Quote from Naaga on May 8, 2023, 4:53 pm

The Dursleys beat and starve Harry, make him do a lot of chores etc.

In canon the Dursleys are significantly emotionally abusive towards Harry, making a very clear difference between him and Dudley and reminding Harry at every turn that they put up with rather than love him, and they are somewhat physically neglectful, but aside from periodically getting roughed up by Dudley's gang there is no evidence that there is much in the way of physical abuse. Vernon at one point loses his rag to the point of seizing Harry by the throat, which is quite bad, and he does once threaten to "knock the stuffing out of" Harry when Harry blackmails him by threatening to tell Vernon's sister Marge (of whom Vernon is evidently quite scared) about Hogwarts; but when Harry accidentally treads on Vernon's face or tries to wrest his letters from him he doesn't seem to be afraid that Vernon will do anything worse than shout at him, and Vernon says that Harry might have turned out better if he had beaten him. So the idea that Vernon is routinely extremely violent towards Harry is not only not canon, it's not canon-compatible.

It's apparent that Vernon gives Harry the occasional clout, because when they are discussing careers in OotP Harry says 'You'd need more than a good sense of fun to liaise with my uncle ... Good sense of when to duck, more like.' But that suggests a spur of the moment thing which is easily avoided, and that once Harry has avoided it it isn't pursued - not the sort of tied-to-a-bed-and-thrashed-with-a-belt scenario so common in fanfiction. It's Marge who believes in formally beating little boys - which suggests that that's what her and Vernon's parents believed, and that Vernon himself is an abuse survivor with no proper rôle model for being a good father/uncle. His fear of upsetting Marge, which led to the only incident we see where he threatens to beat Harry up, may mean that she's older than him and joined in in hurting him as a child, and although he is protective of Petunia he is also very afraid of telling her anything which may offend her, even though (according to Pottermore) she was his secretary when they met, and is probably several years younger than him. [Their son was born in summer 1980 so they were an item by autumn 1979, when Tuney was about twenty-one, and when she was twenty-one Vernon was of sufficient rank to have his own secretary.] He may have been raised by a scary woman - perhaps his father travelled in drills and was often away. There is absolutely no sign in the books that Harry himself has been battered into submission: far from it.

A former social-worker has suggested that Harry's stoicism when Umbridge uses the Blood-Quill on him and his reluctance to tell his friends about it is a sign that he's used to being severely physically abused, but I don't find this convincing when set against the evidence that Vernon has never done to Harry anything which Vernon would classify as a beating, and ten-year-old Harry's complete unconcern about treading on Vernon's face or instructing him to make Dudley get the post. I've always had quite a high pain-threshhold and an ability to brush off mild to moderate pain and just keep going which I attribute in part to the fact that I wasn't hit as a child, with the result that pain has no negative emotional associations for me, other than being painful. I find being hit by somebody during an altercation no different, emotionally, from stubbing my toe.

And Harry is very self-contained: he doesn't come across as somebody who craves emotional support and validation in a situation in which he already knows he's in the right. It's unlikely his friends could do anything practical to help, but they might get hurt trying to, and he'd be more likely to be irritated than bolstered by people being excessively sympathetic and going "Oh you poor thing", which would just add another burden on top of the original problem, and leave him feeling responsible for having upset them.

Given that Marge probably got her ideas about beating little boys from their parents, I would say, rather, that it's Vernon who is the battered child who puts a bold, blustering face on things and pretends that everything in his birth family is fine, but who has no clear idea what's expected of him as a parent and is so afraid of his sister that he panics at the idea of making her angry with him. And Petunia sneers at the magic-using "freak" to get back at the parents who (by her own account) treated her as second-rate because she didn't have magic like her sister. Harry and Dudley are collateral damage - second-generation children raised by adults who have no idea how to be good parents and instead spoil one child and neglect the other.

It's not surprizing Dudley hated Harry. Toddlers commonly resent the arrival of a new child, and this wasn't even a baby he could lord it over but a stranger his own age: one who was both cleverer and better looking than him, and seemed to have creepy mysterious powers. Vernon and Petunia should have built bridges between the boys by telling Dudley how lucky he was to have a playmate always available, but instead they reassured him by making Harry a second-class citizen. Duj has suggested that Petunia's resentment of Harry may have been fed by the fact that he looked better in Dudley's clothes than Dudley did - a pretty green-eyed magical child, like the sister she both loved, resented and mourned - and if she has any idea of why the Potters were targeted, which we don't know, then Harry is in some degree the cause of that sister's death.

