My husband's favorite song is called Moonshadow and it's by a bloke called Cat Stevens (or Yusef Islam as he changed his name to eventually but the song  and most of his other music is credited to Cat Stevens). The song was released in 1971 and was on an album called Teaser and the Firecat, but had been part of Cat's live show for a couple years before that. Hope heard it when Remus was nine at a show at a pub in London, where Cat was performing before recording his first album, Tea for the Tillerman. 

Remus says he remembers there being a copy of the Firecat album in their house way before that, and that she sang it to him when he was a child in the 60's... but it's not possible seeing as it wasn't even released yet... (We had an actual fight about this once.) Remus said that Lyall was best friends with Newt Scamander at the time, around when they wrote the Restriction Act. It was also around that time that it's known that Newt Scamander had a few adventures with Dumbledore using Time Turners - using them to go and do things like see shows on West End (and apparently purchase Cat Stevens records to bring home to Lyall and Hop). Remus insists this is a perfectly rational explanation.

Now you'd think a werewolf would have an aversion to a song called Moonshadow, based purely on the fact that it's about the fucking MOON, but Remus's mum used to sing it to him when he was young and he associates it with so many things from his childhood... He's told me loads and loads of stories about Hope Lupin and how she sang Moonshadow to him. 

Hope was a movie star when she was young. She was beautiful and she was in lots and lots of pictures by the industry standard of the day. I've only seem pictures of her and only a couple. Remus doesn't keep them displayed or anything. He's got one and it's tiny and faded and it has a crease in the corner from being folded into his bifold, where he keeps it. 

She was a knock out - a bombshell as they called them back then, I guess. 

There are loads and loads and loads of pictures of her, but Remus says there's only a few that actually look like her because of how everyone always made her up. Probably because she was so much younger when she was famous than how Remus remembers her doesn't help either. I reckon we're all a bit different when we're kids than when we grow up.

How the fuck someone like Lyall Lupin ended up with her is literally beyond me, though. Especially since she was in the height of her famous life when she met him. Rey's dad wasn't exactly Witch Weekly's pick of the year, if you know what I mean, and he really had the ability to be an arsehole when he wanted, too.

Remus will tell you this story about him saving her from a boggart that attacked her during a trip he took to Canada. She was an American and filming in a funny place called Saskatoon or something like that (or was it Winnipeg?) and they met and Lyall did whatever he did that made her fall for him. They were married and had Remus before she officially quit her Hollywood life to run away with a British wizard in 1962.

Remus said if you look her up in muggle records that the stage name she used was recorded as dead. There's some people who never believed she died though and they guessed that she changed her name and ran away to live a normal life some place. I don't remember the stage name, but Marlene knew who she was when she saw the photograph in Remus's wallet. She thought he had a crush and Remus didn't correct her because he said it was easier than trying to convince her that he was telling the truth she was his mum.

Sometimes when Remus is really sad, he puts on her old movies and watches them.

She's the reason he's into big band music, too. He said when he was really little he remembered them having an old phonograph and she'd turn on big band and they'd dance things like the jitterbug, the boogie woogie, the shag, and the shim sham. These are apparently real dances and not shit he made up even though none of that sounds like it should be real. 

But Moonshadow, he says, was always the one she fell back to. Something about the song stuck with her  and she would stroke his face while she sang it to him.

He said once to me, "She didn't ever see the scar on my nose, but it was like she did in some capacity because she used to run her thumb across my face in nearly exactly the same place as that the scar lies." 

On particularly bad moon nights... or nights when Remus feels the most defeated and horrible because fo the moony-ness, I will sing it while I massage the muscles of his back, working out the knots that his body ties itself in... but I try not to sing it a lot because it is something special between him and his mum and he doesn't have a whole lot of that.  I wouldn't change his memories of that song for all the world.

I know I only have a few special memories about my mum too - even fewer than Rey has of Hope - and I'd hate for any of them to be changed.

Before I wrap this up, I'd just like to say: how perfect, too, that Remus was born to someone whose name is Hope?

Hope named herself that when she left Hollywood because she needed Hope. Her old life had taken hope out of her and drained her and left her ready to run the first chance she had to try and build herself a life with hope in it. However tragic it ended up being for her in the end, I think she made it alright.

After all... she had Remus.