Disclaimer: I am not J. K. Rowling. I do not own Harry Potter.

Note: The following brief sketch is set in an alternate universe where the Dursley family reacted differently from canon to Harry's arrival at number four Privet Drive in November 1981.

Further Note: Some of the sentences are intentionally rather long. My intention in using them is to try and convey the at times overwhelming information a ten year old boy is trying to cope with.

The day after his tenth birthday Harry James Potter found out what had happened to his parents, and it gave him nightmares for a week. He didn't find out exactly how and why they'd met their ends, but he could see why his aunt and uncle had kept it from him for years, instead just telling him that they had died in a car crash, and being tight-lipped about it. And it explained so much else; so very, very much. Like that strange incident with Miles Hogg and the piggy tail two years ago, and Miss. Brandreth's hair last year.

Well now his aunt had told him, and Harry Potter wished that his parents had been killed in a car crash instead of being apparently hunted down and murdered by a terrorist freak with magical powers with Harry then being dumped on the doorstep of Privet Drive in the middle of the next night by some other freak who apparently thought dumping babies on doorsteps with a letter which only half-explained things on a freezing cold and damp November night was something normal to do. What chilled Harry the most about that latter particular act was that the freak who had abandoned him had apparently been the boss of Harry's parents whilst they'd still been alive. His parents had worked for the man and made themselves targets for him in his war – if Harry's Aunt Petunia was right. If he treated the only son of people who had worked for him – and maybe lost their lives because of their connection with him – like that, then how would he treat other people?

Well, whatever he'd meant or thought by the act, he'd done Harry a favour with it as far as Harry could see. The monster had dropped him off like an unwanted dustbin sack in Privet Drive, and clearly wanted no more to do with Harry, and Harry was fine with that. He had his Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon, and cousin Dudley, thank-you very much. He had a normal life away from freaks and terrorists and stupid wars. Money was a bit tight because Aunt Petunia was a housewife, and Vernon was saving up to send Harry and Dudley to his old school, Smeltings, and if Harry's parents ever had had any kind of money then Harry's Aunt and Uncle had never seen so much as a penny of it. When they went on holiday it was to small guest-houses or out-of-season hotels, and Harry and Dudley's clothes (apart from school uniforms) were always second-hand, and they had to make a lot of their own entertainment. They spent a lot of time playing cowboys and Indians with some other children in the neighbourhood, getting hopelessly dirty and falling in streams and having other misadventures.

But Aunt Petunia had told Harry (and Dudley) the truth about Harry's parents (or what she knew of it) now, because Harry was ten now, and if the experience of her own sister, Harry's mother, had been anything to go by, then in the next twelve months someone might try to get in contact with Harry to try and get him to go to a witch and wizard school, and Aunt Petunia didn't want that to come as a complete shock to Harry.

But it was important that they say nothing about Harry's parents or magical schools or terrorists with wands or anything to anyone else. Normal people might think that they were crazy. Worse still, the freaks with wands might hear about it and decide that it threatened their secrecy, and they might send out special hit squads to mess with the memories of anyone they thought shouldn't know and to cause other trouble.

Almost a year after Harry's tenth birthday 'the letter' arrived, inviting Harry to attend 'Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry'. Harry was greatly distressed to learn that Aunt Petunia thought that the name of the man who was apparently the headmaster at Hogwarts was the same as that of the man whom Harry's parents had been working for when they'd been killed, and who'd apparently dumped Harry on the doorstep all those years ago. Rummaging though old boxes and desk draws, Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon eventually found the letter of half-baked explanations and justifications which had been left with Harry that chilly night back in 1981, and the name at the bottom of the letter turned out to be the very same indeed.

Harry wrote a short letter in response to the headmaster of Hogwarts:

Dear Headmaster of Hogwarts,

I'm going to Smeltings, a real school, and not your crummy old school for freaks, and since you got my parents killed you can GET STUFFED.

Harry Potter.

He felt slightly guilty, because he knew that when you were writing a letter to someone you didn't know you were supposed to be polite and finish 'Yours Faithfully,' before signing your name, but Harry didn't feel at all like writing about being faithful to this 'Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore'.

He handed the letter to his aunt who blotted the angry tear stains away, and set about writing a much longer, 'frigidly polite' letter of explanation to send to Hogwarts, with which she would enclose Harry's own response.

Apparently the Chief Freak of Hogwarts (as Harry had mentally christened APWBD) didn't want to take 'no' for an answer, and eventually – to the surprise of Harry and his aunt and uncle and cousin – the dotty 'cat lady', Mrs. Figg, from across the road approached them one evening.

