Secret Lives: J.K. Rowling

 

She cast the Harry Potter spell

 

ARE YOU totally bewitched by Harry Potter? Do you wish you could attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? Or even better, do you wish you could step into best-selling author J.K. Rowling’s shoes? 

 But hang on a moment. What do you know of Joanne Kathleen Rowling? How did she grow up to be a wizard with words, who draws you into reading thick books without pictures, away from TV and video games?

Does Rowling think like you, or share in your fantasies? She said in an interview to Time magazine after the publication of ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ in 1997, “I really can, with no difficulty at all, think myself back to eleven years old. I can remember being a kid and being very powerless and having this whole underworld that to adults is always going to be impenetrable. I think I have very vivid memories of how it felt to be Harry’s age.”

Born on July 31, 1966, in the tiny English hamlet of Chipping Sodbury, dreamy Joanne loved to play games of pretence, either in her room or in the grassy backyard. Her parents Peter and Anne, both bookworms, read aloud to her from a very young age. “My most vivid memory of childhood is my father sitting and reading ‘The Wind in the Willows’ (by Kenneth Grahame) to me,” she confessed to the Daily Telegraph in London. “I had the measles at the time, but I don’t really remember that. I just remember the book.”

Once her younger sister Di arrived two years later, Joanne invented a constant supply of fantastic stories for her. One was about how Di fell through a rabbit hole, and was fed strawberries by its furry-tailed inhabitants. But Di was upset because, with each re-telling, the story changed. So, Joanne picked up a pencil and paper to write her first rabbit story. She’s been writing ever since.

The young writer continued to devour books at a phenomenal pace. Her favourites included ‘The Little White Horse’ by Elizabeth Gouge, ‘Manxmouse’ by Paul Gallico, and the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. 

When the Rowling family shifted to the small town of Winterbourne, Joanne’s closest buddies were Ian and Vikki Potter, who loved to try her madcap ideas, often dressing up as witches or wizards. “Their surname was Potter,” Joanne later recalled. “I always liked the name.” You do too, don’t you?

When Joanne was nine, discovering the James Bond novels and Jane Austen, the family relocated to Tutshill, by the river Wye. She got into trouble at the local primary school. She fared badly in a fractions test on her first day, so the teacher seated her among the duller students. How did Joanne cope? She studied extra hard until she ensured a seat among the bright stars.

By the time she moved on to Wyedean Comprehensive School, Joanne felt ill at ease with the world. “I was quiet, freckly, short-sighted and rubbish at sports,” she recalled. 

But when she emerged from her shell, she made friends easily enough. In an essay, Joanne confessed, “I used to tell my equally quiet and studious friends long serial stories during lunchtime. They usually involved us all doing heroic and daring deeds we certainly would not have done in real life.”

Joanne was soon obsessed by author Jessica Mitford, a human rights and feminist activist who ran away and joined the Spanish Civil War at 19. “I remember reading the book ‘Hons and Rebels’ at age fourteen, and it changed my life,” wrote the Potter author.

She ended high school as the head girl, through she dreaded addressing the whole school.  She played her audience a record on one occasion, to cut down on speaking time. “The record was scratched. It began skipping and played the same line over and over again. Finally, the deputy headmistress came out on stage and kicked it,” Joanne recalled on a website.

Would you have guessed that the creator of Harry Potter had a childhood like this? Not for a zillion Chocolate Frogs or Every-Flavour Beans, I bet.