Platform 9 3/4
Platform 9 3/4 is ridiculous.
No, I mean, really.
It’s pretty easy to find once you walk into King’s Cross Station—which, incidentally, is not the gothic red-brick building with all the turrets and gingerbread you see in The Chamber of Secrets movie, when Harry and Ron fly away from the station in the enchanted car. That one is St Pancras, also a train station, directly next door to King’s Cross. I know that because that’s the station I first walked into in search of Platform 9 3/4, coming straight from my hotel. I looked up at that facade, and said, “Hey, there it is!” But it wasn’t. I couldn’t find Platform 9 3/4 anywhere in there, and I’d so been looking forward to it.
I’d booked my London hotel within five minutes’ walking distance from King’s Cross, in a beautiful old townhouse on a Georgian crescent. A Jane Austen fan’s dream. Except I wasn’t a Jane Austen fan—I was in search of Harry Potter.
Yes, I’ll admit it—I was twenty years old, half-way through my college degree, and still chasing after the dream of that wizarding world. Most kids outgrow that stage by the end of middle school, but not me.
I’d spent the last three weeks before my eleventh birthday desperately waiting and hoping for that Hogwarts letter. Why three weeks? Because that’s when I finally read the book. My aunt hadn’t allowed it before then, let alone let me watch the movie—or movies, rather, as most of them were out by then. They were inappropriate, Aunty said, seductive occult claptrap, and hogwash besides.
“It’s Hogwarts,” I’d muttered under my breath when she said that—I might not have read the books, but I’d heard the other kids in my class mention it. Unfortunately I didn’t mutter quietly enough; I got sent to my room for the rest of the evening. If Aunty had only known how that fed into the whole mystique, she probably would have found another form of punishment for me than sending me upstairs to pretend I didn’t exist. The only thing in which my life differed from what the grapevine had told me of Harry’s, I felt, was that my bedroom wasn’t a cupboard under the stairs.
I found a tattered paperback copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in the library discard bin when I was ten and eleven-twelfth. Somebody must have dropped it into the bathtub, as the pages were badly wrinkled and whole chapters falling out of the binding. But the pages were all there, and that night I devoured the story in secret under my bed covers. It changed my life.
For three glorious weeks, I lived in expectation. But when the clock ticked over past midnight on the evening of my eleventh birthday and the letter hadn’t arrived, I was crushed. For a few more weeks I held onto the hope that maybe they had sent the Weasley’s Errol with my letter and he simply got lost, being that kind of owl, but as time ticked by, that hope dwindled down to a thread, and then trickled away into the sand.
There would be no Hogwarts for me, no glorious discovery of a magical identity as gifted witch, no secret world apart from the one I was living in. I struggled through high school, graduated and headed off to college—a business degree, because that’s what Aunty said was the most sensible thing to do.
Yet somewhere in there, the spark was still alive. Very faint, barely there—but when I had that chance of a trip to London, it made me choose my hotel where I did. I picked it because it was close to the British Library, which had important historic documents in its holdings that every tourist should see, and because the trains from Gatwick airport came into St Pancras Station, so it would be convenient for travel—that’s what I’d told everyone, including myself. But really, it was because of King’s Cross Station and Platform 9 3/4—as I said, they’re next door to St Pancras.
I only took time to stash my bag in the tiny bedroom on the third floor of the hotel, then slipped on my comfortable walking shoes and set out. I crossed the Euston Road with the flow of British pedestrians that seemed to pay no attention to the “Walk” and “Wait” traffic signs at the crosswalks, almost got run over by a car swooping past me from the right—a direction I hadn’t been expecting cars from—and then, heart pounding, made my way into the train station.
The wrong train station. No Platform 9 3/4 anywhere.
“No, this isn’t the place,” I heard a nasal American voice say in passing, “the Harry Potter thing is in the other station, over there. Come on, we don’t have time, we need to catch our train.” I turned my head to see a roller-suitcase-touting family of tourists in shorts and baseball caps, cameras slung around their necks, determinedly marching towards a set of downwards escalators.
Feeling slightly sheepish, I backed out of St Pancras and turned in the direction the man had indicated. Once more I let myself be swept along by the throng of pedestrians, crossed a plaza, then entered through a set of doors beneath the arches of a huge yellow stone building. And there was the sign: “To Platform 9 3/4”.
I’m not sure what I had expected—the actual pillar between the two platforms that you see in the movies? A family of a redheads with a trolley full of luggage, including an owl in a cage perched on top?
Whatever it was, it wasn’t this.