She confessed to being something Harry didn't understand called a 'squib' – apparently she was a freak, but not as freaky as the rest of the freaks – and said she'd been asked to keep an eye on them and to make sure that they were all safe, ever since she moved in shortly after Harry had arrived in Privet Drive. Apparently she also knew the Chief Freak of Hogwarts, and he was very upset at the moment about Harry not wanting to go to his school – but he apparently couldn't come within half a mile of number four Privet Drive right now, because of some piece of magic he'd done years ago without telling anyone about (until now) which had somehow gone badly wrong and which he'd recently discovered kept him, every magical law enforcement officer he knew, and every other Hogwarts staff member he'd tried so far away from Privet Drive. Since Mrs. Figg lived in Privet Drive and for whatever reason didn't seem to be affected by this piece of magic, he'd asked her to check that in fact Harry meant to say that yes he'd love to come to Hogwarts and that he had been forced to write a letter saying he didn't want to attend. The whole business seemed to embarrass and rather fluster Mrs. Figg. She confessed that the Chief Freak had at first asked her to outright kidnap Harry, which she had refused point-blank to do.

Harry explained to Mrs. Figg that no, he genuinely did not want to go to Hogwarts, that yes, he did want to go to Smeltings instead, and that he had not been in any way forced to make this decision by his aunt or uncle or anyone else.

Mrs. Figg looked doubtful and spoke at length with Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon about it. In the end Harry and Dudley were sent to bed whilst the adults were still talking.

The next morning, Uncle Vernon said that Mrs. Figg had seen reason and agreed to tell the Chief Freak that Harry was perfectly happy with going to Smeltings and not Hogwarts, and that it was Harry's choice entirely. Uncle Vernon cheerfully said he doubted that the Chief Freak would be happy about it, but that since neither he nor any of his toadies could come anywhere near Privet Drive because of whatever piece of magic it was which he'd messed up, it sounded like there wasn't much he could do without breaking all the rules about secrecy which the freaks had and getting himself in a lot of trouble.

And that, it seemed, was that.

Several months later, Harry and Dudley arrived at Smeltings for their first term. The school was absolutely brilliant, although the chemistry teacher (Professor Snape) was a bit weird. He was apparently new to the school after something mysterious had happened to his predecessor over the holidays, and he prowled the laboratory during practical lessons in a remarkably stealthy fashion, peering over everyone's shoulder to make sure nothing disastrous was going on. He was clearly a genius though, and he had a disconcerting ability of always seeming to know when anyone was trying to lie to him or hide some piece of mischief. That was probably just as well though, given all the dangerous things that could probably happen in a school laboratory if pupils started messing around…

Author Notes: (subject to revision depending on early reviews)

This is my first venture into writing in an alternate universe where the senior Dursleys (Vernon and Petunia) regard themselves as ordinary, decent, folk, and actually act like it (whatever their differences with Lily and James may have been) when their nephew is dumped without warning on their doorstep overnight in November 1981. They still don't think a lot of magicals (and given the behaviour of some witches and wizards there is a certain justification for an overly simplistic 'freaks' point of view) but they're prepared to overlook those prejudices where their orphaned nephew is concerned.

For the purposes of this particular universe, I assumed that the blood wards Albus Dumbledore put in place on number four Privet Drive were meant to keep away any witches and wizards of ill intent to Harry Potter. They aren't actually malfunctioning; it's just that any witches or wizards trying to force Harry to go to Hogwarts when he wants to go to Smeltings with his cousin and make his aunt and uncle proud (especially after all the financial sacrifices they made to be able to afford two sets of tuition fees) count as having distinctly ill intentions.

Regarding the last paragraph of this story, the Hogwarts headmaster has concluded he can't have Harry at Hogwarts for now, so he pulled some strings behind the scenes and emplaced Severus Snape at Smeltings to at least keep an eye on Harry. (Goodness knows what Severus thought, being told with maybe a month's notice that he was switching schools, subjects, and from the magical world to the muggle one, but if any man or woman on the canon 1991-1992 Hogwarts staff could cope with it, it would be him.)

At one time I had planned an additional scene where the Dursleys and Harry attempted to travel to Diagon Alley so Harry could see what the magical world was like, but being mobbed by 'Boy-Who-Lived' groupies in the Leaky Cauldron was such a terrifying experience that it scared them off. I couldn't see Harry in this story even wanting to look around Diagon Alley though, and so it was cut.

This story is a one-shot, written between staring blankly at the current drafts of the chapters 'Descent Through Fire' (Alternate Scene by the Lake 4) and 'Welcome to Hogwarts' (Saint Potter) on which progress is currently painfully slow.