Chapter 6: The Institute of Psychiatry
By the next morning Harry was itching to learn more about child abuse than he could glean from the brief brochures and fact sheets that he had so far collected. At the training session the previous evening there had been time for only a relatively few questions and he still had many more.
"What I need is a good book," Harry said to himself as he stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror while shaving. "I need to go to a library." Immediately his mind conjured an image of the Hogwarts library and he almost laughed aloud. The books in Hogwarts library were large, heavy, leatherbound, and written on parchment. Even the newest volumes looked old, and he was sure they didn't address topics of psychology or family relations.
By the time he was eating his breakfast of kippers and toast at the long wooden table in the kitchen, Harry was mulling over where he had seen any Muggle libraries in London. Just off the top of his head, he couldn't think of any in the neighborhood around Grimmauld Place. As he ate, he mentally traced his walking path between Grimmauld Place and the Ministry of Magic, but again he could not recall passing any libraries.
What do I know about London? he asked himself as he chewed his food and sipped his juice. Restaurants and bars, clothing stores, music venues, my friends' homes, the public transportation system, the train station. He envisioned these places, one by one. For having lived in London so long, there's a lot of places I haven't been to yet, he thought. I should make a point of getting out more. Then he realized how silly that thought was, considering that the baby would be arriving in a few weeks, and he grinned. The first place I knew in London was King's Cross train station, he thought to himself. I've been in and out of there so many times. Then it suddenly struck him. Right next to the King's Cross train station. Something he had seen over and over. The British Library.
Harry felt a rising sense of urgency to forge ahead with his search for understanding of what had made him the way he was. The time frame for solving this problem was short because Ginny would be back home by Monday at the latest, and he wanted to know what to tell her. Before leaving for work, he sent a hasty owl to Ginny, saying simply that he loved her, he hoped she was enjoying her time in Devon with her parents, and that he had been keeping busy.
Once at the Ministry of Magic he consulted the duty roster to see if there was an Auror with whom he could trade shifts in order to get Friday free. Trading shifts was something that Aurors occasionally did, and on those rare occasions when Harry requested it, he usually achieved success by offering an attractive bait such as a weekend day. This time he would offer a Sunday for Friday. Before long he had managed to negotiate a trade with Andrew Postlethwaite, who was delighted by the unexpected prospect of spending Sunday with his family. Harry was so pleased at how things were going that he was practically dancing at his desk. I'm on a roll, he thought. He was so eager to get to the British Library that the rest of the day seemed to drag.
Harry was out the door early on Friday morning, walking with confident, rapid strides down the pavement of Grimmauld Place in the cool, fresh air, heading toward the underground station. He was so optimistic about finding what he wanted at the British Library that he had dressed in his Auror's uniform so that he could go into his office at the Ministry of Magic in the afternoon if he felt like it. After all, the British Library was huge, at least from the outside. How many books did it contain? Hundreds of thousands? The book he needed must be there. At the station he crowded into the train car with the other commuters, and during this journey he did look around at his fellow commuters, wondering if they were as eager to reach their destinations as he was to reach his. Most of them stared straight ahead with blank expressions on their faces, while Harry could not help smiling a little. He silently counted off the stations, one by one, until the car arrived at the King's Cross/St. Pancras station, where he stepped off the car onto the platform and up into the street. A short walk west on Euston Road, and he saw the mass of the British Library looming up on his right.
There was a wide, brick-paved courtyard in front of the library's main entrance, adorned with sculptures. Harry stood for a few minutes under the morning sky, gazing at the sculptures, especially the one in the form of a giant chained book. He knew that in medieval times, before the invention of the printing press, hand-written books were considered so valuable that they were chained to their shelves. He raised his glance to take in the facade of the library building itself. He knew that the books inside were not chained, but the knowledge they contained was just as valuable.
Harry walked up to the main doors and entered the lobby. Although the library had only just opened for the morning, there was a fair number of people entering, walking briskly through the lobby as if they were quite familiar with their destinations, not moving slowly and gazing around as a tourist would do, indeed, as Harry himself was doing. The lobby was paved with squares of gray and white tiles, and boxy white pillars displayed colorful placards. Exactly where to go was not instantly obvious. Harry looked around, focusing on the details of everything in the lobby, and located the "Welcome to the British Library" stand, with brochures and maps that would doubtless make everything clear.
