At Platform 9 3/4, the construction of which a certain little girl just last summer wrote a sternly worded letter to the Ministry to protest only to be predictably ignored, that same small girl is going over a checklist while her mother feeds her owl a treat between the bars of the cage. There are two wands crossed in the girl's hair, a mass of individual braids so tiny that from a distance they could be mistaken for strands in their own right and then bound up in a lump at the nape of her neck. They are not the only black people on the platform but they don't seem to know the other family. No father is evident.

Mother hugs daughter, and daughter hugs back, and daughter steps into the train and goes looking for a compartment.