Incidentally, somebody whose name I didn't catch pointed out on the net that Dudley's cast-offs, even if they were too big for Harry, probably were at least of fairly good quality. We'd be talking Marks & Spencer's and Burberry, not Primark and Matalan.

The Dursleys make Harry sleep in the understair cupboard but it's big enough to hold Harry, Vernon and a bed at the same time without apparent difficulty. We know that an actual off-the-floor bed is meant, not just a matress or bedroll on the floor, because Harry loses his socks under it and when he finds them there's a spider on one of them, which would be most unlikely if the sock had been pressed flat against the floor. So it's a proper bed, and even if it's a small child's bed it'll be at least 55" by 27" and if a camp bed, 6ft by 2ft, plus space to crane over and rummage underneath it. So Harry's cupboard must be able to accommodate a bed at least 55" long plus two people, one of them a very bulky adult man, and must be the size of a small room - albeit a windowless room which presumably has a severely sloping ceiling at the stair end, and is only full-height for a few feet at the other end. It's described as dark, but must be badly lit rather than unlit (unless Harry is using a torch in there), because Harry is able to see to find his socks and to pick a spider off them.

It could at a pinch be only about 6ft by 4ft if you assume that Harry sat on the bed and Vernon stood with his knees pressed against the side of the bed. Otherwise, it sounds as if it probably resembles the understair cupboard at a cottage where I used to live, which extended along under the upstairs landing and was about 12ft long by just under 4ft wide. That may still sound tiny to Americans and Australians, but some older houses here in Scotland include windowless internal rooms of about that size, and they are regarded as suitable for use as bedrooms. When I was looking to rent a place I viewed a modern house just outside Edinburgh which included a room which was being advertised as a child's bedroom and which, OK, did have a window, but which proved to be around 5ft square and mainly occupied by a 30"-square wooden box containing a water tank, leaving just an L-shaped area of floor-space, 30" wide and wrapped around two sides of the tank. Harry's cupboard-room would probably be considered adequate and even rather cute for a child's bedroom if it were all that was available and was properly lit and decorated: it's the fact that he is given this tiny room while Dudley has two full-sized rooms and that little effort has apparently been made to make it comfortable which is cruel.

When Harry is sent to his cupboard with "no meals" after vanishing the glass on the python enclosure at the zoo - an act which was potentially life-threatening, albeit not deliberate - he waits until the Dursleys have gone to bed and then raids the kitchen, so he's not locked in, and not going hungry for more than a few hours. Nor is he routinely shut in his cupboard, as opposed to just sleeping there. After the python incident he was confined to his cupboard from Dudley's birthday on 30^th June until just after the end of term, so around three weeks, but we are told that this is the longest period for which he has ever been confined, and we can see that he isn't locked in even then (although we are told that on a previous occasion he had been locked in, at least briefly, after the incident where he levitated onto the school roof). And since school was still in session for all but the last few days, and the Dursleys probably wouldn't want to explain his absence from school, he was probably still going to school every day and eating school meals, as well as raiding the kitchen every night, even assuming that "no meals" applied to more than the first night.

The evidence that Harry is routinely seriously underfed is weak. He is small for his age, and Dumbledore says that he "arrived at Hogwarts, neither as happy nor as well-nourished as I would have liked". In DH Harry thinks that "he had suffered periods of near starvation at the Dursleys'". But he can hardly be desperately hungry, because in PoA we see him choose to abandon his breakfast toast in order to speak to Vernon about his Hogsmeade form, and a few days later he leaves the table early, without dessert, to avoid Marge. In the first book he is described as always small and skinny for his age (which if literally true would have to mean he had been small and skinny when he lived with his parents, as well), but the authorial voice suggests that this skinniness may be due to living in a dark cupboard - there's no mention of malnutrition as such. When he arrives at his first Sorting Feast we are told that "The Dursleys had never exactly starved Harry, but he'd never been allowed to eat as much as he liked. Dudley had always taken anything that Harry really wanted".

