The quaint dress of the Sisters of the Society of Friends was a familiar sight in the Village in the old days, but the only Brothers who wore the garb were Charles and William Brett of Suburban House. They were a remarkable couple. The elder a tall, gaunt figure, and the younger very short. They were clean shaved and oddly underhung in the lower jaw. They wore long dark brown coats, with knee-breeches, white stockings, buckled shoes, and shovel hats, and long white aprons with bibs tied round their waists. The apron had nothing to do with the Quaker garb, but belonged to their former trade of hardware merchants in Birmingham. Curiously enough, in the Midlands an apron is or was called a “brat,” and Mr Willie Brett used to say their family name had the same derivation from a brat, or banner. Charlie Brett, as he was  familiarly called, died when Winifred was a very little girl, leaving, it was said, £40,000. She used to accompany her grandmother to Suburban House to pay her rent, and especially enjoyed seeing a very clever grey parrot. Whenever Polly saw money being handled she used solemnly to remark, “Succession duty must be paid,” and there was no doubt she had learnt the phrase in consequence of the number of times the family lawyer had been heard to repeat it. She always received her wages of a shilling every Saturday night, and gave no one any peace till it was given to her. When Willie became an old man he did not always attend to his toilet as carefully as he might have done, and the mistress of Rose Cottage told the Grandmother “She really could not go to his house again till he put up his phylacteries.” Winifred knew that the high flight of stone steps presented difficulties to the gouty feet of both ladies, as there was no side rail to help them up, and for many years she believed phylactery to be a form of ornamental iron railing.

 

Two nieces kept house for the old man, and a nephew was sometimes with them, whose name was Jabez. The Grandmother showed him some kindness, in return for which one winter evening an unexpected visitor came to her door, who introduced himself by saying, “I am Jabez’s father, and I have brought thee a pork pie,” and an excellent pie it proved to be.

 

North Villa was for many years tenanted by Friends, and old Mrs D. was much attached to the Doctor. She was a strict teetotaler, but he was obliged to insist on her taking a drop of comfort at night, and she was so afraid her grandchildren should guess her evil habits that some of his best Cognac was sent to her every now and then in a physic bottle duly labelled, “To be taken at bed-time.”

 

On one occasion he had the misfortune to send her a dead fly in some ointment, and she returned it to him with a Biblical reference written on the paper, Eccles. X., verse I.

 

When about eighty years of age she removed to Tottenham, and one day her son was much surprised to receive at his London office the following mysterious telegram:—“Come at once; your mother has had another child.” The word should have been “chill.”

 

An important building near North Villa was “Beadle’s Warehouse. Few people would care now-a-days to store their valuables in such a Pantechnicon, a large barn of white painted weather boarding some 20 or 30 feet high to the ridge pole of its steep tiled roof. It was crammed from end to end with old and new furniture, carpets, etc. It was burnt down in March, 1878, and one lady lost the whole of her fine old furniture and quantities of beautiful china which had been stored there during her absence in Canada. Three villas occupy the site of the great barn, and one of the worst fires in the Village took place a few years ago on the same spot. Beadle’s Warehouse was burnt on a brilliantly moonlight night, and the Doctor much deplored such a splendid bonfire being wasted. It would have been so much grander in pitch darkness. 

 

Mr Wade of Beaumont Lodge, whose name in perpetuated in Wade’s Hill, walked nearly every day through the Wood. If the wind was south or west he went by the sheltered footpath, down Southgate Lane, and home up Hoppers Road with the wind behind him. If it was north or east he reversed the process, that the trees of the Wood might break the keen blast from the Essex marshes.

 

A strange figure to be met in Hoppers Road was Mrs Lingard, who dressed entirely in the fashions of the Waterloo year—a clinging skirt of white or some light colour, a wide bonnet covered by a veil which hung far down below her shoulders, and an enormous muff reaching above her elbows. She was an extraordinary spectacle in the days of huge crinolines, and when bonnets and muffs alike were as diminutive as possible. Her white stockings and thin sandalled shoes were most unsuited to the rough gravel paths of those days. Mrs Lingard lived with her niece in Verandah Cottage, the only house of any importance on the west side of Hoppers Road. It was said her husband and son had been drowned together in a shipwreck, and her mind had stood still from that moment. She was harmless, unless any reference was made to Queen Victoria, for whom she evinced a great dislike.

 

At Woodside House there lived and died a Mr Neville, the son of the unfortunate Bellingham, who in a fit of insanity shot Spencer Percival and was hung for it. Mr Neville took his mother’s surname, and tried to live down the terrible disgrace in the solitude of a country village. Trouble, and perhaps some hereditary taint, had rendered him melancholy and eccentric, and he was a pathetic figure in his utter loneliness and despair. He died from sleeping in a room with a charcoal stove, perhaps he could endure his life no longer.

 

It is true that “all houses wherein men have lived and died are haunted houses,” but surely, as they say in the west country, spirits “walk.” The old roads, even among new houses, tram lines, shops, and motor ‘buses, have here and there an unchanged corner, a few trees, or a waypost that recalls vividly the personality of those who passed up and down them on business or pleasure in the days of long ago.