The Hill

Primrose Hill is a triangular area next to Regents Park. It is an attractive tree-lined stretch of grassland sloping gently down to Camden Town and the zoo. It gives a wonderful panorama of London and its familiar land marks: CentrePoint, Canary Wharf and all the financial institutions in the City and, of course St Paul's cathedral. As we looked down over London (after a hard day of discussions and deliberations) we reflected on how by chance this Hill had joined us in a common destiny and had seemed to bring us together.

Life will always have its coincidences. We are a mobile society. If we find that our dreaded next door neighbours have shown up in the adjoining hotel room when we go on holiday, or a school friend, unheard of for 25 years, is sharing a table in a burger bar, perhaps we should not be surprised. After all, for most days in the year we do not find our neighbours straying any further than their front gardens, and we can successfully avoid old school friends like the plague.

But sometimes a confluence is so compelling that it is tempting to call it destiny rather than chance, or fate rather than fluke.

The eminent doctor spoke first. When he was a boy his family had fled from Austria during the War, and had moved into a flat just off Primrose Hill road. His father was a lawyer, but Law Society rules at the time had prevented him from practising here. The family was always short of money.

Not long after they moved in, a bomb fell on the street outside. He pointed to a first floor window.
"I was sitting in there when it went off. Immediately the ceiling fell in. I was not hurt. In fact I was rather fascinated by what was happening. My real concern was to find my glasses."

He described how the top of the Hill had been cordoned off and at night the sky lit up when the anti aircraft guns placed there were fired at enemy planes. He believed that they never once hit a plane.
"Look here," he said, showing us a faint indentation in the grass on a smooth part of the hill. "This is where we used to play cricket. Here was the crease."

"Yes, my sister and I used to play near that spot too" said the scientist. She and her sister had moved with their mother into a flat off Primrose Hill about 35 years later. She could see the Hill if she craned her neck out of her bedroom window. Life for them at the time difficult too. The Hill was for her a garden, playground and nature trail. She used to watch wild life on the Hill and collect leaves and worms. She and her sister would roll down the grassy slopes and try to hide from their mother behind the trees.
And then sandwiched in time (too late for the eminent doctor, and too early for the scientist) I knocked on a door of a house in Primrose Hill just as the songs of the sixties were fading away, and the seventies were being ushered in. It seemed a special house because it had a blue plaque on the outside proclaiming that William Butler Yeats lived there. I was responding to an advertisement in the Evening Standard to share a flat.

I agreed to pay my £4 a week and moved in, only to discover that this was where, only a few years earlier, the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes lived; and Sylvia had died. Only last week a memorial service was held in London for Ted Hughes.

It was from here that I studied for my finals, using a stratagem for success which is highly recommended, though unlikely to help to make friends. The stages were:

· Study furiously all morning, sitting on Primrose Hill whenever the sun was shining.
· Bicycle to Belsize Park and have a cheap curry at the Indian restaurant
· Continue the bicycle journey to the College of Law at Lancaster Gate and there arrive just in time for the afternoon lecture, exuding perspiration and strong Indian spices.
· So distract my fellow students that they were quite put off their studies. With the opposition thus disabled, the examiners had to pass someone that year, so I scraped through.

As we walked down the Hill, each of us reflected on the Hill, and what it meant to us. And next time I go there, I shall expect to find the place knee deep in solicitors, all talking animatedly about their common destinies, but all ready to crouch behind the trees to hide if their hellish neighbours show up.

This article first appeared in Solicitors Journal on 21 May 1999