M r and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were
proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank
you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be
involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just
didn’t hold with such nonsense.
Mr Dursley was the director of a fi rm called Grunnings,
which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly
any neck, although he did have a very large moustache.
Mrs Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the
usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent
so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the
neighbours. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and
in their opinion there was no fi ner boy anywhere.
The Dursleys had everything they wanted, but they also
had a secret, and their greatest fear was that somebody would
discover it. They didn’t think they could bear it if anyone
found out about the Potters. Mrs Potter was Mrs Dursley’s sister, but they hadn’t met for several years; in fact, Mrs
Dursley pretended she didn’t have a sister, because her sister
and her good- for-nothing husband were as unDursleyish as it
was possible to be. The Dursleys shuddered to think what the
neighbours would say if the Potters arrived in the street. The
Dursleys knew that the Potters had a small son, too, but they
had never even seen him. This boy was another good reason
for keeping the Potters away; they didn’t want Dudley mixing
with a child like that.