What we actually see is that Harry is bought a less expensive ice cream than Dudley is at the zoo (bearing in mind that both tickets to London Zoo and any food bought there are startlingly expensive, so having to buy an extra ticket for Harry would have seriously impacted the Dursleys' budget for the day). He is sent upstairs with "two slices of bread and a lump of cheese" on the day of the dinner party, but then Dudley too is probably only given a snack, since he is to wait at table, and both boys would probably have dined on leftovers after the party if things hadn't gone pear-shaped. And this is Britian, where "a lumpo of cheese" would probably mean a chunk of cheddar about the size of a lemon. He is locked in his bedroom for three days and fed three small, inadequate meals a day after the Dursleys wrongly believe that he has deliberately wrecked the party on which the family's financial future depends. Other than that he seems to eat the same as the rest of the family, although the comment at the Sorting Feast suggests that Dudley scarfs all the second helpings, so Harry doesn't get to load up as much as a growing boy would like.

At the start of GoF Harry is on short commons because Dudley is on a strict diet and the rest of the family is expected to support him by dieting too, even though Harry and Tuney don't need to; but this is a hunger which they all share (although Harry's portions are even smaller than Dudley's). Harry has emergency food stored under the floorboards in his room, sent to him by his friends, but we're told that "The moment he had got wind of the fact that he was expected to survive the summer on carrot sticks, Harry had sent Hedwig to his friends with pleas for help", so clearly he hadn't expected to be seriously underfed, until he learned that the whole family was expected to go on a sympathy-diet.

Even when they are on the island and have almost nothing to eat, Harry is fed the same amount as Dudley and the adults, although he does get the worst sleeping-accommodation. In fact it is Harry whom we see eat sausages - and presumably some of his birthday cake, although that's not described - in front of the others when they are hungry, although that isn't his fault, because Vernon orders his family not to eat what Hagrid has brought. In the case of sausages made by Hagrid, that's probably very wise.

In the first book, Petunia orders Harry to do the bacon for breakfast on Dudley's birthday while she does other things, and Harry ends up frying the eggs as well. We never see him cook on any other occasion, and Petunia has to ask him to do it as a special act, so it's clearly not routine for Harry to cook the breakfast. On the other hand the fact that she trusts him to cook unsupervised at age ten does suggest that he has done so often enough to be in practice. When Harry cooks breakfast he evidently serves himself a good-sized portion, since he has to "wolf it down" before Dudley knocks over the table.

We have no input as to whether, when Harry cooked before, he cooked for the whole family, or whether it was a case of Petunia leaving him to cook his own breakfast when she was busy.

The idea that Harry does a lot of very heavy chores rests on one incident when he is sent to tidy the garden before an important dinner party, and told he won't get fed until he finishes. This is a big job for a barely-twelve-year-old and might be said to support the idea that he is given heavy chores at other times, but note that Harry is given this job as a punishment for threatening Dudley with his wand, and on this occasion Dudley is also given chores: he has to wait at table.

Harry does say in CoS that he has had a lot of practice cleaning things the Muggle way at the Dursleys' house, but we don't know if this was more than you would expect a child to do. You would think that if he really did a lot of cleaning, his cupboard would be less spidery. After the scene with Hagrid in the first book it says that "... Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon didn’t [cut] force him to do anything or shout at him" any more, but then in the next paragraph it says that "Aunt Petunia didn’t come in to hoover any more, because Hedwig kept bringing back dead mice." So even if Harry got stuck with doing some cleaning before Hagrid arrived, or even a lot of cleaning, he clearly hadn't been doing all the housework in the way so beloved of fanfiction. And in fact, when he says that he has had a lot of practice cleaning, he and Ron are talking specifically about cleaning silver trophies. This is a job which is time-consuming but not heavy. It would make sense that Petunia would do the hoovering etc and leave Harry to sit at the kitchen table and polish the silver and brass.

