Читать книгу Tales of the Gypsy Dressmaker - Thelma Madine - Страница 10

My gypsy customers started coming back to Paddy’s the first few weeks in January. Only now they were coming from all over the country, not just Liverpool or Manchester but from London and Ireland too. As I was getting to know them all a little better, I started giving my phone number out to some of the travellers. They had also started to talk to me more.

One Saturday, a girl approached the stall with a pram. She had a big black coat on and was wrapping it tightly around her. The coat seemed huge because she was tiny. She was very, very young, and, to be honest, looked like she had the world on her shoulders. She kind of shuffled up.

‘Are you the Liverpool woman who makes the dresses?’ she asked, softly. ‘I want dresses made for two little girls,’ she said, pointing to the pram.

I looked down and saw these two tiny little things. One looked around twelve months old, the other a newborn baby. ‘I want them really sticking out.’ And then I want this, and I want that, the young girl carried on. She said that she wanted a bonnet for the really tiny one, who I noticed, when I looked in at her properly, was so small that she looked premature.

‘I’m not sure that the dresses are quite right for your newborn,’ I said to her.

‘Oh, she’s not newborn, she’s ten months. And she’s two,’ she said, pointing at the older baby. They really were the smallest babies I’ve ever seen.

Then the girl started asking if she could have diamonds on the dresses. Now, she was the first traveller to ask for diamonds, and as I’d never done that before I was a bit unsure. So I told her, ‘I can’t start them without half the money as a deposit.’ She said she’d go and get the money and be straight back. So off she went.

Ever since the stall had become popular with the travellers, a lot of the other stallholders had been warning me against working with them. ‘Be careful. Don’t trust them. Just don’t trust them,’ they’d say.

Surprisingly, Gypsy Rose Lee was always stressing the point. But by then I realised that she was different from them. Gypsy Rose was Romany. Romanies are wary of other travellers and, to be honest, sometimes I think they see themselves as a cut or two above them.

Gypsy Rose’s kids were around her stall all the time. They were lovely, really well-behaved, and they’d go and get us all cups of tea. The other traveller kids that came to us, on the other hand, mostly Irish, were loud and boisterous and just so full of confidence. And the language! My God, it was terrible. But I soon got used to that and realised it’s just the way they speak. It’s not threatening or anything.

So, I waited for the girl who wanted the diamond dresses to come back, and deep down I suppose I never expected to see her again – the travellers are always full of promises of coming back but quite often they don’t. But she did, and this time she had her husband in tow. He was carrying one of the babies and was smothering her in kisses. ‘What a lovely dad,’ I thought, surprised at how kind and affectionate he was being. He looked up at me and said, ‘How much are the dresses going to be?’

Now, for the tiny little baby’s outfit the girl had said that she wanted a diamond collar and diamond cuffs. She wanted diamanté all over the dresses, basically. I didn’t know a trade supplier of Swarovski crystals, so I knew I’d have to buy them at the full retail price, which would be dear.

‘£600 for the two,’ I said, thinking he’d say ‘No way’, saving me all the trouble of having to make such a tricky order.

But he didn’t even think about it. He put his hand in his pocket, flicked through the notes and handed me the cash. As they left I remember standing there thinking: ‘Jesus, I’d better make sure these dresses are really nice.’ The couple came back a few weeks later to pick them up. The young mum was over the moon.

A month or so after that I was talking to another traveller woman, Mary – Mary Connors. She was a good-looking woman, Mary, tall with long, brown, wavy hair. You could tell, just by looking at her, that she must have been stunning as a girl. By the time I got to know Mary she must have been around 35 and had had seven kids. She still had a cracking figure, though, and I always liked the way she dressed. Mary was smart and classy looking and would wear long skirts with boots, that kind of thing. She had a neat style, well-off looking, you know?

The other thing I liked about Mary was her confidence. She had an air of authority about her and I knew that she was well liked in the community. The fact that she had seven children earned her the respect of her peers, as the more children a traveller woman has the more status she gets. I always liked seeing Mary with her kids – she was a really warm person and a good mum. Her kids adored her.

But Mary was tough, and even though she was only in her mid-30s, you could tell that she had lots of experience. She was wise and taught me a lot, and would come to the stall just for a chat, asking how things were going and whether I’d had more traveller customers. When I described to her who had come in, she instantly knew who the family was and would tell me all about them. In a way Mary was educating me, teaching me more and more about the travellers that would finally make my business.

So she’d become a bit of a regular on the stall, and though we didn’t know each other really well then, we hit it off and she obviously enjoyed my company as much as I did hers, so she was always popping in for a gossip. One day she came in and asked me: ‘Did you do Margaret’s dresses for the wedding?’