But the brochure and map proved to be a big disappointment. Reading them, Harry discovered that the British Library was not a lending library as he had expected. It seemed to have two components: it was like a book museum with exhibits of historic manuscripts, and it was a closed collection of books that were, for all purposes, inaccessible to him. To actually see the books, one had to apply for a Reader's Pass at the Reader Registration Office and provide information that Harry could not provide: personal ID with signature and proof of address, such as a driving license, student card, business card or professional membership card, and full details of the books or materials he wanted to see. To Harry, these books were as unavailable as if they had actually been chained to the shelves.
Harry felt crushed. He had built up this trip in his mind, so sure that he was on the right track, and now, nothing. He looked again at the library floor map in his hand and saw that there were areas on the first floor labeled "The Sir John Ritblat Gallery: Treasures of the British Library" and "Folio Society Gallery". Maybe these would be interesting to see, some other time; maybe he could bring Ginny here to see them, but now he didn't have the heart to even glance at them. His eye wandered to the spectacle of a glass bookcase, about three stories high, filled with ancient-looking leather-bound books. The placard in front of this exhibit identified it as the personal collection of Sir Hans Sloane, who in the seventeenth century had donated his entire library, a huge (for the era) number of books, to found the British Library. Harry stared through the glass at the books, trying to decipher the titles on the spines, curious as to what types of books Sir Hans had collected.
A voice at his elbow suddenly said, "That's quite a pile of books, isn't it?"
Harry turned his head and saw a middle-aged, rather stocky man standing there. Harry looked back at the glassed-in exhibit again.
"It reminds me of the books in the library of my old school."
The man turned to Harry and chuckled. "Didn't care much for your old school, did you?"
Harry had meant his remark literally, that these books looked like books at Hogwarts, but he realized that the older man assumed he was speaking metaphorically.
"My old school was ... pretty traditional," he explained, smiling.
"And you young fellows like things more modern, don't you?" the man asked heartily.
"Yes, I guess we do," Harry agreed, nodding his head.
"Are you here to do research?" the stocky man asked, and it occurred the Harry that his Auror's uniform made him look professorial.
"Not exactly," Harry said with a sigh. "This is the first time I've ever been here, if you can believe it, and I was hoping I could just walk into the stacks and look for what I wanted, but it turns out you can't do that."
"Oh, it's not that hard," countered the other man. "You just go down that corridor over there," and he pointed with his hand, "to the Reader Registration Office, and they'll issue you a pass."
'"I read about that in this brochure," Harry explained, holding out the brochure in his hand, "but it says you have to ask for specific books or materials, and the truth is, I just need to walk up and down the aisles, seeing what's there."
"Oh," said the man, and a moment later he added, "In that case, tell you what you want to do. You want to go to Foyle's Bookstore in Charing Cross Road. They've got thousands of books too, maybe as many as they've got here, but they're all out on shelves that you can see, all modern stuff, not like this lot," and he jerked his thumb toward the exhibit of antique books behind the glass, with a twinkle in his eye, "and you can browse through them until you find what you need."
"Thank you very much," Harry said gratefully. "I'll do exactly that." He took his spiral-bound notebook from his inside coat pocket. "What was the name of the bookstore again?"
"Foyle's," said the older man. "F-O-Y-L-E-S. A big place, in Charing Cross Road, down near Trafalgar Square. You can't miss it. And if you find a book you like, you can buy it and take it home. Can't do that here!", and he laughed at his own joke.
"Thanks again, " Harry said, putting his notebook and pen away. "I'll go right now."
"You won't be needing that coat much longer, son," the man called out to him as he headed toward the street. "It's gonna be a hot one."
Harry hopped aboard the next underground train heading south and rode to the Charing Cross station. The advice of the man at the British Library turned out to be sound; Foyle's bookstore was close by and easy to find. The name was displayed prominently in big block letters over the door. As Harry entered, he could tell that this was a vast bookstore, and instinctively he looked about for a stack of maps to guide his steps.
