 Still unmarried, her mother began an affair with a supposed Russian duke, but, after her parents' death, her mother married Arthur Crowe, an old widower with a distant connection to Lord Nelson.A year or so later her mother resumed her affair with her Russian lover and became pregnant, but her daughter obtained her husband's surname.Her mother lived alone when Pollock was born, and she narrowly escaped being smothered with a pillow by the nurse who attended her birth.