The book of Life is a series of chapters, and Penny Terceira is about to turn the page on the one headed, ‘A Dream Fulfilled’.

No doubt, the many devotees of Mrs. T’s Victorian Tea Room will be saddened to learn that, come July 17, she will be closing the doors of the popular Southampton facility for good.

The decision has not been taken lightly, but after eight years of the near-daily demands of running a hospitality-based business, Mrs. Terceira has reached a point where she wants to be free to indulge her love of travel, and spend more time with her large, extended family, most of whom live abroad.

The Canadian-born proprietress admits that saying good-bye to the fulfilment of her long-held dream of running a tea room won’t be easy, but by the same token she is looking forward to the luxury of filling her days ‘? la carte’.

“Over the years I have thoroughly enjoyed running the tea room – I never just left it to others – but earlier this year I began thinking about my life (and how it is bound up in the tea room),” Mrs. Terceira says. “I enjoy my home very much, but every day I have to leave it and be indoors all day, which I don’t like. So I thought, ‘I don’t need to be doing this. I have accomplished my dream. It’s time to move on’.

“Whenever I visit friends and family abroad they always ask me when I am coming back, so I came to realise that I wanted to be free to see them whenever I liked, and to travel generally. I also have two grandchildren, Nicholas who is 16 and lives in Canada, and one-year-old Valentina, who lives here, with whom I would like to spend more time.”

Certainly, those who have partaken of Mrs. T’s scrumptious teas, and soaked up the unique ambience of the little Victorian establishment, will miss the very personal interest Mrs. Terceira took in everything – from the food that was served to the many little touches which made the place so special, and the pleasure she derived from chatting with the many locals and repeat visitors for whom such visits were a “must”.

So just what was it about the tea room that made the place such a hit?

There is no single answer, apparently, but rather it has been the combination of many elements – most of which hark back to an age when taking tea was an act of gentility and grace.

Certainly the eclectic mixture of fine bone china, family heirlooms, antique furniture, lace tablecloths, and collectibles galore has proved the perfect foil for the dainty finger sandwiches, cookies, pastries and cakes, scones with clotted cream, and even the old Bermuda favourite, syllabub – all freshly made on site, and a real “plus” in our frozen and fast-food culture.

In the bathrooms, embroidered linen hand towels have always been in use – all of them laundered, starched and ironed to perfection by Mrs. Terceira in her “spare” time.

Open from 12 noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday, Mrs. T’s has also offered a limited but tasty luncheon menu, including sandwiches, shepherd’s pie, fish cakes and hoppin’ John. But perhaps the most unusual have been the steaming “bowls” of home made soup served in hollowed out, fresh cottage loaves, which mysteriously don’t leak their contents. Even the health-conscious have been catered for with smoked salmon, shrimp, cream cheese and capers, and fruit salad on offer.

Operating with limited staff, Mrs. Terceira has been assisted over the years by a series of dedicated cooks and helpers, among them Natalie DeMoura and Marie Kent-Smith.

“Natalie has been with me from the beginning, working the days I don’t,” the proprietress says. “In all, I have had three cooks – two ladies and now a gentleman, and a lot of ladies who helped out one day a week.”

An avowed collector of all sorts of from childhood, Mrs. Terceira’s Christmas Room is a case in point. Here, every inch of the year-round feature reveals her passion for endless variations on the Santa Claus theme, as well as other festive whimsy, and even twinkling tree lights.

Indeed, the entire premises is a wall-to-wall treasure trove of collectibles which one imagines sticky fingers must surely have found irresistibly tempting. But no, Mrs. Terceira is proud to say that nothing has ever gone missing – at least not for long.

“When I present customers with their bill, it is folded in half on a plate with a cute little ‘fridge magnet on top,” she says. “Initially, some people thought these were gifts, and as such some did go missing. However, I remember one customer who, after she left, apparently realised it wasn’t a gift, so she returned and quietly left it on the doorstep.”

Naturally, as the owner-proprietor of the tea room, Mrs. Terceira has had to shoulder many behind-the-scenes responsibilities to ensure a smooth-running operation.

“Well, so what? That’s just business,” one might say. But for this courageous woman, everything was a learning experience from the very beginning because, until his sudden death in 1995, her husband Maurice had handled all of the couple’s affairs and paperwork.

“We met when we were students at Mount Allison University in Canada,” Mrs. Terceira relates. “During the summers I worked as a waitress and then as a hostess in a nice restaurant, so I had experience in that aspect of the business.

“After graduation I taught school in Halifax until Maurice graduated, but when we returned to Bermuda I never went out to work again until his death because fortunately I didn’t have to. I was a stay-at-home mom who raised our three children, as well as being very active in community work and my church.”

Nonetheless, running like a continuous thread throughout their marriage was Mrs. Terceira’s dream of some day opening a tea house.

“I was inspired by ‘Belfield-in-Somerset’, which served teas, and when it closed I thought someone else would surely open one. Years and years passed, but no-one did,” she says.

Thus it was that Mrs. Terceira spent years regularly attending auctions, and even “went antiquing” in her native Canada, buying furniture and whatever else she thought would be appropriate. House sales and thrift shops were other sources of china and more. In fact, there wasn’t a destination in her travels that didn’t include a purchase or two or three.

Happily, despite the fact that the accumulation of purchases ultimately grew to fill a barn and a garage, her husband never admonished her. Quite the contrary, in fact.

“Maurice was always very supportive and he encouraged me,” she recalls. “Of course, the kids would roll their eyes when I came home with more stuff because they never believed it would happen.”

But it did. Now that she was a widow, and her children, Lisa, Peter and Jill, were out in the world, she knew the time had come. The Southampton cottage, which the couple owned, and in which her husband had been raised, would be the solid financial footing on which to build her business, so she gave the tenants’ notice, and over the next year set about converting it into a tea room. A friend showed her how to use a paint roller – she had never done anything more than operate a spray can before – and together they set about sprucing the place up.

Finally, in January, 1997, while her mother (a regular winter visit from her native Nova Scotia) and three children were all in Bermuda at the same time, the family held an informal “opening ceremony” with Mrs. Terceira’s mother cutting the ribbon. One month later, the tea room opened its doors to the public.

And the rest is history.

Admittedly, with tourism below par in recent times, Mrs. Terceira admits that trade from that quarter has not been as robust as it used to be, although visitors who return annually have remained an important element.

“It is the locals who have been the most supportive,” she says. “Some come every week, and I shall miss them.”

Of course, once her clientele get over the shock of what some have already equated with the closing of Trimingham’s/Smiths as the end of another fine institution, the question on a host of lips is bound to be: “What is going to happen to all those lovely furnishings and collectibles?”

“I shall go through everything, and keep what I want, and sometime in the Fall I will have a sale of the rest,” Mrs. Terceira says.