Potter Spawn

The Ten Years

(Insert scene of Harry being left at the Dursley's)

Harry Potter was left on the doorstep of Number 4 Privet Drive. But he didn't know he would be bullied and he would fight back in the most rebellious ways. Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up.

He didn't know he was going to be treated like a house elf for a decade.

He didn't know that help would find him most peculiarly. He did not know he was special, not knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours by Mrs Dursley's scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by his cousin Dudley ... He couldn't know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: "To Harry Potter – the boy who lived!"

4 years later (Harry is 5 years old)...

"Up! Get up! Now!"

Harry woke with a start. His aunt rapped on the door again.

"Up!" she screeched. Harry heard her walking towards the kitchen and then the sound of the frying pan being put on the cooker. He rolled on to his back and tried to remember the dream he had been having. It had been a weird one. There was a flash of green light and maniacal laughter. He had a funny feeling he'd had the same dream before.

His aunt was back outside the door. "Are you up yet?" she demanded.

"Nearly," said Harry. "Well, get a move on, I want you to look after the bacon. And don't you dare let it burn." Harry groaned. "What did you say?" his aunt snapped through the door. "Nothing, nothing ..."

Harry got slowly out of bed and started looking for socks.

He found a pair under his bed and, after pulling a spider off one of them, put them on. Harry was used to spiders, because the cupboard under the stairs was full of them, and that was where he slept.

When he was dressed he went down the hall into the kitchen.

Dudley's favourite punch-bag was Harry, but he couldn't often catch him. Harry didn't look like it, but he was very fast.

Perhaps it had something to do with living in a dark cupboard, but Harry had always been small and skinny for his age. He looked even smaller and skinnier than he really was because all he had to wear were old clothes of Dudley's and Dudley was about four times bigger than he was.

Harry had a thin face, knobbly knees, black hair and bright-green eyes. He wore round glasses held together with a lot of Sellotape because of all the times Dudley had punched him on the nose.

The only thing Harry liked about his appearance was a very thin scar on his forehead which was shaped like a bolt of lightning. He had had it as long as he could remember and the first question he could ever remember asking his Aunt Petunia was how he had got it.

'In the car crash when your parents died,' she had said. 'And don't ask questions.'

Don't ask questions – that was the first rule for a quiet life with the Dursleys. Uncle Vernon entered the kitchen as Harry was turning over the bacon.

"Comb your hair!" he barked, by way of a morning greeting, well more like morning insult. Potters don't need to comb their hair. It's fashionable as it is. About once a week, Uncle Vernon looked over the top of his newspaper and shouted that Harry needed a haircut.

Harry must have had more haircuts than the rest of the boys in his class put together, but it made no difference, his hair simply grew that way – all over the place.