Their Side Of The Story

Petunia Dursley

Cover by: Fifipencil11

I already know what you think of me. I'm the personification of the wicked step-mother, the woman who mistreated and abused your hero. I do not write this to beg your forgiveness but, after what has happened to me, you owe it to me to read my side of the story before making your final judgement.

Not that I care what you think. What have you ever done for me? There are only two people in my life I care about, who matter to me. The same two people you have tried to destroy, with your monsters and wars.

There was a third but you've already taken her away from me, haven't you? To you she is a saint and a martyr. To me she was my little sister, and it was my job to look after her because I was older. But you split us apart, luring her away with tricks until you destroyed her, too. So, no, do not expect me to come crawling to you. It is not you who needs to find forgiveness. But I'll start at the beginning because all fairy stories have a beginning, as well as a dark side.

Once upon a time there were two sisters. They lived happily with their loving parents in a small house in an old mill town and everything was perfect. Except it wasn't.

The older sister wasn't happy, because she wanted her family to be like everybody else, and they weren't. She would watch the men go off to work and then call in at the pub on the way home. She would watch them go to football on a Saturday afternoon. She would watch the women hanging out washing on a Monday. She would smell the meals they would cook for their men folk to come home to. They were good honest smells; of stews and pies and roasting meat. She would listen to them gossiping to each other over the fence.

A lot of the time they were gossiping about us, the "odd family" who lived amongst them but were not like them.

My parents didn't work; they were "artists". My father was a disciple of Lowry. He would paint pictures of terraced houses and factory chimneys, of women queuing outside the butcher's shop and of men on their way to football matches wearing their red and white scarves.

My mother collected wool shed by the sheep on the moors above our town and spun it, dyeing it with wild plants. Then she would knit jumpers. To me they looked awful; shapeless and mud coloured. Why would anyone want to wear them when the shops were full of brightly coloured clothes made from new materials like polyester? But some people did; people like them, who were trapped in the past rather than looking forward to a future where plastic and space ships and nuclear energy would sweep away everything old fashioned.

Even their tastes in music had to be different to everyone else. Not for them the brass bands or the ballads heard on the radio, that everyone else in our street listened to. No, they liked jazz and we would be taken along to listen and hopefully acquire a taste for it. I never did; a discordant jangling that made no sense. Then there were the people we met there. Men who wore polo neck jumpers and odd, foreign looking hats on their heads; berets, they were called. What was wrong with the flat caps normal people wore around our town?

The women were even worse, either wearing the kind of clothes my mother made or slacks. They even smoked in public. They thought they were so wonderful they made up special words for themselves. They were "cool" or "hip" and they called each other "daddy-o". They never considered how ridiculous they looked or sounded as they tried so hard to be different.

But I wanted my parents to be like everyone else. I wanted to fit in, for them to fit in, so we wouldn't be talked about, or given odd looks in the street. I wanted us to be normal, anonymous people who got on with their lives. I didn't want to be the one sat on my own at school because the other children avoided me. I wanted friends who would come and play, but they never did, so I learnt to ignore them and turned my back on them.