[HPforGrownups] On the other hand (was Re: Disliked Uncle Vernon)

[manawydan]

No: HPFGUIDX 92487

Kneasy wondered:
>Has anyone ever considered the situation from Vernon's viewpoint?

>We  don't have fat dossier  on Vernon, just a few facts from which we
>can base some reasonable suppositions. Family man, wife and one
>child, works hard, probably at senior middle management level, sole
>wage-earner in the household, lives in the suburbs, a conformist.

It's interesting to speculate on Vernon and Petunia's courtship, of course.
There are, sadly, many things we don't know: whether Lily or Petunia is the
older, when exactly V & P met, how long they were courting before they
married, and how long married before little Dudley came along.

Also when exactly the Evans parents died. We know from last week's chat that
JKR has said there's no significance to their death from a plot point of
view (damn, that's one of my pet theories down the dunny) but it's also
almost certain that their deaths were untimely (after all, they couldn't
have been so old when Lily was born to die of old age when she was a
teenager/young adult).

Petunia gives the impression of being older than she necessarily is, but
maybe she actually is the elder sister, jealous of Lily for her magical
talent, resentful of her parents for fostering Lily. Vernon must also be
sufficiently mature in years to have got to the kind of position that he has
in Grunnings by the time that Harry is foisted on them.

Was the internal tension between Lily and Petunia an Issue when V & P were
courting? It sounds very much as if it was. So Vernon had a good reason to
be against wizardry and magic, he was taking the side of the girl he loved.

Vernon also can't be _that_ bad at his job. When we meet him he's in a
management position, sufficiently senior to do a lot of shouting, in a
manufacturing company. And the company survives not one but two severe
slumps in manufacturing, the ones in the 1980s and 1990s, and is still going
as we speak. That's no mean feat and probably needed some pretty good
business acumen on Vernon's part. Not, though, prospering enough for the
Dursleys to trade up from Privet Drive to somewhere more exclusive, he's
obviously not made it on to the Board.

And as you say, his cosy little world gets shaken at intervals by the one
thing that he and Petunia have tried to put out of sight for x number of
years.

That's the good side. And I'm sure that if Harry had never come along, he'd
have lived his unremarkable suburban life and died an unremarkable suburban
death.

Enough to put him on the side of the good guys? Probably not. But a person
in his own right.

Interesting that JKR hates him more than Umbridge.

Cheers

Ffred

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