Joanne Rowling always loved trains. Maybe it was because her parents met on a train. It was a chilly day, and her mother, Anne, said she was cold. A stranger named Peter offered her his coat. A year later they were married.
Jo was born at Yate General Hospital on July 31, 1965, in Gloucestershire, England. Two years later she had a little sister named Diana, or Di.
Jo made up stories to tell her little sister. In one story, Di fell down a rabbit hole. Luckily the family of rabbits who lived in the hole fed her strawberries. As they got older, Jo and Di played games. Their favorite was the cliff game. In that game, Jo dangled from the top stair of the staircase. She pretended she was on a cliff. She pleaded with Di to rescue her before she fell. But Di never helped. Finally Jo would fall to the floor, “dead.” Then they would start all over again. Only this time Di would be the one hanging off the cliff.
When they weren’t playing games, Jo and Di were often fighting. During one fight, Jo threw a battery at her sister, leaving a scar just above her eyebrow.
“I didn’t mean to hit her,” Jo explained to her mother. “I thought she would duck.” But this excuse didn’t stop her mother from being angrier than Jo had ever seen her.
When Jo was nine, her family moved to a little village called Tutshill. Tutshill sits on the eastern bank of the River Wye. It is also near a big forest called the Forest of Dean. Perhaps even better than the river and the forest was an old castle on a cliff not far from Jo’s house! It is called the Chepstow Castle.
IN 1066, WILLIAM OF NORMANDY CROSSED THE CHANNEL FROM FRANCE TO INVADE ENGLAND. ONCE HE BECAME KING, WILLIAM STARTED BUILDING CASTLES ALL OVER ENGLAND. CHEPSTOW WAS THE VERY FIRST CASTLE HE BUILT. IT WAS IN AN IMPORTANT SPOT. THE CASTLE GUARDED THE MAIN RIVER CROSSING FROM ENGLAND INTO WALES. HUNDREDS OF YEARS EARLIER, THE ROMANS HAD A FORT IN THE SAME PLACE. WILLIAM USED BRICKS FROM THE ROMAN FORT IN THE MAIN ARCHWAY OF HIS CASTLE. IT IS THE OLDEST MEDIEVAL CASTLE IN GREAT BRITAIN. IT CONTAINS WHAT IS PROBABLY THE OLDEST MEDIEVAL TOILET!
Living in the country was a dream come true for Jo’s parents, who were both from London. Her mother was a lab technician. Her father worked at an aircraft engine plant.
The river, the forest, and the castle gave Jo even more ideas for her stories. So did the many books she read. Some of her favorites were The Little White Horse, a story about a girl who ends a long feud in her magical family, and The Chronicles of Narnia, about a group of children who rule a secret, magical kingdom.
One thing that Jo didn’t like about Tutshill was her school, Tutshill Primary. Her teacher, Mrs. Morgan, was very strict. As Jo remembered, she seated all the children in her class according to how smart she thought they were. The bright students sat on Mrs. Morgan’s left. The students Mrs. Morgan thought were “dim” sat on her right. On the first day of class, Mrs. Morgan gave everyone a test on fractions. Jo had never studied fractions before. She failed the test. Mrs. Morgan made Jo sit on the “bad” side of the room. In an article called “The Not Especially Fascinating Life So Far of J. K. Rowling,” Jo said she sat “as far right as you could get without sitting in the playground.”
Jo always remembered how awful she felt that day. She didn’t think the test was fair. Years later, she would write about another teacher, Severus Snape, doing similar things to Harry Potter.
Jo wasn’t sad to leave Tutshill Primary behind. At 11, she went to Wyedean Comprehensive School. At first Jo was afraid. She’d heard some scary stories about what happened to students there. For instance, she heard that they stuffed new students’ heads down the toilets the first day.
No one stuck Jo’s head down the toilet at Wyedean. But one of the toughest girls in school did pick a fight with her. Even though Jo was quiet and a good student, she fought back against the bigger girl. She became famous for standing up to the bully. But standing up to the bully came with a price. In “Not Especially,” Jo said that she spent the next few weeks “peering nervously around corners” in case the bully was waiting for her.
Jo didn’t like fighting in real life. But she loved fighting battles in her imagination. At lunchtime she told her friends stories in which they were the heroes. Made-up adventures, Jo was discovering, could be more fun than the real thing.
