Mr. 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 firm called Grunnings, which
made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. 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 neighbors. The Dursleys had a small
son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer 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 neighbors 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.