London - JK Rowling has revealed the heartbreaking moment she almost snatched a baby from her cot in a “cold and frightening” state-run orphanage in Eastern Europe.
The Harry Potter author says her maternal instincts drove her to consider the unthinkable during a visit to the institution, which she claimed was more like a prison than a home.
“I’m an emotional person. I struggle with that a lot in this kind of situation. There was one little baby, a girl, and I was standing at this cot and I just thought, ‘I will take her’.
“It was irrational but that’s your human response. There was no earthly way I could take this baby home but that is your most powerful reaction. You think as a mother: ‘I will save this baby, this one baby’.”
Rowling recalls the encounter in an emotional interview with Mail on Sunday editor Geordie Greig, in which she also discusses the work of her children’s charity Lumos, named after a spell in the Harry Potter novels.
The mother of three also reveals that, despite being worth £560-million (R89-billion), she still worries about money – the legacy of once being a single mother living on benefits.
Rowling’s charity has rescued thousands of children from filthy and inadequate care homes in some of Europe’s poorest countries. They include orphans as well as those whose parents are no longer able to feed them properly.
The writer, who is planning to expand the work of the charity to Britain, has donated millions of pounds of her own money and made a series of “secret” visits both to the orphanage she is trying to close and the replacement homes she has helped to build.
In the interview, she also discusses the emotional toil the encounters have had on her and how she hopes to help a million children in Moldova, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and Romania.
“The one incident that absolutely killed me was a little girl with physical disabilities who had been put into the institution and used to ask for her mother.
“The nurse would go outside and ring the girl and pretend to be her mother. Utterly heartbreaking,” said the author.
Rowling also reveals how she came up with the charity’s unusual name – the wand-lighting charm in Harry Potter.
“Harry had been left in a very hostile environment, so there are clear parallels. He is a boy removed from his family by bereavement.”
The author speaks candidly about how her “emotional anxiety” about money is deeply rooted in her past.
“I still worry about money. Funnily enough, it bears no relation to what is in your bank account, it is purely emotional,” she said.
“I was as poor as it’s possible to be in this country. I was a single parent. The key phrase is ‘in this country’ because we have a welfare state. I remember not eating so my daughter would eat… nights when there was literally no money, when I had one Rich Tea biscuit and that was dinner.”
She added: “I was terrified of pressing the wrong button and losing everything, and having to look my daughter in the face and say: ‘We had a house and now through a stupid error…’ I don’t know what I thought I was going to do, but my terror was making a ridiculous mistake and it all disappearing.”
Rowling – whose seven Harry Potter books have sold more than 450 million copies between them – is now enjoying success with her two adult fiction novels, The Casual Vacancy and The Cuckoo’s Calling.
She was accused of being “anti-middle-class” after her first novel looked at tensions between a sink council estate and the local town.
But she explains: “I’m not anti-middle-class in the slightest. Look at me! I am very pro people putting time and money and effort into trying to improve the world.
“And the middle classes do that very, very well. I would be the last person to deny that, being middle-class myself.” – Mail On Sunday