Colin’s Hogwash
1. The Chocolate What Card?
The horizon was barely tinged with pink, but Dennis was already dressed in his new shirt and trousers. He stood at the window barefoot, looking out and breathing in the air redolent of the wildflowers, the cattle’s drying manure, the dew-laden grass and the sharp clean scent of the sea.
It smelled like a wonderful morning. Though it wasn’t.
He winced, not liking the direction of his thoughts. He went back to his bed and sat on its edge. His patent leather loafers shone in the dimness of his lamp like a beacon. It used to belong to his brother.
Below him, he heard his mother puttering around in the kitchen. The room was lighter now. Dennis had no idea he’d been staring blankly for so long. He blinked. With that blink, he took notice of the box whose shadow lay just inches from the loafers.
Dennis held his breath as he disturbed the dust covering the top of the cardboard box. It was chained and padlocked. He smirked at it now, but when he’d been eleven, it had seemed a clever idea. Inside the box was his diary after all.
He hadn’t touched it in three years.
Having no idea at all where the key was, he just ripped one side open after pushing the chain for enough space. Through the space, he wrestled his diary out.
It had been a gift from Aunt Eloise, whose seeming delusion that they were nieces instead of nephews Colin hated.
He wondered what Colin did with his diary. As for him, he did write on it some, and then locked it away, when life began to be too interesting to be logged onto a diary.
His heart thudded in his ribcage with as he leafed through the first few pages. Ah, there it was.
May 14, 1992, Saturday, 6:35 pm
Hello Jim,
Yeah, Mum told me I should name you too. So that’s your name. It’s short and very friendly. Look, I have something to show and entrust to you. I know it hasn’t been long, but you don’t have a tongue or legs or hands, its safe to trust you.
What do you think? I took this photo with Popsy’s Brownie. He said he’ll give it to Colin soon so I seezed my chance to use it one last time. Don’t worry, Nana said she’d get me my own camera. And if she forgets I’d go to Aunt Eloise! Ha! I developt this at Auntie’s basement last week. I’d been hiding it in my underwear drawer all this time, but I couldn’t lock that drawer forever, because Mum’s getting suspicious.
This photo’s the mouse.
Dennis sniggered. Taped beneath his messy scrawl was a picture of his brother in greyscale, but his pout and the round glob on his nose was very sharp in focus. Dennis remembered drawing that mouse nose on his brother with Aunt Eloise’s lipstick. Colin had been napping in the porch swing, knocked out by all the apple pies with which their aunt had stuffed them.
Dennis still wondered why Colin pouted when he slept. He had never asked or told him either. Again, Dennis scowled at his own thoughts and turned his attention back to his diary.
June 28, 1992, Friday, 7:10 pm
Jim!
He’s at it again!
Have I told you about Colin’s quirks yet? He told stories, you know. Aside from being squeal-y. I mean that he’s loud and shrill when he’s happy, not that he ever tells on me. Anyway, sometimes I even wonder if Aunt Eloise was right and that Colin was a niece in a nephew’s body. It’s bad enough the islanders still see us as transplants. My brother had to be ezzentrick as well, bugger. That’s what I heard Miss Gibbons say to my mother today. “He’s rather ezzentrick, and that makes the other children treat him badly at times, but I’ve always known him to be gentle, until now.”
You see, there’s Robert Farrow at school. He’s the son of another dairy farmer here in Alderney. And me and Colin think that’s the reason he’s marked us as targets of his bullying bad breath from the beginning.
The littluns maybe had a practical exam about cattle that morning, cos at lunchtime, we saw a big white Brahman and a little maroon Jersey tethered to the ash tree in the corner of the school yard. They must have been there long enough, cos there were giant lumps of dung around them.
Colin and his classmates were kicking ball with their shirts off. When I entered the school yard, I could hear Farrow shouting insults to my brother’s anatomy from his jowls to his ribs to his bellybutton. Colin ignored him. I guess Farrow hated being ignored, cos when the ball went by the cow-corner of the schoolyard, he went after Colin and shoved him.
There was lots of dung there. I only thanked God Colin wasn’t wearing his shirt. If his pants were the corduroys, though, Mum would kill him.
But Colin grabbed the Brahman.
Farrow just spat and turned away. I told you, though, that my brother was a story-teller and squeal-y.
I was yards off, but I still heard him.
“The cow moved! It sorta jerked its haunches so I grabbed them!”
My classmates beside me sniggered. I groaned.
I heard Farrow’s voice next. “Oh, so you grab haunches when they jerk, do you?”
More sniggers.
Farrow bowed. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you another of Creevey’s Famous Hogwash.”
“You leave my family name out of this,” Colin said. We had always been lectured by our dad about the importance of our name. And yeah, Thomas Creevey also wrote diaries!
“Colin’s Hogwash then,” Farrow said with another bow. But the audience had by then stopped laughing, cos Farrow wasn’t funny anymore and my brother wasn’t that unpopular. Judith Ruth, the editor of the Rag even called him ‘whimsical’, as in Credits of our photos to our whimsical Colin Creevey.
I was sighing with relief when I heard my brother say, “They’re not hogwash.”
I left my perch on one of the first floor corridor benches and ran to my brother. Farrow had turned back by then and I reached them just in time to hear his joovenile singsonging. “The apples peeling themselves for you that time you were sick, the manure lopping back onto the bucket when you tripped on your ugly big feet at the fair, and now this cow you’re dumber than waving her fanny to save you from getting a faceful of dung. You’re ridiculous, Creevey. Give it up. You just like playing it up, don’t you?”
And then Farrow said something about our father. By this time, blood rushed to my ears so maybe that’s why I don’t remember much. But it was nasty. Something about Colin playing up my father’s being from the mainland with cock-and-bull stories, like we were better than anyone else and that was why Colin was saved and obeyed by the apples and manure and cows.