We also don't have clear evidence that Dudley is not given this sort of job, other than the general fact that he's a spoilt brat and would probably be more trouble than he's worth, as a worker. In fact, right in the first book we see Vernon tell Dudley to go get the post (that is, from the front door mat, about 20ft away), then Dudley says to make Harry do it, and Harry says to make Dudley do it... Vernon eventually comes down on Dudley's side and tells him to poke Harry with his Smeltings stick, but his first thought had been to give the task to Dudley, and Harry certainly shows no fear of any severe consequences for instructing Vernon to stick with that original thought.

The gardening scene is really at the core of the fanon idea of house-elf!Harry. On the face of it, it does look bad. Petunia aims a blow at Harry's head with a frying pan, which he ducks - one of only two instances of physical violence by Vernon and Petunia which we see (the other being Vernon gripping Harry's throat), and one which could have done very serious damage if the blow had connected. She then orders Harry to weed the garden and tells him he won't get fed until he finishes. But all this is presented as being a punishment for Harry threatening Dudley with magic. We know he was only pretending, but Petunia doesn't and as far as she is concerned Harry has just done the equivalent of pointing a loaded gun at Dudley and threatening to pull the trigger. The dinner party is vitally important to the family's future, it might enable them to have actual holidays in the future, and as far as we see Petunia is doing all the cooking and preparation on her own and is probably more than somewhat hysterical when she tries to swat Harry. Vernon actually says to Harry, as he is on his way out to collect his and Dudley's dinner jackets (apparently hired, another sign the family is not all that well off), "You stay out of your aunt's way when she's cleaning". As far as we see, up to the point at which Harry gave her an excuse to dump the job on him, she'd been planning to do the garden herself as well.

Obviously, there is a certain amount of leeway as to how abusive/demanding you want the Dursleys to have been, and a Harry who has to do a lot of chores or who is frequently sent to bed without supper is just about canon-compatible. But the common belief that it's established canon that Harry was hideously ill-treated (over and above being verbally hectored and emotionally oppressed) is just not true.

The Dursleys do have every reason to resent Harry's presence, although none of it is his fault and they shouldn't take it out on him. They've been landed with an extra child who may at any moment cause some deadly magical side-effect (if he had vanished the glass restraining a cobra or a large crocodile instead of a python, Dudley would probably have died); whose mere presence puts their and their child's lives in danger by embroiling them in a murderous war they cannot even understand, except that it killed Petunia's sister and brother-in-law; almost every wizard they meet treats them with contempt and often with great brutality; and so far as we see they are never even given any money to help with the cost of raising Harry, although his father's family were rich. They know it, too - according to Pottermore James swanked about his wealth in front of the Dursleys, and Rowling has said that Vernon resented Harry because he disliked James. This incident was primarily Vernon's fault - he accused James of being an unemployed layabout, so James was justified in making it clear that he didn't work because he was too rich to need to - and in any case it's unfair of Vernon to blame the son for the father, just as it's unfair for Hagrid to attack Dudley because he dislikes Vernon. But given that the prequelette which JK wrote for charity shows James and Sirius baiting and mocking two innocent Muggle policemen, James probably really rubbed Vernon's nose in his superiority and wealth.

Petunia is about two years older than Lily, so she was around twenty-two when Dudley was born, and probably twenty-one when he was conceived. In a discussion on Loose Canon, among other things about whether Vernon is related to the owners of Grunnings (according to Pottermore Petunia was his secretary when Dudley was conceived and she herself was twenty-one or younger, and in PS we're told Vernon was a director when Dudley was sixteen months old, so either he's a lot older than his wife or he's a brilliant employee or he's related to the boss), maidofkent said:

"While being only 23 doesn't excuse Petunia's treatment of Harry - many young women would have done a perfectly fine job of raising both him and Dudley - it is a rather different picture than the middle-aged harridan I think most people visualise. She has had a problematic upbringing, where her parents, if not openly preferring pretty, talented Lily, certainly make much of her, and do not seem to have made Petunia feel special. They then must have died when Petunia was in her late teens to very early twenties, she has a demanding baby whom she and Vernon are making more demanding by the day, she has just learned by letter that her little sister has been killed by the magic Petunia both wants and hates, and now has to raise a probably magic child alongside the one she adores but can't really cope with. Although she manages Vernon in later life, it's possible her early marriage wasn't a bed of roses since he is a bully. It's rather similar to visualising Snape as a mature confident bully rather than the immature, nervy young man he was.