In the hall in front of the barriers—not even on the platform—crowds of tourists were roped off, waiting in a tightly packed line for their turn at “Platform 9 3/4”, as the brick wall between two shops was labelled. Half a luggage trolley was glued to the wall below the sign, loaded with a couple of half trunks and the edge of a round bird cage. Person after person stepped up to that trolley, had a scarlet-and-gold Gryffindor scarf slung around their neck, put their hands on the trolley’s handle bar, and pretended to push, while a bored-looking shop employee held out the end of the scarf behind them to make it look like it was flying out in the breeze, and another one snapped a photo with a big fancy camera. Then they were hustled off to the side to wait for their official photo to be downloaded to the computers of the adjacent Platform 9 3/4 Shop, where it could be purchased for the mere sum of £15, if not their body weight in sickles and knuts.
As I stood staring, trying to swallow past the lump of disappointment in my throat, a guy stepped up to the fake trolley. He was tall and skinny, looked to be about my own age, and had flaming red hair. “Hey, look, I’m Ron Weasley!” he cried with a big grin on his face. From the side, a giggling girl with a fall of white-blonde hair held up her phone and snapped pictures as he hammed it up for the camera.
I turned away, my sense of disappointment starting to morph into something like contempt. This was silly. What had I expected anyway? I knew it was all fake, a fictional world sprung from the head of a writer who had made millions with her stories. Yay for her.
I drifted through the glass doors into the shop, shuffled through the crowds to the shelves, half-heartedly poked at the rows of stuffed Hedwigs (they cost anywhere from £8 to £45), waved around a wooden Hermione Granger wand (£31), eyed up a £19.99 Ravenclaw t-shirt—I’d always fancied myself as a Ravenclaw—and finally decided to spend £10.50, discounted from £12.99, on a hardcover copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which had been reissued in honour of the latest movie. Might as well get some kind of souvenir from the place, as ridiculous as it was.
As I stood in line at the checkout, I heard giggling behind me.
“You said the L means pounds?” said a girl. “How much is £12.50 worth then?” Probably another American tourist—although her accent sounded really British, perhaps even with a slight French undertone.
“About two and a half galleons,” replied a guy’s voice, this one definitely British. “I wonder if Uncle Harry knows that’s how much it costs for a ballpoint pen that looks like his wand.”
What? My head turned all on its own.
Right by my elbow, in front of a display of wand-shaped pens and other knick-knacks, huddled the white-blonde girl with yet another tall skinny guy, this one with black hair tufting up all over his head like he was trying to be Harry Potter. His face looked an awful lot like the red-haired guy she’d been with earlier, the one who had put on such a show at the trolley wall.
The girl picked up a pen wand.
“Look, this one is meant to be Uncle Ron’s!” She waved the pen at a stack of pretend little Hogwarts trunks. “Alohomora!” she intoned.
Every last trunk lock sprang open.
“Oops!” The girl burst into a giggle, clapped her hand to her mouth to stifle it and ducked her head between her shoulders.
The guy tried to repress a guffaw, took the pen from her hand and gingerly put it back on its display stand, looking around to see if anyone had noticed. His shoulders shaking with silent laughter, he sidled over to the fake trunks and thumbed the locks shut, a look of determined innocence on his face.
“Come on, Teddy,” the girl said quietly, her voice full of suppressed giggles, “we had better go or we’ll miss the kids! I promised Rose and Albus I’d see them off on the train, and it’s Hugo’s first time to school.”
The guy looked up, and he saw me staring at him.
Staring, because his hair had gone pink. Bright, fluorescent pink. Right in front of my eyes.
Was nobody else seeing this? I slewed my head around. The packed shop was humming with chatter, people shuffling around from shelf to display to shelf again, scrabbling in their purses for unfamiliar pound coins, digging through their wallets for credit cards.
“How much for the Gryffindor mug?”
“Do you have the notebook in Slytherin? My daughter really wants…”
“That’s another fifty pence, please. That big silver coin there…”
“Yes, we can ship to Canada. It’ll take about…”
Nobody seemed to see a thing.
The guy’s hair slowly changed tints like an LED colour display. It smoothed out and lay down flat on his head, one soft lavender lock flopping down his forehead and over an eye that slowly closed in a wink as he looked straight back at me.
He reached for his girlfriend’s hand.
“Let’s go, Victoire,” he said softly, and I knew for sure that his voice was pitched exactly so nobody but she and I could hear it. “The Hogwarts train won’t wait for anyone.”
My book dropped to the floor.
By the time I picked it up, dusted it off, stuck it on the counter and pushed my way out of the shop, the two of them were nowhere to be seen.
But it didn’t matter. I knew where they had gone. I knew that it was all real, that somewhere behind the barrier, a large red engine stood steaming, ready to take a train-load full of eager young witches and wizards to a place of magical learning and enchantment.
A place that perhaps someday, I would get to see myself—maybe not as a student, but perhaps as the mother of one. A little girl who would set off on her adventure right here, right from this platform.
Platform 9 3/4 is the best place on Earth.
©A.M. Offenwanger 2018