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Nellie’s own ancestral origins were lost in the mists of time—or, in her case, Irish bog fog—but what was known—or claimed—was that her maternal grandmother had been thrown out of Ireland for vagrancy, thereby having the good fortune to miss the Great Famine and establish the beginnings of the dynasty. This woman had washed up in Glasgow, where she peddled “soft goods” from door to door before migrating eastwards and being taken up—who knew how?—by a well-off laird from the Kingdom of Fife, a second son, elevated to first by the death of his brother in mysterious circumstances. There were some ignorant rumours that he had been cursed.
There was a hasty wedding. Nellie’s grandmother was already carrying the secret of Nellie’s mother inside her, after whose birth the new laird enthusiastically set about gambling away the family money at the same time as drinking himself to death.
By the time Nellie came along there was little of the family fortune left. When she was still quite young she had been packed off to France to be educated, at a convent school in Lyons, before being “finished” （in more ways than one） in Paris. Fresh from the French capital and possibly already enceinte with Niven, she returned to Edinburgh and married a medical man from Inverness. They set up a lavish home that they couldn’t afford in Edinburgh’s New Town and Nellie discovered that her new husband was not only a drinker but a gambler to boot, and when all the money and goodwill had eventually drained away, Nellie took matters into her own hands and yanked her children into a third-class carriage at Waverley and hauled them back out at King’s Cross.
All except Niven, her eldest, who had already been conscripted into the Scots Guards in Edinburgh and was serving at the Front. Not volunteered. Niven would not have volunteered for the Army. Or, indeed, for anything. He had been conscripted into the ranks, having refused the officer’s commission for which he was eligible, thanks to his attendance at Fettes. The public schools of Great Britain had helpfully provided fodder for the notoriously short-lived junior officer ranks. Niven had harboured no wish to be preferred in this way. He would take his chances in the other ranks, he said. He did, and lived.
Nellie left the rest of them sitting on their trunks on the platform while she went looking for lodgings. One pound a week for first-floor rooms in Great Percy Street, just round the corner from the station. Lacking even the money for the first week’s rent, Nellie handed over her wedding ring as a deposit. It wasn’t her own wedding ring—that had been lost some time ago （carelessly, some might say） and she had bought a cheap nine-carat one from a pawn shop. A war widow, Nellie told the landlady in Great Percy Street, her husband killed at Ypres. The children regarded their mother with interest. Betty and Shirley had seen their father only the previous week, spotting him rolling drunkenly around St. Andrew Square as they walked home from school.
Nellie expanded on her misfortunes—six children, one （more or less） still a babe-in-arms and one of them fighting on the Front. The landlady’s defences crumbled easily and she welcomed them warmly over the threshold. She refused the wedding ring. She was a kindly old soul, still dressed in the fashion of the previous century.
There were four floors to the house. The landlady herself lived below them on the ground floor and above them was a noisy family of Belgian refugees, and in the attic a pair of Russian “Bolshevists”—very nice men, if rather dirty, who did odd jobs around the house and taught the young Ramsay a little of their language, as well as how to play a card game called Preferans. They could play all night, drinking potato vodka they bought in Holborn from an illicit still. Nellie was furious when she found out. Gambling had been the downfall of her family in the past, she said, and she would not let it be their downfall in the future.
The girls were delighted with their new lodgings because the landlady had a big dark-furred cat called Moppet and they spent a good deal of time fussing over him—dressing him up in Kitty’s smocks and bonnets and brushing his splendid coat until poor Ramsay thought his lungs would implode. Nellie herself brought in a little money from taking in sewing; she was an excellent plain needlewoman, having been taught by nuns in her alma mater in Lyons. The landlady had a Singer treadle that she no longer used. The Bolshevists heaved it up from her quarters to the Cokers’。
Nellie’s purse strings were tightly drawn. The soles of their shoes were mended with liquid rubber solution, their white collars were rubbed with lumps of bread to clean them, and they dined on liver soup and eel pie. Nellie was an excellent economist. All the while that she was saving, pennies here, pennies there, she was hatching a plan.