"[cut] the early 80s were a time of global recession when a lot of small businesses closed in Britain, so it's possible Vernon was under some strain keeping Grunnings afloat. In that case, the sudden arrival of Harry would have caused further strain. They would have needed at least a double buggy so Petunia could get to the shops, probably another car seat, double the nappies - since Dudley was probably at least one baby size bigger than Harry, the habit of dressing Harry in Dudley's out-grown clothes would have started early. Of course Harry, suddenly bereft of Mummy and Daddy would probably have screamed when (and if) Petunia cuddled/fed him, and woken at night weeping for Lily and James, poor child. It wouldn't have been easy, and that's without all the emotional baggage Petunia brings with her. Of course, none of this is insurmountable, and many people would have surmounted it, but it does give some background to Petunia's neglect."

duj added "And don't forget that putting a toddler used to magical entertainments, remedies and solutions in a non-magical home meant no more baby-broom or books with moving pictures, Mercurochrome on his cuts and scratches instead of instant-action potions, etc. Some quite ordinary household activities would have upset and/or angered him, and he couldn't even tell them why." I suggested that they probably started off with both babies in one nursery room, but if Harry's nightmares about red eyes and green lights and his mother screaming woke him up crying he would of course wake Dudley and set him yelling too, so he may have been moved to the cupboard in the first place because it was far away enough from the nursery that he wouldn't keep setting Dudley off in the middle of the night. A walk-in cupboard would have been adequate for a baby in a cot, and then Dudley colonised the spare bedroom as well as the nursery and it became too much trouble to evict him and move Harry back upstairs.

The Dursleys are not very well-off. We can see this because in GoF we're told that they never take Harry on holiday, preferring to leave him with Mrs Figg, but in PS Harry expects to see Mrs Figg one day a year, on Dudley's birthday. Clearly, holidays are a very rare event for the Dursleys; and either they usually take Harry with them when they take Dudley on an outing, except for Dudley's birthday treat, or they only take Dudley out once a year, on his birthday. Also, in CoS recently-twelve-year-old Harry says that the Dursleys haven't given him pocket money for about six years, meaning that they did give him pocket money when he was five or six. It may be that they stopped because he had started to manifest wandless magic and they were punishing him for it - or they may have become poorer at that point.

Or perhaps that was the point at which they began to save for Dudley's fees at Smeltings, which probably take up a third to half of Vernon's income. The business-dinner which Dobby ruined, which would have given them the means to go on holiday every year, must have been vitally important and longed-for so it's not surprising that, for once, they really did become quite physically abusive and underfed Harry for a few days when they believed that he had intentionally sabotaged their chances out of spite.

If indeed they only take Dudley out once a year when they are small, it's understandable that part of his birthday treat is to have a day without the cousin he so much dislikes. But if they were playing fair they would follow up by taking Harry out for a treat on his birthday.

Against this, in DH Harry looks around the Dursleys' house and thinks that "Long ago, when he had been left alone while the Dursleys went out to enjoy themselves, the hours of solitude had been a rare treat: pausing only to sneak something tasty from the fridge he had rushed upstairs to play on Dudley’s computer, or put on the television and flicked through the channels to his heart’s content." This sounds as if they went out more often than once a year, but then you have to wonder why they would leave Harry with Mrs Figg on Dudley's birthday, and not for other outings. It makes sense to assume that when Harry was very young they either took him with them on outings or left him at Mrs Figg's (and if they left him at Mrs Figg's every time they went out, they went out very rarely), but once he was older they left him at home on his own - and perhaps were slightly better off and able to go out more often. Also, of course, once Harry was eleven and up they would make more of an effort to go out with Dudley during the holidays, because he like Harry was away at boarding school most of the year.

Of course, it is unfair of them to blame and punish Harry for involuntary wandless magic he isn't even sure he's done (leaving aside the fact that in the case of the dinner party fiasco, it wasn't him). Yet from their point of view, it's reasonable to blame him, because, as duj has pointed out, their experience of wandless childhood magic comes mainly from Lily who had an extraordinary degree of power and control, and probably did every magical thing she did deliberately. No-one, so far as we know, ever gives the Dursleys a book on what to expect from a growing magical child, or any guidance, so they're pretty-well bound to assume Lily was the norm and Harry must know what he's doing. But we don't find out about Lily's preternatural control until the final book, by which time fanon had firmly established that the Dursleys were just being unreasonable.