It was ridiculous. Maybe Farrow’s dad was that bitter about the competition. Popsy did say our dad had a dab hand in raising dairy cattle. He even drove around delivering milk to our neighbours even though only a dozen or so of them didn’t have their own cow or two. It was quite beneath him, Popsy said. Dad was from Oxford and he met Mum at university. When Popsy and Nana decided to retire, they gave the egg farm to Aunt Eloise and the dairy farm to Mum. Mum and Dad moved here. Me and Colin were born here in Alderney. Farrow was the one who was ridiculous. And I wanted to thump him. But see, I couldn’t have reached him even if I acted on my insane impulse. Cos suddenly Farrow flew to one of the dunghills made by the well-fed Brahman and Jersey.
And that’s why I hate Colin right now, cos instead of admitting right out that he’d thrown Farrow there (I’d have been proud), he insisted Farrow just flung himself there of his own accord.
And now my hand’s also aching from writing this all down. Maybe I’d hide his favourite socks again as return-torment.
Dennis skipped several pages’ worth of entries, turning pages almost frantically.
July 15, 1992, Sunday, 8 pm
Hey Jim,
We were having Sunday breakfast when Colin regald us with another ‘hogwash’. Popsy, Nana and Aunt Eloise all nearly swallowed their false teeth when he entered from the morning’s milking of his pet cow, Merna, and told us he’d had a letter delivered by an owl. Bugger. As if owls would rouse at daytime.
He waved the letter at us but didn’t show the content to us. I saw green ink and curly writing. Where on earth did he get such ink and who wrote it? He also made a show reading the letter. His eyes got round and round and threatened to pop out onto his pancakes.
And then after Nana forced him to drink water and even rubbed his cheeks cos they’d gone so white, Colin said in one breath: “ItsayshereI’mawizardandthatI’m acceptedtoHogwashCoolandthatProfessorDumbeldoortheHeadmasterwilltalktoyoulaterat6 o’clockandthatallyouneedtodowasholdtheChocolateFrogCard.”
So you get an idea of why we just stared at him for about a minute, Jim. I only deciphered it cos Colin was just here and we talked. I talked, he babbled. It didn’t make sense.
Dad just said, “The chocolate what card?”
And Nana said, “Dumbwaiter, Colin, not dumb-door. What about dumbwaiters, then, my buck?”
But Colin only shook his head and shoved the letter under Mum and Dad’s noses. Aunt Eloise was rubbing circles on Colin’s back with one hand and rubbing his cheeks with the other. Mum and Dad looked at each other after reading and then laughed real good.
Colin went up his room and didn’t go out ever since until awhile ago when he came here to my room.
He said, “Den, that letter said I’m a wizard and that I’m accepted at hog warts school of witchcraft and wizardry.”
I’d asked him to repeat it, that’s why I could spell it now. Hog warts. My foot. Where did he come up with that? And then I smiled. I said to him, I said, “Look, I know you don’t wanna be at Auntie’s during the fair, but Mum and Dad’ll still see you anyway even if you sneak.”
You see, Colin’s been banned by Mum from the fair cos of his run in with Farrow. We’re usually tasked with disposing of the buckets of dung from the horses and cows we trade, but Popsy and Nana were real generous lining our pockets so we nearly always rode the rides and shot with air rifles and even bought jars of marbles. Colin must be sore missing that. And this must be a plan to sneak back, I thought, an excuse to be able to hide maybe in the port, away from Auntie.
But he really believed that letter ‘delivered by owl’. He said he’d given the chocolate frog card to Mum and Dad. And that the chocolate frog had jumped before he caught it and ate it. Really. I just patted his shoulder. His imagination was wilder when he was lonesome.
It was going on 6 then and we’d just finished dinner. Colin said Mum and Dad would be talking with Professor Dumbledore anytime soon.
“He says in the letter that he has business with an old friend Nicholas and can’t leave him yet so it was handy to send us all a chocolate frog card he has enchanted so he can talk to our parents that way.”
“What do you mean ‘us’?” I asked.
“Oh, other students, I reckon.”
My coo-coo clock coo-coo-d the hour and then it was silent for a moment before we heard Mum shriek.
Author’s Note: A Brahman is a breed of beef cattle; a Jersey is one of dairy cattle.
I’ll remind you, too, guys, that Dennis is nine years old in his diary in this chapter. It is difficult enough watching his tenses (whew!), but I let him have some adorable slips in spelling and numerals. You can’t italicise your handwriting either, so he uses underlining.
Before DH’s release, one of my ‘predictions’ is that Harry and co. will be able to confer with Albie through a Chocolate Frog Card, handier than his portrait. I realise this dream here. ^_^
For non-Brits like me: Alderney is one of the Channel Islands (along with Jersey, Guernsey and Sark) off the coast of UK. Potatoes are their principal export. But the Channel Islands are also known for their unique breeds of cattle (the Jersey and the Guernsey originated here). I love joining the Challenges because of the research. I’ve researched dairy cattle and the Channel Islands are mentioned and voila.
~>Forgive the liberty if it’s been mentioned by JKR where the Creeveys live. In this story, I also interpreted Colin’s “My Dad’s a milkman” as a rather careless and excitable blurt. Can you see the fields he passes here as he delivers his milk to neighbours? More charming than driving a truck through city/suburb traffic, no?
Brownie: a type of box camera, (the earliest type used by the general public, designed by British Kenneth Henry Grange), the one Colin dazzles Ron and Harry with in the COS movie.
I love poor Colin. I’ve made another little tribute to him in my other story Complete Faith in You. Thank you for reading. Tell me what you think!