Harry Potter and the flight from reality

The differences begin at the beginning. The Hogwarts pupil takes his first ride on the school train at 11. By that age I was a three-year veteran of those emotionally supercharged departure scenes at London railway stations: I in short flannel trousers and uniform cap waiting on the platform with mum and dad, all of us wearing brave "Brief Encounter" smiles.

To cry was a source of shame and embarrassment. At age 9, my elder brother protectively explained away my tears as "a problem with his eyes." Look no further than the boarding school for an explanation of the British male's exaggerated distaste for any show of emotion -- unless it is cheerfulness, the only frivolous feeling allowed.

Harry, a confident, troll-slaying kind of kid, grateful to be away from his sadistic uncle and aunt, is able to thrive. Perhaps, if such a child were to exist, he, too, would enjoy boarding school. It is the sensitive child (often a natural state at the age of 7) who should stay away. Growing up is hard enough without the extra angst of expulsion from the home and the curious bifocal existence that follows.

Regardless of his age or propensity for hard knocks, Harry enjoys at Hogwarts a strangely enlightened regime. There is a sense that those in authority are interested in his welfare. Headmaster Albus Dumbledore is revered; Madam Pomfrey, the nurse, can work magic. In my day, pastoral care after the age of 13 was the business of a housemaster rarely seen outside prayers or mealtimes and his 60-something housekeeper. Bullying was endemic although on the wane in the enlightened '70s, a period of reaction against some of the traditional brutalities. (My father was astonished to find that as teenagers we were addressing each other by first names.)

Harry was more or less protected from hardcore abuse at the hands of his schoolmates by an ingenious "sorting" system -- the magical segregation of children into houses by type -- practiced at Hogwarts. Harry gets to share his life with a more or less like-minded bunch of Gryffindors. The worst trial of real-life boarding school is mixing 24 hours a day with an unsorted crowd of HufflePuffs, Ravenclaws and Slytherins. The only advantage is that relentless exposure to bad hats (think Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle) teaches some early lessons in conflict avoidance.

Another happy mystery in Potter's education is the source of his school tuition. Even when conditions were Spartan -- we bathed in tin tubs -- our fees were big enough to chew a big hole out of any banker's or lawyer's income. Today it can cost 15,000 pounds (almost $23,000) a year to keep a child at a top-flight school. One presumes that Hogwarts offers generous scholarships. How else can Pa Weasley fund the schooling of five kids simultaneously on a civil servant's salary?

Crucially, Hogwarts takes girls, a type more or less unknown to the British boarding male of the '70s and still introduced only in limited numbers. Harry and best mate Ron may have their differences with Hermione but at least they're friends. At 11, my capacity for anything so tricky as simple friendship with a girl was still a decade or so away.

Of course, there are some similarities. Take the Hogwarts attitude to the outside world. For us, the kids who went home every night to mum's cooking, sympathy and a spell in front of the TV inhabited a parallel universe, forgotten rather than envied or scorned. They were just different: They were Muggles.

And the sports obsession. Harry may not look the superjock -- remember the nerdy specs and spiky hair -- but he's a natural Quidditch player and so on the fast track to social success. Spot on. Games fetishism is a hazard at any boys school, but at a British boarding school it's reinforced by tradition and convenience. Games with wacky rules (we played a variant of soccer with the pitch enclosed in netting) enhance a school's distinction, and some way must be found to occupy those slabs of empty time between lunch and tea.

Lucky Potter, a natural athlete with a turbocharged broomstick. In the '70s, it was just about cool to fake indifference to organized sport, but, as a closet conformist, I'd have traded success in class for a place on almost any team at any level. For their part, the sporty types achieve a success so complete and intense that nothing in later life will ever quite compare. (A wishful tortoise's perspective: The hares may see it differently.)

Next Page: Children return home as polite strangers

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