In addition, maidofkent points out that "Vernon only finds out that Harry is forbidden to do magic at home at the start of CoS, when Harry receives his warning from the Ministry. Yet Vernon is married to the sister of a Muggle-born witch. Why didn't Petunia reassure Vernon and Dudders that Harry would be unable to inflict any magical harm on them during the holidays? // Petunia states that Lily carried out some acts of magic at home, and JKR has said in interview that Lily received some minor warnings for doing this. It looks as if either Lily herself kept quiet both about the prohibition and the warnings she received, or Petunia knew about the prohibition, but considered that as Lily had only ever received 'taps on the wrist', that the Ministry would not seriously intervene. She has listened to Severus telling Lily that the Dementors are reserved for 'very bad stuff' and this does not include magic out of school. // So, this is another reason for the Dursleys to be concerned over Harry's magic."

Furthermore, what little contact they do have with the wizarding world doesn't provide a good rôle model. They see Hagrid attack Dudley without provocation and afflict him with a painful and humiliating pig's tail which they then have to pay a private surgeon to remove, just to punish the boy for being fat and to get at Vernon; they see the Twins use Dudley as an experimental animal and risk choking him with a monstrously enlarged tongue. It must be clear to them both that their beloved son is in extreme danger from the magical world, and that wizards regard it as quite normal to punish a small child for the sins of its parents, so they are doing to Harry what they see wizards do to Dudley (albeit that they did it first).

Clearly, Harry doesn't hate his life with the Dursleys all that much, since he dreads visiting Mrs Figg who is perfectly pleasant to him, but boring. Whatever he feels about the Dursleys, he finds being with them more enjoyable than looking at photographs of cats, which surely wouldn't be the case if they seriously starved or beat him. Mrs Figg does believe that the Dursleys have an active spite against Harry and wouldn't send him round to her if they thought he enjoyed it, but it seems to me more likely that if they thought it was fun, Dudley would insist on coming too. When Petunia tries to dye Dudley's old uniform grey for Harry she reassures him, rather hopelessly, that it will be fine and will look the same as everyone else's so she's not being spiteful to him - she probably just can't afford a new uniform for him. She could, of course, if she didn't over-indulge Dudley to such an extent but Dudley uses his jealousy of Harry as a means of bullying his parents, and I suppose they would feel that they didn't want Harry's presence to cause their son to have less than he would otherwise have done.

The fact that they try to keep Harry away from magic and away from Hogwarts is as likely to be protective of Harry as of themselves - especially when you consider how much they clearly dislike having Harry around, and yet they prefer to send him to a local comprehensive which will have him at home under their feet every day until he's at least sixteen, rather than send him away to boarding school. They know, after all, that it was getting involved with the wizarding world which led to the death of Petunia's sister, and have probably been told, at least vaguely, that the same force which killed Lily may come after Harry - since Petunia seems to know something about the Blood-Wards and the fact that Harry's living with them protects both Harry and themselves from some serious danger. And really, they're right to worry, since Dumbledore already has ambitions to train Harry up to be a close-to-kamikaze soldier.

The standard plot where Vernon abuses Harry so badly that he has to be rescued by Snape at point of death is wildly off-canon, but could be made to work if you have Marge (who is so keen on beating little boys) or Dudley or a member of Dudley's gang injure Harry, and Vernon and Petunia anxiously trying to cover it up and just hoping Harry will get better without a doctor because they don't want Marge or Dudley to go to gaol. JKR has drawn parallels between Dudley and James, by giving Dudley a sidekick called Piers (an antique form of the name Peter) who is described as rat-like and who helps to hold down Dudley's victims, so there could be some Muggle equivalent of the werewolf incident - Dudley's gang might cause Harry to be hit by a car, for example.

There are also many fanfics in which the Dursleys take Harry somewhere and abandon him, presumably inspired by the bit in the first book where Vernon drops Harry at King's Cross and then drives off without waiting to see if he finds his train, and is laughing at the idea that there might not be a train. This is a peculiar scene, because if there had been no train, Harry might have gone to the police to get a lift home, potentially getting the Dursleys into trouble.

