The GoF Train Scene (was:Re: Humanity, Kant, Caricatures, and Draco)

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 146681

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Peg DiGrazia <pegdigrazia at y...> 
wrote:

Peg:
>   I think they all knew, or thought they knew, what happened by the 
end of the year simply because word gets around.  No one has to make 
an official statement about something like Crouch!Moody for a group 
of hundreds of teenagers who spend all their time together to work it 
out for themselves, or at least to come up with rumors that turn out 
to be pretty close to the truth.  I mean, Harry appears with Cedric's 
body, both Karkaroff and "Moody" disappear that same night, and a few 
days later DD tells you that LV killed Cedric...  Even if you didn't 
know about Crouch, wouldn't you assume Moody had turned out to be a 
maniac?  And if one student got an owl from a parent who works at St. 
Mungo's saying that Moody had been brought in for an examination (as 
I assume he would have been,) and didn't he look awful, all skin and 
bones and with a bald patch on the side of his head, that information 
would have travelled across the student body in a day.  There's not 
much you can do to squelch the
>  rumor mill.

Geoff:
This correlates with what happened at the end of the "Philsopher's 
Stone":

'Harry swallowed and looked around him. He realised he must be in the 
hospital wing. He was lying in a bed with white linen sheets and next 
to him was a table piled high with what looked like half the sweet-
shop.
"Tokens from your friends and admirers," said Dumbledore, 
beaming. "What happened down in the dungeons between you and 
Professor Quirrell is a complete secret, so, naturally, the whole 
school knows...."'

(PS "The Man with Two Faces" p.214 UK edition)

Sounds a bit like our Secret Service....
:-)

Mark you, the rumour mill can, like Burns' mouse "gang aft agley".... 
Some information became subject to a little artist's licence:

'The notices had gone up all around the school overnight but they did 
not explain how every single person within the castle seemed to know 
that Dumbledore had overcome two Aurors, the High Inquisitor, the 
Minister for Magic and his Junior Assistant to escape. No matter 
where Harry went within the castle, the sole topic of conversation 
was Dumbledore's flight and though some of the details may have gone 
awy in the retelling (Harry overheard one second-year girl assuring 
another that Fudge was now lying in St.Mungo's with a pumpkin for a 
head) it was surprising how accurate the rest of their information 
was. Everybody knew, for instance, that Harry and Marietta were the 
only students to have witnessed the scene in Dumbledore's office and, 
as Marietta was now in the hospital wing, Harry found himself 
besieged with requests to give a first-hand account.'

(OOTP "Snape's Worst Memory" p.550 UK edition)