The map indicated there were four floors of bookshelves, and it labeled the various areas on each floor with the categories of books to be found there. Harry wasn't sure which category was his goal - health? crime? medical? - but the map also indicated the location of an information booth, so he negotiated his way through the areas of New Titles and Fiction, past the lifts, and found the booth, where a young man answered his query by directing him down a staircase behind the booth to the lower floor, Medical area.
There were rows of bookshelves full of hardbound and paperbound books. Harry was elated. He walked quickly along the aisles, scanning the titles, passing sections of books about purely physical topics like diabetes and chronic lung disease, and soon found an area containing titles that pertained to child abuse. He pulled one book off the shelf at random and began flipping through the pages, reading sections here and there to get a handle on what the book contained. Then he replaced it on the shelf and checked out another one, and another, and another. There were several dozen books on the general topic of child abuse, and Harry began to see the same themes repeated over and over. Discussions of the history of the recognition of the problem of child abuse, the laws concerning the handling of abuse cases, statistics about abuse, descriptions of abuse. Some books were case histories of individual families.
Harry spent more than an hour looking through these books, and he still didn't find exactly what he wanted. All the authors seemed to be writing multiple parallel versions of the same few ideas, and Harry was not finding much that would help him to understand himself. Maybe no one has written the book I want, he thought sadly. He wasn't exactly sure what that book would look like, but he felt certain he would recognize it if he saw it.
There was a cashier's desk in this room, and the middle-aged man who manned it left his desk and approached Harry. Harry looked up from the book in his hand and wondered if the cashier was going to remind him that this was a shop, not a library. But as the man came near he simply asked in a pleasant voice, "Is there something I can do to help you?"
That might have been a rhetorical question, a mere conversation-opener, but Harry chose to take it literally.
"I hope so," he replied. "I see that you have many titles on child abuse, but I'm not seeing what I want. Something in more depth, maybe, about the mindset of abusers and victims, something about the basic principles of what's going on."
"Our books are selected for a general audience," the cashier said, "but you may be needing something more professional. If you haven't seen anything here that meets your needs," and he indicated the long expanse of the shelves with a wave of his hand, " I would suggest that you try the library of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College. Their resources are vast. If they don't have what you need, it doesn't exist."
'Another trip, Harry thought. Well, at least the day is still fairly young. It's still before noon. But no chance of getting back to the Ministry of Magic for the afternoon.
"Thank you for the suggestion. Can you tell me where that is?" asked Harry.
"Come with me," said the cashier, and he walked back to his desk, Harry following close behind. The cashier took a big metropolitan London street map from a shelf under the counter and spread it out in front of Harry. "This is where we are," he indicated, tapping a spot on the map with the tip of his pen, "and this is where the Institute of Psychiatry is," flipping the map over and tapping a spot south of the Thames, in Southwark.
Harry was dismayed to discover that the Institute of Psychiatry was not just a short tube ride away. "That's rather far," he remarked.
"Are you traveling by private car today?" the cashier inquired.
"No," Harry reluctantly admitted, "I'm traveling by public transportation." I wish I could just Apparate, he thought, but I'm totally unfamiliar with this destination.
"You can get there by bus or by railway," the cashier continued, "but the railway is simpler and easier. Take the train at the Charing Cross station," and he tapped the front side of the map, "and change at the London Bridge station." Another tap. "After you change, go all the way to the Denmark Hill station." His pen tip described a sweeping arc on the back side of the map. "The Institute of Psychiatry is fortunately very close to the train station. You just walk east on Windsor, north on Grove Lane, and west on De Crespigny Park." He traced this brief walking journey with his pen again.
Harry took out his little notebook and made a rough sketch map of this trip, jotting down the names of the streets.
"Thank you very much," he said, as the cashier refolded the map and put it away. "I appreciate your help." He reached out his hand to the cashier, who took it in a firm handshake and gave Harry a smile.
As Harry went back up the stairs and out into the street, he thought, Well, this is it. If it's not at the Institute of Psychiatry, then it doesn't exist. The cashier said so.
He walked along the Strand to the railway station. There were little food kiosks in the station, but Harry decided not to stop to eat because he suspected that the trains between London Bridge and Denmark Hill did not run extremely often, and he did not want to miss the train by five minutes because he had taken time to eat.
