Joanne showed signs of becoming an author at an early age. As a small child, she told stories to her sister, Dianne, which mostly were about rabbits, since as Rowling recalls, “Rabbits loomed large in my imagination.” One of these stories was about Di, two years younger than Rowling, in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside. Di and Joanne both longed for a rabbit.
The first “book” Jo wrote was “Rabbit.” Written during her rabbit phase, it told of a rabbit called Rabbit who gets the measles and is visited by faithful friends including Miss Bee, a giant bee. “Very imaginative,” she now says. Ever since then, age six, Jo longed to be an author. “It was my secret ambition, but I rarely told anybody so, because I thought they would say I didn’t have a hope.”

The Rowlings moved twice in Joanne’s childhood. The first move was from Yate to Winterbourne in 1973. She and her sister used to played with a “gang” of children, including two; Ian and Vikki Potter. They enjoyed playing games about magic. According to Ian, “The girls, including Joanne, used to dress up as witches. And the boys, obviously, would dress up as wizards.

Now Mr. Potter is a damp-proofer in Bristol, not as mischievous as he once was. “I was one for tricks in my younger days -- most evenings I would come home at a couple of hours late,” he recalls. Vikki Potter, Ian’s sister, 31, and a software sales director says: “Ian was the perfect inspiration for a mischief-making wizard. Once he told me and Joanne to run through wet concrete -- which we did, unaware of the results.” Ian’s father’s comments are: “If there was one member of our family to inspire Joanne to write a story about a wizard called Potter, it would be our Ian. He is OK now, but it has taken him 28 years to grow up.”

This may have had something to do with the famous character of Rowling’s pen. According to Joanne about her own name, Rowling: “I always liked the name, but then, I was keener on my friends’ surnames than my own.” Often mistaken, Rowling’s name is said “r-OW-ling”, but the correct way is “r-OH-ling." Unfortunately, this lead to being teased about “rolling pins," and later on as a teacher, “rolling stone."

The Rowlings moved for the second time when Joanne was nine; in 1974 she and her family moved to Tutshill in the Forest of Dean. Being out in the countryside was her parents’ dream, she says, “both being Londoners.” Jo and Di spent most of their time wandering and exploring unsupervised. “The only fly in the ointment,” she explains now, “was my new school, which I hated.”
 

Her “new school," Tutshill Primary was actually not so “new." The old-fashioned school was complete with desks with inkwells. Jo’s new teacher, Mrs. Morgan “scared the life out of me,” Ms. Rowling recalls. “She gave me an arithmetic test on the first day of school, and after a huge effort I managed to get none out of ten -- I had never done fractions before.”

After Tutshill Primary, Jo went on to Wyedean Comprehensive. She heard the same rumor that Dudley told Harry about Stonewall High, but it never happened in her knowledge.

Her favorite subjects were English and languages, though out of the two she preferred English. She says, “I was rubbish at sports... I am the only person I know who can break their arm playing netball.” (Surprising next to Harry’s talents on the Quidditch field.) Another sign of a future author was that Jo told friends as quiet and studious friends as she was long adventurous stories of them doing daring and heroic deeds which they actually wouldn’t have dreamed of doing -- they were all “too swotty.” She describes herself as a child as being, short, freckly, near-sighted, and quiet or a “swotty little git with National Health spectacles.”

Yet despite her “swottiness,” she does admit having a fight with another girl, but it unfolds that “I didn’t have a choice, she started hitting me and it was hit back or lie down and play dead. The truth was my locker was behind me and held me up. I spent weeks afterwards peering nervously around corners in case she was waiting to     ambush me.”

Jo says, “I became less quiet as I got older. For one thing, I got contact lenses, which made me less afraid of being hit in the face.”

After school, Joanne went to England’s Exeter University, majoring French at the impulse of her parents, who hoped she would become an interpreter or a translator. She regretted this afterwards, calling it “a big mistake. I had listened too hard to my parents who thought languages would lead to a great career as a bilingual secretary. Unfortunately, I am one of the most disorganized people in the world and, as I later proved, the worst secretary ever. All I ever liked about working in an office was being able to type up little bits of stories when no-one was looking.”

She graduated in the 1980’s from Exeter University with a degree in French and Classics.

