On Privet Drive in Little Whinging, Surrey, beneath a gloomy sky, identical houses lined the neat street. The neighbors' houses looked just the same as the Dursleys', standing one after another in a row. This dull, boring, quiet place seemed to have nothing to do with magic at all, just like the privet shrub from which the neighborhood took its name—the shrub used to make hedges between suburban houses. When the Dursleys had chosen this place, they had more or less hoped the name would bring them luck, a symbol that would let them be normal people, far away from wizards.
In Harry's bedroom on the second floor, the one with a trapdoor in the door, there was a bed, a wardrobe, and a desk. Hedwig lived in the cage on the desk. Scattered around the room were some books that might have belonged to Dudley but that Harry had never seen him open, along with a few of Dudley's old toys that were beyond repair—after 1991, Harry's Uncle Vernon had given Harry the room Dudley had used for storage.
It had not been out of kindness. Back then, after Allen and Flag's visit, and after the first Hogwarts acceptance letter addressed to Harry Potter had arrived, with the address written on it: "Mr. Harry Potter, The Cupboard Under the Stairs, 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey," Vernon had been terrified, because he had realized that people from the wizarding world might already know just how badly Harry was being mistreated.
So he had moved Harry into Dudley's spare bedroom upstairs to keep himself out of trouble.
Harry was stacking his odds and ends into his trunk. On the desk beside him stood a broken shard of mirror, and Sirius Black's face watched from inside it as Harry stuffed everything