I think Dick as a boy actually lived in the same stair as us...it was a real run down Victorian cheap-build squeeze-em-in build where you could hardly swing a cat between the doors. The steps up to the " single ends" were all worn in the middle by several inches...there were certainly more rats than people living there. That poor part of Edinburgh: strictly Leith was were a lot of Irish migrants ended up which is why the posh folk called it disparagingly "Little Glasgow".