One way or another, Nell's father seems to have been out of the picture by the time of her childhood in Covent Garden, and her "dipsomaniac mother, sister", Rose, were left in a low situation. She experimented with cross-dressing between 1663 and 1667 going under the name "William Nell" and adopting a false beard; her observations informed a most successful and hilarious character interpretation acting as a man on the stage in March 1667. Old Madam Gwyn was by most accounts an alcoholic whose business was running a bawdy house (or brothel). There, or in the bawdy house of one Madam Ross, Nell would spend at least some time. It is possible that she herself was a child prostitute; Peter Thomson, in the "Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre", says it is "probable". A rare mention of her upbringing from the source herself might be seen to contradict the idea: A 1667 entry in Samuel Pepys' diary records, second-hand, thatHere Mrs. Pierce tells me [... that Nelly and Beck Marshall, falling out the other day, the latter called the other my Lord Buckhurst's whore. Nell answered then, "I was but one man's whore, though I was brought up in a bawdy-house to fill strong waters to the guests; and you are a whore to three or four, though a Presbyter's praying daughter!". It is not out of the question that Gwyn was merely echoing the satirists of the day, if she said this at all.