When the train stopped at Denmark Hill station, Harry stood up and stepped off the train onto the little platform. He glanced again at the hand-drawn map that he had been carrying in his pocket, then strode off along Windsor Walk to Grove Lane, turned left, and passed a junior school. The sun shone down on the bright green grass around the school building, but no children were playing there. Turning left again into De Crespigny Park, he passed a new modern building. The blue and white sign in front identified it as the Henry Welcome Building for Psychology. The next building was his destination, the Institute of Psychiatry. He stopped on the sidewalk and gazed at the building for a minute, contemplating what he might find inside. Then he took a deep breath and walked up to the entrance.
There were four glass doors and the words INSTITUTE OF PSYCHIATRY on the lintel over them in block letters. Taped to the doors were notices of upcoming events. A man and a woman who appeared to be about his age were leaving the building as he entered, and he noted that their clothing was more casual than his own Auror uniform of black trousers, white shirt, gray tie, and black topcoat. He hoped he looked professorial. A building directory on the wall of the foyer told him that the library was on the second floor. The building was busy with people going back and forth in the corridor. He climbed the staircase to the second floor, and it did not take him long to locate the library. Through its glass doors he could see a very large room with book shelves all around the periphery and reading desks centrally, with tall lamps with white shades on the desks. There were several dozen people at the desks, all reading and writing, and a few wandering by the bookshelves. But there was a hurdle to overcome, a receptionist sitting at a desk just inside the door, and a sign that Harry could read even at this distance through the glass of the door, directing library users to show official university ID.
Harry stepped backwards into the hallway and considered his possibilities. He could enter without an ID card, unseen, by using a Disillusion charm or Apparate into the room beyond the reception desk, but both those actions would present problems regarding his sudden reappearance at the far side of the room. He could Confound the receptionist and cause her to allow him to enter without ID. Or he could create an ID card for himself by Transfiguring another object. The last idea seemed like the best and simplest, so he went back downstairs to the foyer, picked up a brochure from a rack near the entrance door, and carried it a short way down the hall to the men's loo. In the privacy of a toilet stall, Harry Transfigured the brochure into an ID card of King's College, complete with a photo of himself. He inspected the card and grinned with satisfaction; the photo on the card grinned back at him. No, that won't do, he thought with amusement, imagining the receptionist's reaction if he failed to keep a straight face while presenting his card, so he assumed a solemn expression and put a Quiescence charm on the card to keep the photo motionless.
Back in the upstairs hallway, Harry confidently pushed open the library's glass doors, walked in, and showed his ID card to the receptionist. She was a young woman with short, dark hair, and in between checking IDs or answering questions she was reading a book. Harry wondered if she was a student herself, tending the reception desk as a part-time job. She glanced quickly at the card and then at Harry's face, while he tried to maintain a solemn look that matched the photo, and then she nodded wordlessly and went back to her reading.
Harry walked forward and gazed around. The bookshelves seemed to stretch out endlessly. There must be thousands of books here, he thought. It was overwhelming. Where to start? He walked to one side of the room where there was a rack with magazines displayed in ranks. When Harry got closer he could see that they were professional journals arranged in alphabetical order. His eyes swept over their titles and stopped on a journal entitled "Child Abuse and Neglect: The International Journal". Merlin's beard! he thought. They have an entire journal on that one topic. He picked it up, knowing it was not the basic explanation of child abuse that he was seeking, but curious about what kind of articles it contained. Opening the journal to its page of contents, he scanned the titles of the articles. Something about violent delinquency. Something about "poly-victimization". Something about a longitudinal analysis of risk factors (he didn't even know what that meant).
He placed the journal back on the rack and decided that he needed help. He would ask a woman, not a man, and hope that she would have sympathy for him. His eyes roamed around the room and alit on a young woman sitting alone at a reading desk. He walked up to her desk and sat down in an adjacent chair, leaned forward, and whispered, "Excuse me. My name is Harry. This is my first time at this library and I'm unfamiliar with locating materials. Could you spare a moment to help me find out what section of the bookshelves I need to go to?" He looked at her with what he hoped was an appealing, non-threatening expression so that she would not think he was trying to hit on her, and she smiled slightly and whispered back, "What topic are you looking for?"
"General material on child abuse," Harry whispered.
