I moved from Boston to London to go to St Martin’s for a year in 1976. The flat I found was on Delancey Street in Camden with a young architect, Doug Smith. His ex-girlfriend (Sacha Craddock), as well as most of his friends, lived in Tolmers Square nearby. 

I’d grown up in the suburbs of Boston and spent three miserable years at Harvard studying English and longing to be somewhere else. I finally left before getting my degree and applied to St Martin’s to do a year of sculpture in 1977-78. I was twenty, incredibly naïve, and had no idea how to find a place to live in London. Time Out was on strike. I had a week booked in a B&B. Someone suggested I look at the notice board at UCL, which is how I ended up living with Doug. I liked him a lot more than the driving instructors in Dollis Hill who invited me to a Yes concert. That was my only other option.

Through Doug I met Sacha, Cora, Dave, Patrick, Nick and Caroline, Barry and Atalia, Jamie, Orlando and by extension, Dominie, Sally, John Craddock and about a hundred other peripheral Tolmers-related people. I couldn’t believe my luck and spent the rest of that year in a kind of happy daze. All those amazing people. And best of all, I could be friends with them without actually having to live in a squat.

In 1979 I moved back to Boston to finish my degree and then to a slum on Christopher Street in New York City. Patrick came and stayed on my couch. This was in a grim corridor called the kitchen where there was just enough room for him, the couch and the fridge. He demanded an adventure so I fixed him up with my best friend, a gorgeous Jewish girl from the Upper West Side. They checked into a seedy hotel in Times Square. A very drunk Dave Taylor and I broke into the closed penthouse floor of a Hyatt Hotel a year or two later and were arrested for trespassing. Dominie lived with me in the Village. Doug came to a Talking Heads concert on the upper west side. Barry visited my other slum on 10^th street. Patrick and Penny stayed with me in Gramercy Park and brought their own tea.

I finally moved back to London in 1989 and met my husband the following day at Sacha’s 34^th birthday party in Great Russell Street. Jamie cooked one of his special Tolmers style dinners a few days later at GRS and invited us both. It was rabbit stew, and he dished up a horrible big furry ear in Paul’s portion (lest anyone over-romanticise his style of cooking). Almost fifty years later, I’m still friends with most of the people I met that year, at least the ones who are still alive.

Read more about the author Meg Rosoff