A little over twenty-four years before, Nellie Pope had been born to two honest, hard-working country folk. They lived in a village of about two dozen cottages a stone's throw from the great cross cut by the Romans on the chalky side of Chiltern Hills, in England. Her parents' quiver had already been a full one and there was indeed very little room in it for the new arrival. Eight other boys and girls had preceded her with a rapidity which must have surprised nature herself, bounteous as she is. The father, a deep-chested, brown-bearded, very ignorant, but good-natured man, worked all the year round on a farm. His wages were fourteen shillings a week. The wife, who had been a domestic servant, added to the family pot by taking in washing and, if able, helping at the big house when guests were there. Neither of them had ever been farther away from their native village than the town which lay in the saucer of the valley, the steeple of whose church could be seen glinting in the sun away below.
Little Nellai, as she was called, was thrown on her own resources from the moment that she could crawl out of the narrow kitchen door into the patch of garden where potatoes grew and eager chickens played the scavenger for odd morsels of food. Her eldest sister was her real mother, and it was she who daily led her little brood of dirty-faced children out into the beech forest which stood in strange silence behind the cottage. The monotonous years slipped by one after another, enlivened only by a death or a birth or a fight, or a very occasional jaunt to the town in one of the farm wagons, perched up on a load of hay or wedged in between sacks of potatoes. Little Nellai's pretty face and fair hair very soon made her a pet of the lady at the big house, and it was from this kind, but mistaken person, from whom she obtained the seeds of discontent which at the early age of sixteen sent her into the town as a "help" in the kitchen of a man who kept a garage. It was from this place, on the main road to London, that Nellie Pope saw life for the first time and became aware of the fact that the world was a larger place than the little village perched up so near the sky, and caught the fever of discovery from the white dust that was left behind by the cars which sped to London one way, and to Oxford the other.