Twenty More Random Facts
1) The night Tobias first kissed Eileen, he was so drunk he could barely see. He could feel, however, and what he felt was an amazing tingling in their joined lips. She wrote her name and a rendezvous for the next morning in eyeliner on his arm so he wouldn’t forget.
2) He was rather disappointed when he walked into the café and an ugly girl waved at him, but he was too hungover to make a scene. Besides, he could hardly complain, with a nose like his.
3) At the end of the date, he realised that her deadpan wit and sarcasm made her more attractive than the pretty air-headed girls he'd dated in the past. He arranged to see her again.
4) Toby was born in the East End. He was five years old when the war broke out and was evacuated to escape the Blitz, along with thousands of other London children. He arrived after a long and uncomfortable journey in a small mill town called Scoursby, in West Yorkshire. His brother, Edward, was twelve and ended up in Dorset. Ted turned 17 on 3rd December 1944 and joined the army the same day. The telegram their mother received six weeks later described him as ‘Missing in Action.’
5) No word was ever received on what happened to their father, who had been a minor technician on a secret Ministry of Defence detail in the tropics. Their mother pursed her lips and hypothesised that he was alive and well somewhere in the arms of a foreign woman. Toby has no opinion, he has only the vaguest recollections of a man with a brown moustache kissing him goodbye.
6) At the end of the war, Toby’s mother moved up to Scoursby too, her own home, and indeed most of their street, having been completely destroyed on the most intense and deadly night of bombing - 10th May 1941.
7) Her Cockney accent had sharpened through barking orders as she drove ambulances through mountains of rubble to reach the injured. After six years in Scoursby, Toby spoke like a born and bred Yorkshireman. Sometimes they had trouble understanding each other.
8) Because of his tumultuous childhood, he vowed that he would try to be a good dad to his children and let them grow up knowing what it meant to have a proper family.
9) His son was born one devilishly cold January afternoon; the midwife had to ski down Spinner’s End to reach them. It was only four o’clock but the sun had already set.
10) Tobias adored the baby.
11) His mates ribbed him mercilessly because he took little Sev everywhere with him - out onto the moors, into town, or just sat with him on the front doorstep, talking and explaining everything that was going on. Severus absorbed it all with enormous black eyes and a toothless smile which lit up his father’s life.
12) When Severus was three, he threw a screaming tantrum at being denied a biscuit just before lunch. Toby left the room for twenty seconds and returned to find the whole biscuit tin in the boy’s lap, despite having locked it in the cellar cupboard just minutes earlier. His blood ran cold as he realised Severus was a wizard. Not because he disliked magic, but because he realised that he would have to leave home and attend boarding school for seven precious years of his life. The thought brought a lump to his throat. He let Severus have as many biscuits as he wanted after that.
13) He didn’t mind that the skinny and bookish Severus was no good at football, hopeless at cricket, painfully feeble at rugby and bored by fishing. What he couldn’t fathom was the way the boy showed no interest in any sport, not even following Leeds United, nor even the England cricket team. It just wasn’t natural. By the time he was nine, the consensus around town was that Sev was bound to grow up a poofter.
14) Tobias wanted lots of children, but after Severus’ birth, no more arrived. It was years before he got Eileen to admit that she had been using a contraceptive spell without his knowledge. He knew he should have felt angry about being deceived, but all he could muster was regret.
15) He never ever hit his wife, but grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her once when he was very angry and she was being sarcastic. He only smacked Severus if he was really naughty, and certainly not with his belt, like some of his mates did with their kids.
16) Tobias held the record for downing a pint of brown ale backwards at his local pub for three years. (5.2 seconds and no spillage.)
17) Eileen took him to the wizard area of London once. He felt like he was in a film and tried not to let her see how frightening he found it. Some strangely-dressed blond-haired former classmates of Eileen’s stopped them and looked at him as though he were a piece of dirt, and at her as though she were insane. They never returned to Diagon Alley after that.
18) All teenagers fall out with their parents as they get older. Toby knew he ought to expect some conflict, but never anticipated the sideways looks of pure loathing he started to receive when Sev came home for school holidays from the age of about fifteen. Shortly afterwards he stopped coming home at all. He supposed that the shabby little muggle terrace was no longer good enough for the talented young wizard which Eileen assured him their son had become; that the shabby old dad was no better.
19) Eileen was delighted with her life as a muggle when they were first married. He never understood why she left him.
20) Tobias Snape’s grave stands alone in the cemetery of St Joseph’s church in Scoursby. Sometimes a dark figure can be seen kneeling next to it, though when the locals try to approach, it vanishes into thin air.