She was a strange mixture of good and evil, sense and nonsense, sanity and insanity. Her physical powers were as strange as her mental, for she bade defiance to the elements, and laughed disease to scorn. If out of gaol for a month, she spent that month out of doors night and day unless I provided shelter for her, and toward the last I found this difficult to do, for no one would have her, even if paid well. During the great frost of 1895, for nine weeks she lay out of doors, her lodging the bare ground, her bed a bundle of sticks, her dressing-room the banks of the Lea, where morning by morning she broke the ice that she might wash. ‘Ladies always wash in cold water,’ she was fond of saying, and not in the depths of winter would she consent to have even the chill taken off; and when at length in the asylum, she told me with tears that they compelled her to bathe in warm water. Time after time I have at midnight made some provision for her lodging. I have found her in the early morning at other times lying wet through on a bed of shavings shivering with cold, yet hot with fever. When I have suggested the workhouse, she has got up and cursed me, and staggered away. Next day she would smilingly accost me in the police court, where she cheerfully awaited her month.
She had given herself into custody--a not infrequent occurrence. Jane was not a drunkard; she had no drink crave at all, and when she chose could do without it. But the smallest amount of drink roused the worst elements within her; a pennyworth of four ale was quite sufficient, and after the nearest policeman she would go. The police often fled at the sight of her; they did not want to take her into custody. Many an officer has bribed her to go away when she approached him. I have seen policemen running away and ‘old Jane’ after them to be taken into custody. When she could not catch them, she would lie down on her back, screaming ‘Murder!’ and ‘Police!’ when of course they had to return and arrest her; but not an inch would she budge then till they had fetched the ‘perambulator,’ as she called the ambulance; and fetched it had to be, and Jane strapped on it, before they got her to the station.
During the nine weeks she lay out of doors she touched no drink, and no one could persuade her to take any, but the romantic heart of the old lady had been touched. A gentleman living in the neighbourhood left a shilling weekly at a coffee stall on Stamford Hill, that Cakebread might be supplied with two cups of hot coffee daily. That shilling a week loomed large in her eye, and became a pound a day; that kind act of pity on the gentleman’s part she construed into a declaration of love, and she built many hopes upon it. She became a nuisance to the stall-keeper, declaring that she was being robbed, and not getting value for her pound a day. She waited and waited on Stamford Hill for the lover that never came, but fancying every well-dressed man that passed to be her love. Hope deferred made her heart, hopeful as it was, sick at last, so she got her pennyworth of drink and gave herself into custody.