Jehane Desrosiers

Chapter 2 – A Sandy, Winding Road

My mother was a lovely, gentle and talented English witch. I never met my grandparents but I know that their marriage was unhappy. My mother was the youngest, the baby and only girl, born late in her parents’ struggling life, neglected by my grandparents in their war with each other and in the tussles and expense of raising five sons. My uncles treated her fondly as a lesser brother in a back-thumping, teasing way, but she was not suited to this tomboy role, being feminine, shy and inward.

She graduated from Hogwart’s but instead of going on to university like her brothers, she chose to attend a technical college program in wandmaking.

My mother was gifted in the subtle synergies of materials that make the wand unique and suited to its owner. She took joy in her craftsmanship and was known for the character and magical properties of her wands, as well as their beauty. Although she did not promote herself, she had a small following of wand aficionados before she was twenty-five. I believe that this was one of the happiest times of her life.

My father’s background was quite different. From one of the oldest wizarding families in France, he was expected as the eldest son to aspire to a high post in wizard public service, at Le Ministere de Magie, perhaps, or at a university or cultural institution. But he preferred a life of exploration and experience to one of achievement. He left Beauxbatons before graduation and by the age of thirty had vagabonded across several continents. He loved to be outside and was most adept at those magics that make use of the natural world.

My paternal grandparents could never comprehend my father or overcome their disappointment in him. At a loss as to how their son was to identify himself – or, more accurately, how they were to identify him -- in a legitimate manner, they gave him a vineyard when he turned thirty-five in hopes that he would settle down into a regular occupation.

Father was uninterested in growing grapes or making wine but he did enjoy being on his land, and he was not averse to business. As he explored the idea of farming hardwoods for magical purposes he attended a wandmaking conference in Paris. There he met my mother, who had come there from London.

I have tried to imagine their meeting and their first days together, for when they left the conference after five days and traveled to the south of France to meet my father’s parents they were already engaged . Pictures of my mother at age twenty-five show a fair, slight woman with a heart shaped face and a dark braid. She was pretty, with a chiseled cupid’s bow to her rosy lips, a fine sharp bridge to her delicate nose and a small pointed chin, but she had the knack of being unnoticed, and I suspect she had had only a few small romances before my father. Her hands, so strong and sure in possession of woodworking tools, were as small as a child’s.

My father, at thirty-six, was not a handsome man. He was over six feet tall, with a bush of coarse ginger hair, a speckled beard of rust, brown and white, and large wind-reddened features. If my grandparents had hoped that marriage would make their son more conventional, they were again disappointed. I was born on the vineyard in a yurt without running water, attended by a midwitch and with my father and several goats assisting. In the following two years, while raising both me and a business in custom wands and hardwoods, they built a log house and a workshop and dug a well.

If there were any shadow over my early years in the vineyard (and we always said, “in the vineyard,” although the grapes were untended and eaten by birds) it was that I had no siblings. None came, and I sensed the sadness in my mother, even when she most enjoyed her games with me. She made wonderful dolls and toy animals from scrap wood, and we gave them outdoor cottages in stumps and hollow logs

I have said that there was the one shadow over my childhood, but that is not true. Looking back, there was one other, present and unnamed. As I gradually and wordlessly came to realize, my father was one of those people who can be truly close to only one other. I am sure he cared for me deeply; he protected me and provided for me, and until I went to Beauxbatons, he was responsible for my education. But as I grew from self-centered little girl to outward-looking older girl to almost-teen, my attempts to forge a relationship with him in my own right fell short. He could not talk about what mattered to him, and he could not listen usefully to what mattered to me.

But children don’t question what they have always known. Because my parents were in the workshop or on the land so much, I spent much happy time alone outdoors. In my memories, I think first of the winding roads of the vineyard, soft with the sandy soil, and how I followed them. In my memories it is always summer and I am barefoot, digging my toes into the sand as I walk.

I liked to sit quietly and watch the animals go about their business, to see a fox eating ripe grapes, rising up on his hind legs with his black paws hanging down. In the hardwood stands I climbed trees and sat for hours. I kept pets -- lizards, mice, tadpoles, songbirds and a flying squirrel. Many of my baby-magics were those that charmed animals, called them and made their minds clear to me.

When I wasn’t outside, I was reading, like many a lonesome child. My parents made all kinds of books in great number available to me. My father, an autodidactic, often guided my reading with suggestions. I ate up piles of novels, and I suppose this is how I came to think of myself in the second person, as a protagonist in a story, and to account for the odd, unchildlike formality of my speech and vocabulary.

I might not have grown up so odd if there had been other wizarding families in our region. My parents were liberal and would not have prevented me from mixing with the Muggle children two miles down the road, but I was shy and awkward and unsure that I could maintain the necessary concealment. It was easier to make my mother my playmate, to help her in the workshop and do lessons with my father, and when they were busy to live in my own world of imagination, observation and books.

This changed when a wizarding family took over a larger vineyard contiguous with ours. Msr. Lamott, was enthusiastic about viniculture and recognized my father as a rich source of information on the locale. Mme Lamott, with her great joie de vivre, love of books and creative house magic, became my second model of what a woman can be. The two families were soon good friends as well as good neighbors.

Their daughter Thalia was the first companion of my heart. We were nine years old and immediately formed a complete world between us. I cannot say how I, who had never had a friendship except with my mother, could so easily and surely slip into that one. It may have been the combination of our gifts, for Thalia was lively and outgoing where I was restrained and thoughtful; I considered her wonderfully bold and she thought me a genius of invention. Many of my imaginary games were fantastically elaborated under her generous spirit of excess. Her rough-and -tumble life with her younger brother and sister wore some of the awkward edges from me, while she found in me a quieter place of rest.

Thalia took the lead in the plays we wrote and drafted her sister and brother into the supporting roles. I insisted on the non-speaking parts. We became spies and made up secret codes. We got into trouble using magic we had been forbidden. We saved our galleons to buy a horse, or possibly a Pegasus, and share it between us. We slept at each other’s houses and stayed up late planning many different lives together.

And to my joy, the September we were both eleven we enrolled at Beauxbatons School of Magic.

Notes:
The only part of J.K. Rowling’s invention that I have never found believable is the ignorance of Muggle culture in the wizarding world. It makes no sense to me that intelligent people, many of them born of Muggles, would ignore so many useful and beautiful ideas and products. I’ve chosen to ignore just that part of Rowling’s work. Hence, the books Jehane reads so voraciously are both wizarding and Muggle.