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.
The children would have been happy to remain in Great Percy Street, but the landlady died a few months later and her son, who lived in Birmingham and never visited, wrote to say he had decided to “sell up” and move to America on the proceeds. Nellie had grown fond of the landlady in the course of the time they had lived there, sometimes taking tea with her in the afternoon. The woman was a keen baker, her repertoire based on the Be-Ro recipe book—rock buns, drop scones, queen cakes, all much appreciated by Nellie.
Nellie was accustomed to hearing the little sounds of everyday life from the landlady’s domain—water running, doors closing and so on. It had dawned on her slowly during the course of the day that all was silence below and she went down to investigate. She had read the landlady’s cards the night before and had seen “a great change” coming, but nothing about death.
When there was no answer to her knock, she had opened the landlady’s door, knowing it to be always unlocked. The rooms felt empty, the dust of silence sat heavily. Nellie was saddened but not surprised to find that the landlady had never risen that morning and was still in her bed, sleeping the eternal rest.
Nellie tidied the place up a little. Shelves and drawers: putting things away, taking things out. There was cash, she knew, in a caddy, a commemorative one for the Coronation of Edward VII. The money was truffled out and slipped into the pocket of her apron. Beneath the high brass bed on which the corpse was serenely reposed, Nellie spotted a rather rusty metal box, like a large cash box. Nellie hooked it out from beneath the bed with the old lady’s walking stick. It was locked; it took a good deal more rummaging to come up with the key that was hiding in a little potpourri vase.
Nellie had been expecting dry, dusty papers. A lease, a will. She had not been expecting a treasure trove. A queen’s ransom. Diamonds, rubies, sapphires, opals and garnets. Rings and brooches, bracelets and bangles. Cuffs and chokers, an emerald tiara in the Russian style, a five-strand pearl necklace. Cameos, corals, a pair of fine aquamarine chandelier earrings, a many-stranded opal bracelet set with rubies and diamonds.
What kind of a secret life had the unassuming landlady lived to have garnered such prizes? Nellie chose not to speculate. It was only later that she learnt that the kindly old landlady had in fact been a fence for the London gangs and the jewellery had already been stolen several times. Nellie couldn’t help but be impressed by the landlady’s quiet duplicity. It was a lesson in disguise.
As far as her own guilt was concerned, Nellie reasoned to her inner judge that the landlady might have given her the jewellery freely if she had known she was about to die. An unlikely but comforting narrative. Nellie’s tread on the stair was remorseful as she made her way back up to her own floor, where she sent Edith to fetch a doctor for the landlady. “Is she ill?” Edith asked. “Very,” Nellie said.
Later, Nellie wondered if she had been reading her own cards, not the landlady’s, for a great change did come to their lives. They said goodbye to the Bolshevists, who set off back across Europe to their revolution, and left Great Percy Street before they were turned out by the son and before the landlady’s criminal friends could come looking for their looted goods. For many years, perhaps even now, Nellie would look over her shoulder in the street, wondering if the thieves had found out that she had stolen their booty and were about to wreak vengeance on her.
They proceeded to rent a mildewed, mice-infested basement in Tottenham Court Road. They took Moppet with them and he turned out to be an excellent mouser, more than earning his keep. Penitentially, Nellie chose to sell her favourite piece—a magnificent early-eighteenth-century amethyst necklace—to a pawnbroker she was acquainted with, beating him up to the grand sum of fifty pounds. Nellie was an expert haggler. The rest she put away to be sold, piece by piece, as necessary. Nellie was parsimonious where business was concerned. One endeavour, she believed, should finance the next. Business begat business.
Nellie had spotted an advertisement in the Gazette, from someone called Jaeger. He was a coarse, weaselly little man but he seemed to have some idea of what he was doing. He had been holding “tango teas” during the war in a basement in Fitzrovia, but the fashion for the tango had passed and he was looking for someone to go into partnership with him, to hold thés dansants. Together, Nellie and Jaeger found a basement—a cellar, really—in Little Newport Street, near Leicester Square, and spent a fair amount of money doing it out, after which they sold subscriptions for two shillings a night for dancing and refreshments. “Jaeger’s Dance Hall,” they called it.
The Savoy—the champagne and orchids trade—charged five shillings and Nellie supposed they served dainty food. Jaeger’s Dance Hall provided a more robust thé—iced cakes, sandwiches, lemonade and something called “Turk’s Blood,” which was bright pink: lemonade, Angostura bitters and some extra cochineal. No liquor licence, of course. At first, they abided by the law, but if they didn’t serve drink someone else would. So they did.
As a help in this move into illegality, Jaeger acquired the services of the law, in the shape of a policeman—a certain Detective Sergeant Arthur Maddox, who worked at Bow Street police station. Maddox was a helpful sort of policeman, who, for a sum of money every week, would turn a blind eye to the licencing laws and tip Jaeger and Nellie off if he heard that a raid was imminent.