No 3, the Grove – a handsome 17th-century terrace near the pinnacle of Highgate Hill, lately inhabited by the likes of Jude Law and Sting – has always been an inspiring house. On its façade, one plaque states that here the poet Coleridge died in 1834, aged 61; another plaque informs us that here lived the novelist, playwright and essayist J B Priestley. And here, in 1932, was born Tom Priestley, JBP’s youngest child and only son.
On this August day, 30 years since his father died, Tom has taken the 390 bus from Notting Hill to revisit his birthplace. At the centuries-old Flask pub across the road, he reminds me (in this First World War-obsessed year) that it is 100 years since his dad joined up with the Duke of Wellington’s West Riding Regiment. Young Jack Priestley spent his 21st birthday in the trenches of the Western Front, under bombardment and surrounded by mud, lice-infested filth and the sickening stench of death. His experiences there remained “an open wound that never healed”.
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