and reading became impossible, Petunia scrambled down from her tree and slipped into the house just as her mother came out to call Lily and Tim in from their game. They ate tea listening to Lily enthusiastically explaining their game to Mother and Father, while Tim chipped in details she had forgotten, and Petunia pictured herself as Lucy, with her necklace full of magic healing juice.

Petunia left the table without pudding, to secure more reading time in her room before bedtime.

*

Petunia woke with her lamp blazing painfully into her eyes and her hand still clasped around the book she had fallen asleep reading. She clicked the lamp off, and carefully book-marked her page.

That was the moment Lily's voice split the morning into two, the great divide between before and after.

She descended the stairs sleepily, with a faint chill of foreboding that she barely even noticed.

Lily was jumping up and down on the doormat, waving a crisp, creamy coloured envelope in front of her father's nose.

'I'm going to a magic school Daddy!' she cried.

'That's nice, dear, any post for me?' he inquired, used to his daughter's flamboyance.

'No, really, Daddy, look!'

Mr Evans looked at the letter in her small fingers. He frowned, and took it into the kitchen for closer inspection. Lily skipped after him.

Petunia was frozen to the stair she had stopped on.

*

Mr and Mrs Evans didn't often leave her alone in the house, but they had taken Lily to buy her school things somewhere in London, and Petunia who 'didn't want to go anywhere near that freak stuff' was left at home on her own.

She took the books down to the end of the garden, to the blackened patch where her father burned the dead leaves and pruned branches from the garden every autumn. It took several journeys to bring them all down. On the final trip, the matchbox rattled on top of the stack of books.

With trembling fingers, Petunia held a match to the cover of The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe. As the flames licked the illustration on the front - Lucy healing Edmund with the magic juice from her necklace - hot tears trickled down her nose and hissed against the flame.

Petunia shook them away - there was no reason to cry, she would not cry. These were her books, all bought with her pocket money saved up over years and years, during which time she had wanted nothing more than another book - unless it was a reality as magical as the stories.

These were her books, and she was leaving them behind. There was no such thing as magic. She was a grown up, she was too old for such childish games.

There was no such thing as magic.

There was no way Lily was going to a magic school to learn to be a witch, it couldn't possibly be true, Lily didn't even want the magic. If there had been magic, she, Petunia, who had wanted it desperately for as long as she could remember, she would have been the one to find it, not Lily. Lily was just a poor deluded freak, a freak, and everybody would laugh if they knew what Lily was.

Lily was a freak going to magic school, everyone would laugh if they knew that Lily had got what Petunia longed for, if they knew how pathetic Petunia was, here, crying her heart out over what she couldn't have, what she wasn't good enough to get, what Lily had got without even asking.

Petunia had cried herself to sleep, before, because magic didn't exist. This was worse. This was beyond worse. Magic existed, but not for her.

For Petunia, there was no such thing as magic.

She sobbed and sobbed as the flames claimed each of her favourite stories, but she did not regret it, because they were fiction and she was angry with them for being untrue. She was angry with them for being so unfair as to mislead her into thinking that life ought to be just and magic made things perfect and good things happened to people that wanted them, if they wanted them enough.

When the fire was over, and each book completely disintegrated into cinders, Petunia Evans raked the ashes about to disguise that a fire had been there recently. She wiped her face on her sleeve and took the matches back inside, putting them carefully in their cupboard.

*

She told her mother she had given her books away to Oxfam, that she was growing too big for such rubbish. She read Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights.

She watched serenely as Lily boarded the Hogwarts Express.

She never shed another tear over magic, not when it killed her parents, not when it destroyed Lily, not when it dumped Lily's small son on her doorstep. She did not even cry when she read Madame Bovary, snatching hours whilst Dudley and Harry were at primary school, and discovered that she was not the only woman to long for fiction only to be trapped securely in mundane reality. She did not cry when Harry performed magic, without even knowing he was doing it, she simply ignored it, face tilted to the sky, gravity keeping the sadness where it belonged, deep inside her, buried and controlled.

There was no such thing as magic, not for Petunia Dursley, née Evans, and she did not hold with such nonsense.