On a tedious train trip from Manchester to London, Joanne was staring out the window, “...as far as I can remember, I was staring at some cows thinking nothing in particular. Not the most inspiring subject. The idea just came. I cannot tell you why or what triggered it -- if indeed anything triggered it. I saw Harry incredibly clearly. The idea basically at that point was wizard school, and I saw Harry very, very, plainly.” She also says that, “Harry strolled into my head, fully-formed. I still don’t know he came from. ...the idea for Harry just fell into my head. At that point it was essentially the idea for boy who didn’t know he was a wizard, and the wizard school he ended up going to...”

Jo had no pen nor paper to write with, and here she was her best story idea. The trip lasted four hours, and her mind was overflowing with ideas. “As soon as I got home, I scribbled and scribbled, using up sheets of paper.”

The Rowling family has an interesting thing about trains. Her parents, Peter and Ann, met on train. On another train, Peter proposed to Ann. Because of this, “King’s Cross has always been a very romantic place for me,” Jo said, explaining why she chose it as the magical entrance to Hogwarts.

Three months after Jo’s graduation, her mother, Ann, died at age 45 of multiple sclerosis. “She was a compulsive, continual reader and that rubbed of on me. I had no idea that MS would hit her so quickly. And I wasn’t there. That stirs up such guilt. She knew I wrote, but she never read any of it. Can you imagine how much I regret that? There’s a chapter in the book where Harry sees his dead parents in a magic mirror, and I knew that if hadn’t died I would have treated that a lot less seriously.”

At age twenty-six she gave up offices completely and moved to Portugal to teach Portuguese children English. This is where “rolling pins” matured in to “rolling stone”.  In Portugal, she met Jorge, a media journalist. They got married in 1990 and Jo became pregnant a few years later. In 1993, she gave birth to a little girl she named Jessica, after her heroine, Jessica Mitford. "I read Hons and Rebels at fourteen and have never been the same," she claims.

Three and a half months after Jessica’s birth, Jorge and Joanne got divorced. Jo moved to Scotland to be close to her sister, Di.

One rainy afternoon, she read the first four chapters to Di. “It’s possible if she hadn’t laughed, I would have set the whole thing on one side,” Ms. Rowling says presently.  This time was the time of her life she called her “bad patch.” She was poor and went on the dole.

She and Jessica lived in a little flat. It was heated, unlike some claims that it had no heat. “I must get the record straight,” Jo announced. “I did not go to cafés because the flat wasn’t heated. I am not as so stupid to live in Edinburgh without heat.”

Instead, the reason she went to cafés to write was because Jessica needed to be asleep to let Jo write. First she would push Jessica around in her pram until she fell asleep. Then she would dug in the nearest coffee-shop and scribble furiously on scraps of paper. "She was a funny sight," according to the manager of Nicholson.

Jo says “I prefer to use black ink over blue ink,” and “in a perfect world I would always use ‘narrow feint’ writing paper,”. That period, six months, was not "a perfect world.”

“It was the pits,” she as she would put it.

Many people ask her where her ideas for names come from. Some she makes up, and she collects funny names. “Snape” is a small town in England that she once visited. “Minerva” is a Roman goddess.

She says, “Some of it’s really easy. Some of it I worked hard for. ‘Quidditch’ took ages; completely on a whim, I wanted a word that started with a ‘Q’. Malfoy I made up. Some words came from Latin. Hedwig was a saint. ‘Dumbledore’ an oblesete English word for bumblebee. ‘Hagrid’ is an obscure you’d use if you’d had a bad night. I like inventing words, and I like odd words.”

“I had no intention, no desire, to remain on benefits. It’s the most soul-destroying thing. I don’t want to dramatize, but there were nights when, though Jessica ate, I didn’t. The suggestion that you would deliberately make your self-entitled... you’d have to be a complete idiot. “ Ms. Rowling goes on to say about her “bad-patch”:
“I was a graduate, I had skills, I knew that my prospects long-term were good. It must be different for women who don’t have that belief and end up in that poverty trap -- it’s the hopelessness of it, the loss of self-esteem. For me, at least, it was six months. I was writing all the time, which really saved my sanity. As soon as Jessie was asleep, I’d reach for pen and paper.

“I was very depressed and having a newborn child made it doubly difficult. The little money I had went on baby gear and all I could afford on house benefit was a freezing, terribly grotty little flat. I simply felt like a non-person, I was so low, and I had to achieve something. Without the challenge I would have gone stark raving mad.”

But she and her mental health survived.

to be continued....

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Quick Glossary of British-English words:

flat = apartment
dole = welfare