"The card catalog is on computer," the woman whispered. "Come with me." She pushed back her chair, stood up, and walked across the room to a group of computers. She leaned over one and tapped the keys. The computer screen flickered, and in a moment she took a scrap of paper from a little plastic basket next to the computer and jotted something down. She handed the scrap to Harry and whispered, "This is the general section of the stacks where you will find books about child abuse."
"Thank you very much," Harry whispered. "You've been very helpful."
Paper in hand, Harry started walking along the periphery of the room until he reached the section whose number was written on the scrap. He swept his eyes along the shelves, reading the titles. There were books about child and adolescent therapy, child protection, interviewing children, forensic psychology, sexual abuse, pediatric homicide, predatory pedophilic priests, child custody...the titles went on and on. He could spend all day pulling down one book after another without finding what he wanted. Foyle's bookstore had had too little material, but this library had infinitely too much. It seemed to be too specialized, too technical. Harry felt desperate. Was his search coming to a dead end? He glanced back and forth along the rows of books. How could he identify the one he needed, out of so many?
As he stood there, irresolute, an idea began to form in his mind. Would it work? Maybe...if his wand knew him well enough to make the choice. He had never before tried something exactly like this. He fingered his holly and phoenix feather wand inside his coat and whispered, "Accio the book I need, but not more than three inches." Then he gazed intently along the rows of books to his right, but saw nothing. He turned his face to the left and stared at those books, and about 5 yards to his left, he saw a book slowly edging out of the ranks of volumes until its spine protruded three inches forward of the spines of the books on either side. Then it stopped moving.
With a burst of joy in his heart, Harry strode rapidly to the book that his wand had selected, seized it, and pulled it the rest of the way off the shelf. It was a smaller book than many of the other, thicker tomes, with a faded brown cloth cover. It looked older than many of the other books. Harry observed that all the books in this library looked newer that the books in the Hogwarts library, and he wondered if Muggles placed less value on old knowledge than the magical community did. If so, he was thankful that they had not discarded this book. He looked around for an unoccupied reading desk, carried his book to it, sat down, and began to read.
The book was, in fact, old. It had been published in the 1960's in the United States of America and was a detailed description of the psychology of adults who had suffered abuse as children. Harry sat and read, fascinated, not moving, totally consumed by this book. He saw himself in every sentence. As he read, Harry had a vision of himself sitting on a stool, like an artist's model, and the author of this book sitting nearby, but instead of an easel and a paintbrush, the author had a quill and a parchment. The author would look intently at Harry, then write a sentence or two, look at Harry again, write a few more sentences, until Harry's whole soul was delineated on that parchment in revealing and undeniable words.
He turned page after page, unaware of the passing of time, continually more astonished to discover that so many characteristics of his personality, which he had assumed were just part of his nature, had been shaped by living in the Dursley household during his childhood years. He finally stopped reading and simply stared forward, gazing over the library room but not seeing anything in particular. It was almost too much to think about at one time. He smiled faintly, remembering how Professor Dumbledore had given him a mission seven years ago and had told him to keep it secret; according to this book, he would have kept it secret anyway. Reluctance to confide, a compulsion to save others, conviction that he had to do everything by himself, difficulty trusting, blaming himself when things went wrong...it was all there. He thought about the summer when he turned fifteen and had been so angry about being kept out of the loop of information; he had assumed that his anger was entirely justified by the circumstances and that other people did not care sufficiently about him. Now he wondered whether another person in the same situation might have reacted differently, might have trusted more, might have made less negative assumptions.
Harry stood up stiffly. He realized that he had been reading for over two hours, and he was hungry and a little chilly, the result of his inactivity and the air conditioning in the library. Although he had not finished the book, he felt that he had learned enough. It seemed to him that he had come out of a dark cave into the brilliant daylight, and that somehow this day would prove to be a pivotal one in his life, if only he could figure out how to take advantage of it. He took the little notebook out of the inside pocket of his coat, wrote down the title and author of the book, and then carried the book to a rolling cart parked under a sign that said "Place books here for reshelving."
It was time to leave. He walked past the desk where the dark-haired receptionist was still reading, pushed open the glass doors, and went out into the hall. There was a cafe opposite the library doors, and Harry considered going in there to get something to eat, but he was feeling emotionally drained and decided that he just wanted to go home. He went downstairs to the men's loo and Disapparated back to Grimmauld Place.