Spinner's End as home (wasRe: CHAPDISC: HBP 2, Spinner's End

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 142139

Saturniia wrote:
> I think this may be an example of "hiding in plain sight", as much
as anything else.  All the examples you came up with are, or at least
were, situations where the Wizarding home fit the socioeconomic status
of the Muggles living around them. <snip>Snape's probably the
exception, since his home seems to fit the socioeconomic status of his
Muggle parent rather than his magic parent.
> 
> Anyway, my point is that the families blend in with the Muggles around 
> them, and the Muggles are less likely to notice a house than a row, a 
> street than a neighborhood, a village than a town or a city.  The more 
> discreet the Wizarding world is, the fewer Muggles the government has 
> to obliviate, which saves money and manpower.
>
Carol responds;
I can see an adult who can Apparate and Disapparate hiding in plain
sight. But how is the child Severus supposed to do that? Did he spend
his entire out-of-school life in that dreary bedroom? I can't imagine
him wearing Muggle clothes or going to school with Muggle children. At
some point in his childhood, he tries to ride a bucking broom (I've
always assumed that the broom was hexed because Severus is not a
coward and is determined to ride it--a normal broom would have obeyed
his commands.) The laughing girl has to be a witch. (Could she be
Bellatrix? Or Narcissa?) And as I keep saying, Severus came to
Hogwarts at age eleven knowing more hexes than most seventh years. I
can't see him coming from a Muggle background or growing up in a
Muggle neighborhood. The child knew he was a wizard and took advantage
of it, blowing the law against underage magic out of the water. He
must have lived in a home in which magic would go undetected. And to
me that indicates that he must have lived with the Princes, not with
Muggle Tobias, who would never have allowed his young son anywhere
near a wand. And it must have been his mother's wand, or that of
another adult wizard, that he practiced with. Children don't get their
wands until their eleventh birthday when they receive their Hogwarts
letter. Either that, or between his eleventh birthday on January 9 and
his entry into Hogwarts as a first year on September 1 of the same
year, he taught himself a lot of spells using his own wand--and still
very much in violation of the Underage Magic law. And if he practiced
his hexes at Spinner's End, a Muggle neighborhood, he would also have
been violating the Statute of Secrecy.

I can't see either young Severus or his mother Eileen "hiding in plain
sight," actually, even with Muggle-repelling charms on the house.
Wouldn't people notice, at the very least, the absence of a TV antenna
and a car in a 1960s house, even if they couldn't tell that the house
was lit by candles rather than electricity? Wouldn't they notice a
woman or a boy wearing what looked like a priest's cassock or a
graduation gown? The neighborhood seems deserted *now* and Snape is
clever enough to conceal his presence, but I really don't see how he
could have done so as a child.

But if he did spend his entire non-Hogwarts childhood in that dreary
house, somehow getting away with underage magic, no wonder he looked
"pallid," like a plant deprived of light. And no wonder he had no
social skills!

Carol