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Hermione’s parents were NHS dentists, true believers who never took a private patient. Both children of dirty mill towns who got into the grammar school and fought their way into a redbrick university. Her grandmothers both worked at textile mills their hands as scarred, worn and twisted with arthritis as each others. Her grandfathers both worked at shipyards, their hands burnt and scarred and their lungs filled with asbestos. The same whether her maternal grandparents arrived on a boat in 1950 newly wed and looking for opportunity or her paternal grandparents were born in the same tenement her great grandparents were; whether her mother spoke Urdu with a thick Teeside accent or her father’s voice was Glasgow through and through.
The perception of rich dentists isn’t true for NHS dentists and even if it was her parents believed in equal provision. NHS dentistry is emergency surgery for the kid who fell off his bike on Sunday night and the same kid stopping anyone from bullying her for years as a result. Long hours, low pay but everyone knowing her parents and having a good thing to say. It was going to a the local primary school picked up by her Nana, his shoulders bent with labour and his English still stilted when not about work. Urdu lessons on Saturday at the community centre, ballet on Thursday evening and gymnastics on Friday at the church hall, German at the town hall on Monday and Arabic at the Mosque on Wednesday, all surrounded by her classmates and people who’d taught her mother before her.
When her letter from Hogwarts came she was spending the summer in Glasgow with her Grandda and Gran, learning Latin at their parish church and visiting Grandda at the hospital. It started an argument like she’d never heard before, the only time her parents couldn’t compromise or find a common ground. Her grandparents blamed each other for her magic. Her parents wondered why they’d been left to worry about the strange things that happened around her with no support. They didn’t see why they should send their only child way to a world that didn’t want them and whispered in between them, didn’t seem to want her. The next argument was just her parents. As a witch, at Hogwarts and within the Wizarding community, she couldn’t go to a normal doctor but instead need to see a healer or medi-witch. The pamphlet she was given informed them of the costs of medical care and where the nearest medi-witch could be found. Her parents, devotes of the NHS and not that well off, were furious but united.
When she met Molly Weasley, another book was pressed into her hands. Potions for minor illnesses she could brew in her dorm without risk of anything worse than make-up contamination and that wasn’t a worry for long. Lavender’s family were no better off than Ron’s and she was practical under the giggles and passion for fashion. Parvati and she quickly came to an arrangement where neither of them interfered and neither of them wrote home about what the other was doing that their Nani wouldn’t be happy about. In the next book there were spells that eased Harry’s bruises and relaxed tense muscles after quidditch or yet another adventure. Still more that cleaned minor wounds and sealed them over with a thin membrane, they could be cast on the train or the Burrow without anybody noticing. She swallowed hard the first time she saw blood properly but it was Ginny and she looked so scared that she didn’t stop and think just made the bleeding stop using spells she’d read but never tried while Lavender coaxed giggles from her.
Trying to explain the Wizarding medical system to her parents was a constant argument that resulted in biographies of Nye Bevan for three Christmases running. Healers were equivalent to surgeons or consultants, her parents spat at the idea, while a medi-witch was a midwife and nurse practitioner combined. It was a role suited to Molly Weasley and Lavender Brown, bustling women who ruled their families and made a house a home with their presence but Hermione was more experimental. She didn’t have the knack for comfort the way they did nor the patience to treat the same cold ten times in a day with a different nervous young mother each time but she could alter a spell so it wouldn’t counteract a potion the patient had already taken in ways that Molly didn’t understand. She couldn't take the money grubbing of St Mungo’s without hearing her parents rants about privatisation, remembering her grandfather dying painlessly, and seeing the Labour sign in their yard every election.
She’d learnt to heal during a war and an aftermath where what was needed was done by anyone who could. Sometimes she’d have a pound of mince pressed into her hands or a loaf of bread but no-one had money to spare and food was far more useful. She couldn’t be someone who let Luna’s mother die because of lack of coin, the one part of their faith her grandparents and parents managed to instil in her was a belief that you needed enough money to survive but more was a sin. Her parents believed with a unalterable certainty that everyone had the right to free healthcare and that their provision of that healthcare would be rewarded with enough, that their faiths may have informed that certainty didn’t diminish it in Hermione’s mind even if the necessity of Harry’s sacrifice had taken her faith.
The moment she was done training, safe to have patients at her own there were blood stains on her sofa, the smell of surgical spirits in her kitchen that overpowered the smell of cooking most of the day. More patients that she saw after work than at work, a basket of eggs on the stoop in the morning, a free loaf of bread at the bakery and Mrs Catchpole showing off her baby. Ron complaining she saw more of his girlfriend than he did and more patients than she could fit into her flat.
It was Harry who suggest Grimmauld place. It made him laugh to see Mrs Black scream herself hoarse at mudbloods, half bloods and creatures coming into her house for treatment. There was no rent at Grimmauld Place and there was never a shortage of food. More patients than either she or Lavender could see and work a paying job as well so it was just as well that the shop was doing well enough to support Ron and Lavender and Harry was happy to donate to the Marauders Charity hospital funded by generous donation in the names of Moony, Padfoot, and Prongs, treatment always available no matter what you can afford to pay.