Jane Owen is a British novelist and writer, author of Camden Girls and The Bitches of Suburbia. She lived for many years in Camden before moving to the south coast.
Jane Owen
Camden Girls
Penguin, 1997.
On her left the grass slopes gently down towards london zoo and on her right it rises steeply up to provide a perfect hill for running down with your arms spread wide, for careering down straight towards one of the neat little victorian gas lamps dotted alongside all the paths although they're lectric now so I don't suppose you can call them gas lamps any more but they still look like gas lamps in fact the whole park looks just the way it did in a hundred and one dalmatians...
Juno has 'walked through the iron gates into primrose hill park' at 2.19 pm on a Saturday, 'cocooned in a warm and mild alcoholic haze all her own', for a breather during a weekend of pubs, parties, raves and assorted drugs.
At the summit 'the brown smudge of pollution is clearly visible stretching right across the horizon in a murky stripe 'twixt land and sky but it's not always like this. There've been bright spring days when Juno has stood here and watched hard fluffy clouds race boisterously down a three lane skyway westbound towards heathrow...foggy winter days when only the bare trees are visible, the tips of their branches poking up from the mist like the hands of drowning sailors going down for the last time