July, 1938
Hogwarts Deputy Mistress and Charms teacher Hester O’Hare had the feeling that this would be one hard job to do. Since the beginning days of Hogwarts, dealing with muggleborn children and their parents had been a problem.
It was the summer of 1937 and she was standing in front of the Stockwell Orphanage in London. Hester, who was a middle-aged witch, could remember the dreadful nineteenth century Muggle orphanages, and was pleased to see that this place was actually very fine in comparison. Several Victorian houses, grouped around a yard, looking clean and well-kept made up the orphanage. It had a boys and a girls house, a Sunday school and enough place to play. The children wore individual clothes and didn’t look too depressed.
The reason for her being here was an orphan named Tom Riddle. Like all wizard children, his birth had been written down in a book. This book resided in a small and secret chamber in Hogwarts. It had been created by the founders themselves, just like the Sorting Hat and the four houses. A magical quill wrote down the name of every wizard child in Britain at its birth. When the child died before his or her eleventh birthday, it was written down, and wizard children moving to Britain were noted, too.
This book never stopped working, and it couldn’t be fooled. Once in a year, the current Headmaster and Deputy Headmaster looked up all the names and prepared the letters they would send this year. Every wizard child, whether they were poor beggars or members of the gentry, had the right to attend Hogwarts. If the parents could afford it, they had to pay a small fee, but for everyone else, Hogwarts was free, raising its funds from the school board and the ministry.
So money wasn’t a problem, and reading and writing wouldn’t be, either, as the orphanage had a school. But what made Hester worry was the boy himself. What would his character be like, having grown up in an orphanage? How would the other orphans react to one of them being able to go away to a boarding school?
And there was also the fact, that he wasn’t really an orphan. His father was still alive. And the boy didn’t know this. She entered the building and a nurse showed her the way to the office of the Headmaster. She braced herself and stepped inside.
About two hours later, she left it again, feeling drained and shaken. During the talk, the matron of the dorm Tom Riddle lived in had been called inside, and they had argued fervently. She walked down the creaking wooden stairs and replayed the conversation in her mind.
While the Headmaster of Stockwell himself was rather easily convinced that magic existed, it took him a while to believe in Hogwarts and the fact that one of the Stockwell boys should indeed go there. The matron had been called in, and soon they had been looking up papers together. What came to their eyes was a tale of misery.
The boy, as had been written in the book, was born in 1927, to a woman who had been rejected by her husband. The young man had, in order to annul the marriage, sent her to Bethlehem Hospital, a hospital for the treatment of the insane. This infamous institution, commonly called ‘Bedlam’, was renowned for being the worst of all hospitals for the insane in Britain and everywhere over Europe. The doctors there indeed diagnosed a severe case of delusions. The few remaining documents revealed that the mother, a pregnant witch, had insisted on being exactly that, a witch.
It was heart-wrenching for Hester O’Hare to read what happened after that. The Bethlehem Hospital documents told that the woman was treated as insane all during her pregnancy, and then died while giving birth to the child, due to the stress and bad hygienic conditions. She wondered why the witch hadn’t simply employed magic to leave. What about her family? The family of the father, who had been paying for the mother, wouldn’t accept the child, but continued paying for it. Still, the child was named after the father and grandfather : Tom Marvolo Riddle.
What to do with a newly born child in a hospital for the insane? In the beginning, the child was nurtured by a nurse, who was herself a woman admitted to the Institute. But the woman could be cured and left the child behind when she left the hospital. Little Tom, by then almost a year old, couldn’t be given to a proper Orphanage “ he was too young “ and no one wanted a child from Bethlehem institute. So he stayed there for two more years, and maybe a normal child wouldn’t have survived this, but it was reported that he had an extremely strong health.
In 1930, the Bedlam institution, renowned for its terrible treatment of the insane, was finally shut down. The child, with his three years actually yet too young, was accepted at Stockwell Orphanage.
From then on, the Headmaster and Hester followed the account of the matron. She told them of a ‘poor dear confused little fellow’. He was very scared of everybody, and didn’t play at all like a normal child. But he was never causing any trouble once he had found his place, and he was very bright despite his bad upbringing.
He “ being the youngest child in Stockwell - was the favourite of many nurses and teachers, but the other boys at Stockwell didn’t like him nearly as much. Tom was the constant victim of mockery and cruel insults because of his ‘insane’ mother. That, combined with the fact that he lacked self confidence and was younger and weaker than the other boys, made life difficult for him.
“You can’t do that,” the matron closed her tale. “You can’t take him out of here, not if you plan to send him back! The other boys won’t accept that. And I can’t accept that this strange, this “ this magic thing furthers his problems! He’ll end up like his mother!”
But the Headmaster had the last word in the matter. And he was convinced by Hester O’Hare to send little Tom Riddle to Hogwarts. Why that was so, he told her when she was just intending to leave.
“I’m a Christian, Madam, and my faith in the Lord has always been strong. But I have always had the feeling that there should be more to the world, that there should be wonders and signs! And here you are, the proof of the supernatural. Be the Lord with you.”
So she left the office, walking down the creaking wooden stairs. From far away echoed the feet of orphans on the floors, and dusty light fell through the windows. She was still lost in her thoughts, shaken by that poor witch’s life, angry at the father, when a small boy appeared suddenly like a ghost at the bottom of the stairs. She immediately knew it was him, not by the parchment he held clutched in his hands, but by the tickle of magic around him. It momentarily took her breath away, to feel it so strong from a mere child. She knew only one person who emanated magic like that : the new Transfiguration teacher at Hogwarts.
This comparison was somewhat absurd and it made her smile. The teacher was a middle-aged wizard with a youthful temperament and long auburn hair and beard, quirky but powerful. This little boy at the stairs was only ten, tiny and dark-haired, wide-eyed and pale.
“Hello Tom,” she said, mustering a kind smile.