J.K Rowling - her autobiography

Part One

I was born in Chipping Sodbury General Hospital, which I think is appropriate for someone who collects funny names. My sister, Di, was born just under two years later, and she was the person who suffered my first efforts at story-telling (I was much bigger than her and could hold her down). Rabbits loomed large in our early story-telling sessions; we badly wanted a rabbit.

Di can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called Rabbit. He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee. And ever since Rabbit and Miss Bee, I have wanted to be a writer, though I rarely told anyone so. I was afraid they'd tell me I didn't have a hope.

We moved house twice when I was growing up. The first move was from Yate (just outside Bristol) to Winterbourne (on the other side of Bristol). A gang of children including myself and my sister used to play together up and down our street in Winterbourne. Two of the gang members were a brother and sister whose surname was Potter. I always liked the name, but then I was always keener on my friends' surnames than my own ('Rowling' is pronounced like "rolling", which used to lead to annoying children's jokes about rolling pins).

When I was nine we moved to Tutshill near Chepstow in the Forest of Dean. We were finally out in the countryside, which had always been my parents' dream, both being Londoners, and my sister and I spent most of our times wandering unsupervised across fields and along the river Wye. The only fly in the ointment was the fact that I hated my new school. It was a very small, very old-fashioned place where the roll-top desks still had ink-wells. My new teacher, Mrs. Morgan, scared the life out of me. She gave me an arithmetic test on the very first morning and after a huge effort I managed to get zero out of ten - I had never done fractions before. So she sat me in the row of desks on her far right. It took me a few days to realise I was in the "stupid" row. Mrs Morgan positioned everyone in the class according to how clever she thought they were; the brightest sat on her left, and everyone she thought was dim sat on the right. I was as far right as you could get without sitting in the playground. By the end of the year, I had been promoted to second left - but at a cost. Mrs Morgan made me swap seats with my best friend, so that in one short walk across the room I became clever but unpopular.