On Being a Mudblood.

When I watched the first Harry Potter movie last week I was struck by a sense of familiarity when the new intake of young students arrived at Hogwarts. That was because it reminded me of being one of a new intake of cadets at the Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, one damp, chilly night in early January. I was seventeen and the youngest cadet there. We even arrived by train which ran alongside the sea on the South Devon coast between Exeter and Kingswear, just across the river from the college.

And those familiar with Harry Potter will know what I mean when I say that there was more than one Malfoy at Dartmouth, and they were always sure to remind me that I was a mudblood and therefore inherently inferior. I spoke with a regional accent, you see. I’d spent the first fourteen years of my life living in social housing in a northern industrial city. I’d gone to an ordinary high school and didn’t wear my old school tie to informal occasions as the public schoolboys did to proclaim their status. I was working class, and the Malfoys made sure I knew it.

On one occasion I grabbed one of them by the collar, put the tip of my forefinger close to his stupid mouth, and threatened to beat him up if he ever spoke to me like that again. And I declined to carry his bags across the gangway in furtherance of his orders. It’s the only time in my life I ever did that. He backed off silently, but the prejudice remained.

I wonder whether the Malfoys are a dying breed now. I expect they are, but I'll bet a house elf's wages they’re not extinct yet.