Work Text:
The common people of Great Britain were not, on the whole, stupid. Sure, there was the odd idiot, but in general, they were just as intelligent as anyone else. For every dunce there was usually a citizen of exceptional intelligence. They were not the uniform, swarming mass that some might imply they were. They were good. They were bad. They were ugly and beautiful and generous and stingy and every other possible adjective one could possibly name.
The one thing they were decidedly not was as dense as the wizards thought they were.
Or perhaps they were only less dense than the wizards themselves. For in order to assume the common people remained ignorant of the wizards’ existence, one would have to be extraordinarily dense indeed—and perhaps a pinch arrogant.
Nobody quite remembered how it started because nobody ever discussed it. Perhaps knowledge of the wizards simply grew overtime, handed down from one family to another, from wizard spouses and children and friends and relatives and students until simply nobody didn’t know anymore. Or perhaps the wizards were so painfully obvious about hiding their “secret society” that the awareness simply never left from centuries past, back when wizards were hated and feared.
Nobody particularly feared them anymore.
The easiest way to spot a wizard from afar was by looking at their clothes. The ones who even bothered to disguise themselves in ordinary clothes were obnoxiously bad at it, combining articles of clothing that must never be mixed, and using colors and patterns that should never have seen the light of day. Admittedly, there were certain times and places where it was notoriously difficult to tell a wizard from the rest of the crowd—large music festivals, for instance.
And many wizards refused to disguise themselves altogether. They couldn’t abide the idea of lowering themselves to such a practice. Instead, they paraded around their preferred hometowns looking like the Spanish Inquisition and expecting nobody to notice.
Even without the clothes, signs of wizards were everywhere for those who wanted to look. The platform at King’s Cross Station was hardly subtle, and neither were the mobs of families in robes and brandishing owls that appeared there every September first. The abandoned storefront in the middle of London was also highly suspicious. There was no way an empty building in that part of town could remain undeveloped for so many years, especially these days—the real estate was far too valuable. The locals would have suspected gang activity had it not been for the wizards that were constantly coming and going through the glass displays.
And so it grew to be common knowledge amongst the peoples of Britain that wizards existed—and were exceptionally self-obsessed. To be sure, wizards were rare enough that some people could go their entire lives without seeing one in the wild. But everyone knew somebody who who had seen one in London once. Everyone had a friend-of-a-friend with eccentric dress sense. Everyone had oddly reclusive distant relatives whose children disappeared off to an unnamed boarding school. There were certain locations were wizards were known to appear. Wizard-spotting was even something of a favored pastime among certain communities.
So why, might you ask, was this farce upheld? Why not just tell the wizards that they were as subtle as a house on fire and be done? These are fair questions, but there is no real, concrete answer, at least on the surface. For remember, the common folk of Britain are not a unified force. They are not a faceless mob of clones. They all had independent lives, families, and careers to attend to. The majority of them could not care less about wizards, and barely gave them the time of day. Simply put, there was no official consensus on the matter, and nobody really cared enough about the issue to pursue it.
However, it is important to remember that, though they are not all exact replicas of each other, the British people were still united as a culture. They were still bound by common laws and grievances. For the most part, they all bought Marmite and sausage rolls and grumped about train schedules. They watched the same television and read the same books. And as a part of British cultural life, the wizards had become something of a staple: a meme, if you will. They were an inside joke, an elephant in the room. But the inside joke was about as public as it could get, and the elephant was wearing Heelys and a feather boa. Despite there being no real “consensus,” everyone kept their mouths shut because, deep down, some part of them knew that it was the best practical joke they would ever be a part of.