However, Vernon knows that the magical world exists and probably knows that his sister-in-law used to get to Hogwarts by train. He knows that Diagon Alley exists, and assuming he talks to his wife at all he probably knows roughly where it is (since it's pretty-well a "given" that Lily would have babbled to her family about her exciting trip t o London when she was eleven, and would have found being in London nearly as thrilling as being in the magical world). From King's Cross, had there been no train, Harry could have walked to Diagon Alley in less than an hour, and Vernon would almost certainly know that. He could have walked to St Mungo's in half an hour. The fact that Harry can get to the Dursleys from Diagon Alley via Paddington Station means that Little Whinging must be in the extreme north of Surrey, close to Heathrow Airport, so if he had had to Harry could have walked from King's Cross all the way to Privet Drive in around seven hours.

It's unlikely that Vernon really thought there wouldn't be a train, since he knows Hogwarts is real - it's more likely that he was fantasizing out loud, or winding Harry up. But even if he did think there might not be a train, he wouldn't have expected that he would be losing Harry by abandoning him - just subjecting him to the tedious nuisance of a long walk. If Vernon understands that Harry has money in the bank, it wouldn't even be the long walk to Little Whinging - just about a 45-minute walk to Gringott's to get some of his G alleons changed for Muggle money so he could get the train home.

I've seen somebody suggest on Quora that Rowling's intention in writing the Dursleys and showing us these brief, limited scenes of abuse is to hint to us that in fact far worse abuse takes place behind the scenes where we can't see it and that the Dursleys are monsters. It's not in itself an impossible idea - I suspect she may mean us to suspect that more goes on in the Snape household than just shouting, for example. But if you're going to try to guess at authorial intent you have to ask why the author would include this or that scene or piece of information. In the case of the Dursleys, you have to ask why, if Rowling's purpose was to hint to us that the Dursleys are far more abusive than she has shown, would she have gone to the trouble of also telling us that Vernon considers himself never to have beaten Harry, that the only heavy chore which we see Harry being given is a punishment for misbehaviour and that Harry prefers being with the Dursleys to looking at pictures of cats? On the contrary, the only coherent motive for including those points is surely to establish that the Dursleys are not very much more abusive than she has shown.

Incidentally, a reviewer of this essay has complained online that I have fallen into the trap of seeing only two options - in this case, that if the Dursleys aren't the violently abusive monsters of fanfic they must barely be abusive at all. This is to miss the point by a mile. It's established in canon that the Dursleys are quite emotionally abusive to Harry, and at least somewhat physically neglectful; that at age ten Harry has cooked the breakfast often enough to know how to do it without further instruction; and that at just-turned-twelve he is punished for threatening Dudley by being given a gardening chore which is really too heavy for his age. We see two instances of limited physical violence: one where Vernon grabs Harry's throat and one where Petunia - under great provocation - swats at him with a frying pan. It's also established canon that Vernon believes himself never to have beaten Harry, as far as whatever his own definition of "beaten" goes; that Harry behaves as if he has no physical fear of Vernon; that Harry doesn't cook the breakfast every day but has to be specifically instructed to do it for a special occasion; and that we see quite a lot of Harry at the Dursleys' house and never see him asked to do any chores apart from one instance of cooking breakfast, one instance of fetching the post, and the gardening scene.

Obviously, in between the canon facts there's a lot of leeway. Vernon might clip Harry round the ear on a regular basis but not think of this as beating him; Harry might really be given a lot of chores which we don't see, and so on. But only those things which are established in canon can be used as firm evidence for anything else in canon. We cannot say e.g. that canon Dumbledore is a bad person because he sends Harry to a place where he will be hit and made to do regular heavy chores, when the idea that Harry is hit by the Dursleys and made to do regular heavy chores is only canon-compatible, not actual canon. Otherwise, we're falling into the same logic trap as the populist historians who reason that because Richard III might have master-minded his own accession, he must have done so, and then use this possible but almost totally unsupported idea that he was a ruthless cllmber to "prove" that he murdered his nephews.