The first time Harry meets a kind stranger, he is 3, playing in a sand box. It’s the first time his aunt has let him come to the park with Dudley and her and he doesn’t know where to look. There’s so many colours and everything is bright, not like at at home where his room is dark all the time. He is wondering at everything and doesn’t see his aunt disappear with Dudley. So when the stranger says hello from the edge of the sand box, Harry startles and, not seeing any familiar faces, starts to bawl like the 3 year old that he is. The stranger pics him up gently and rocks him a few times. This is the first time Harry has been picked up so gently, and when he doesn’t get smacked on his bottom, the confused toddler quietens and dares to snuggle into the stranger’s neck. He feels a soft rumble emanating from the man’s chest and the man starts to walk with him. Harry doesn’t know what’s happening and doesn’t care. As long as he is in the kind stranger’s arms, he is warm and he feels safe. When the man walks into a building with a lot of people and is asked for his name, he responds with a sleepy “Boy” before snuggling back into the stranger’s neck. The stranger has a nice smell. Eventually the stranger hands him over to another kind stranger who pets him on the head and he is brought back to the house where his frantic aunt opens the door. They stand in the doorway for a long time, but as soon as his aunt closes the door and they are alone, his aunt brings him to his room and sets him on his bed.
The second time Harry meets a kind stranger, he is six. It’s his first day of school and he’s been left to walk home alone. He knows it’s only a few streets away, his aunt said that to the receptionist at school “Magnolia crescent you know, he’s a bit behind, if you know what I mean so I arranged for a tutor there.” She has done no such thing, but she had warned him that he would have to walk and make a detour to get home “or else…” and he knew that the or else was never anything good. So he walked in the direction she had indicated that morning and was quickly lost. A kind stranger approaches him when he’s been standing at a crossroads for a while. When the stranger asks for his name, Harry proudly replies with “Harry Potter”, he had learned today that that’s his name instead of “Boy”. The stranger smiles and when they pass by a bakery and his stomach makes a loud growling noise, the stranger stops and tugs Harry inside. They leave with two bagels and scone with jam filling and when the stranger leads him to a large building with a lot of nice strangers inside, this time Harry knows that they are coppers and that they will send him right back to prison. But that prison is better than the orphanage or the streets. He gives his name again when asked and gets a soft ruffle of his hair from the kind stranger before he is driven back to his house. When his aunt opens the door this time she is not frantic and when she tells him to go to his room, he knows that his ‘room’ is actually a cupboard under the stairs.
The third time Harry meets a kind stranger is not long after the second time. Harry has just run away for the first time. It’s the holidays and Piers Pokis, Dudley’s best friend, is vacationing away from Little Whining. So Dudley is bored. Harry already knows that a bored Dudley doesn’t spell out anything good for him. Dudley threw a tantrum the first day of the holidays so aunt Petunia took him out to the fair after dropping Harry off with the baby sitter. Harry never knows whether to like mrs Figg or not, she lets Harry sit on the sofa and pet her cats and he’s allowed to read the comics in her old newspapers. He thinks mrs Figg goes to the local library to get him comics and books when she knows sufficiently in advance that he will be coming over too, but he’s seen her wearing a pointy hat once and he thinks she might be a witch. His aunt told Dudley once about a witch that lived in a chicken and ate children, and another time he overheard uncle Vernon talking to aunt Petunia about witches taking him away and boiling him in soup.
So when he goes over to mrs Figg he is always polite, takes off his shoes and eats the biscuits and drinks the tea she gives him. Even though the biscuits are always stale and he thinks she might have tried to poison him once (or every time) when she had given him a scone with white and green topping that tasted bitter and tea that was even more bitter. He had been sick for a week after.
Today however his aunt has decided that Harry has to clean the house. The vacuum cleaner makes a lot of noise so Harry is cleaning the living room where Dudley is watching the telly. In retaliation, Dudley had broken one of aunt Petunia’s vases and Harry knows that he will be blamed so he’s ran out. It’s cold out and in his panic he’s run out without his shoes. He doesn’t own a jacket. Harry’s cold and doesn’t know what to do now. He’s been wandering around aimlessly for some time so when a stranger taps him on the shoulder and asks kindly if he’s all right, the dam on his emotions bursts open and he cries for the first time in years. The kind stranger picks him up and takes his cold feet into his hand to warm them up one by one. Harry thinks he’s a bit old to be picked up, but it happens so rarely to him and it feels nice. He knows now that children shouldn’t go anywhere with strangers, his homeroom teacher said that to the class once, that they might be hurt or taken away.
But Harry is smart, all the teachers at his school think he’s a bad boy and aren’t nice to him, just like aunt Petunia and uncle Vernon.
Unlike strangers, who have always been nice to him. So if this kind stranger takes him away, Harry is fine with that.
The stranger doesn’t take him away… but they do walk past the second hand shop where the stranger finds him a pair of boots that fit perfect and have wool inside so his feet are nice and warm. They also find a blanket with a hole in the middle that the stranger drapes over harry’s head and has a secret pocket inside. It’s not a jacket and it looks a bit old and tatty, but it’s warm, and Harry thinks he might also use it on his bed, if he has to go back to the Dursleys.
They also pass through the fair, where harry gets a meat pie AND a candied apple before they reach the police station and Harry is sent back to Privet drive.
Over the next five years, Harry gets glimpses of kind strangers, often in the park he sees strangers smile at him, once, a stranger came to shake his hand and thanked him when he was out shopping with his aunt, then sometimes, a stranger would pat the space besides them when they’re sitting on a bench. When Harry goes to sit with them, he gets to eat part of whatever food they have on them. Harry always hopes to be taken away by one of them, just like the teacher said they would do, but it never happens. He thinks that maybe the teacher was lying, because otherwise the only reason Harry can think of, is that Harry’s a freak.
Harry knows that his relatives are right when they tell him he’s a freak, odd things always seem to happen around him.
One time had been when he was in his first year of school, he had turned the teacher’s hair blue. He knew it was him, because the teacher had just scolded him.
This teacher had been nice to him at first so he had liked her for a little while, but then aunt Petunia had joined the Little Whinging Gardening Club and gossiped about Harry being a delinquent started making the rounds, and the teacher had stopped being nice to him. This, however had been some time before, but on THE day, during recess, Dudley had forced harry to swallow the ink in one of the ink-cartridges they used to fill their pens. And because obviously one would naw on one’s ink-cartridges on purpose, Harry was scolded for being all bruised up and having inky lips, teeth and tongue, as well as inky boogers. So Harry knew he had been the one to turn the teacher’s hair that same inky blue.
Another time he’d been chased by Dudley and his gang and he’d jumped from a dumpster to the cafeteria roof.
He’d regrown his hair, shrunken an ugly sweater, healed wounds really quickly, and more recently he’d spoken to the snakes in the zoo and vanished the glass on one of the enclosures.
But the feat he was most conscious of was that he had kept his blanket and his boots secret from everyone in the house even though he wore them all the time. And his boots still fit, even though his feet must have grown, and Dudley needed a new pair of shoes almost every month.