‘Who’s Margaret?’ I said.

‘Margaret, you know, Sweepy’s Margaret?’

The thing is, the gypsies think that you know everyone that they do because they live in such a closed community and all know each other. But I had no idea who Margaret was. Also, in my experience all traveller women seemed to be called Margaret or Mary!

‘Oh, they were handsome, love,’ she said. ‘All these diamonds on them. Oh, they were really handsome.’

Then, of course, I knew who she was talking about.

‘Do you know him, love?’ she asked, meaning the man who’d given me the cash that day.

‘No, not really,’ I told her.

‘Oh, he’s a multi-millionaire,’ said Mary. I was gobsmacked, thinking back to the day that I first set eyes on young Margaret, remembering that black coat and how she was the poorest-looking soul I’d ever seen.

I know the family really well now. The girls in that pram are all grown up and they love the fact that they were the first to get their dresses covered in diamonds. They still talk about it.

Shannon, the two-year-old, is 16 now, and the really tiny one that I was worried about, Shamelia, is 15. They’ve got two more sisters now as well, and we have made swishy little dresses for them since they were little too. Shannon and Shamelia are a great barometer of how traveller tastes have changed. When we first started making designs for them their mum wanted all the Victorian stuff, but with lots of glitter, really pretty dresses. Now that the girls are older and have their own ideas about how they want to dress, it’s all sparkly Swarovski-covered catsuits and the like. They’ve grown up to be really gorgeous, lovely kids, these girls.

The thing is, travellers always like to dress their children well. And, you know, I think Liverpool people are exactly the same as gypsies that way, because if you don’t have much to call your own, your whole pride comes from how good your kid looks. Nothing feels better than to have your child with you, dressed up so nice that people stop and say, ‘Oh, look at what she’s wearing.’ You just want to give your kids everything. There are probably more designer kids’ boutiques in Liverpool than anywhere else today. Yet for the Liverpool mum there are never, ever enough.

I’m the same myself. About thirty years ago I bought my daughter Hayley a pair of shoes that cost around £70. To be honest, she wasn’t even at the walking stage, but I didn’t care, I just loved dressing my kids up.

A few years back, when my youngest daughter, Katrina, who’s seven now, went to nursery, all the girls who worked there used to get so excited when I dropped her off. I wasn’t on the telly then, so they didn’t know I was a dressmaker. ‘We can’t wait to see what she’s got on when she comes in,’ they’d say. So I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll definitely need to make sure I have something new on her every day if they are waiting to see what she’s wearing!’ Now I’m the same with my granddaughter Phoebe – I buy her new outfits all the time.

It’s such a Liverpool thing – maybe you need to come from Liverpool to understand it. You see, when I was a kid, no matter how little money we had, I always had the best dress and, from as far back as I can remember, I knew exactly what I wanted to wear: dream-come-true dresses that moved when you moved, dresses where you could feel the weight of the fabric swinging about you as you walked.

Once my mum asked this woman, who used to make costumes for the dancing school I went to, if she would make me a couple of day dresses. I was so excited when we went to collect them. The first one was pink with lots of frothy net under it and a big tie belt wrapped into a big bow at the side. As soon as I put that one on, I just didn’t want to take it off. I had to, though, because I had to try on the other one.

Now, this other one was probably a lovely dress but it was straight up and down with a pleated hem. As soon as I saw it I thought, ‘No! No! No!’ I looked at my mum and started crying. She told me to try it on. ‘I don’t want it,’ I wailed. ‘Get it off me!’

‘No, no, they’re lovely,’ my mum said to the woman as she paid for the dresses, obviously dead embarrassed, trying to rush me out the door. So off we went back home with both of the dresses. But I never did wear that straight dress. I never wanted it. All I ever wanted were pretty, girly, sticky-out dresses. So when these young gypsy girls come to me now, I know exactly why they want them too. But then I’ve always had a strong vision in my head of what the perfect girl’s dress should be.

Back in the early eighties, long before I’d set up at Paddy’s, I’d just had my youngest daughter Hayley. On Saturdays I used to go shopping with my mum, and we’d go to all the little kids’ boutiques in Liverpool looking for clothes for her.

The thing is, I could never find anything that I really liked and I remember thinking I’d like to do kids’ clothes myself. I’d just had a baby and was looking at it from the point of view of what I’d like to dress her in, as a customer. ‘If I can’t find the right thing,’ I thought, ‘then there must be loads of other mums out there who feel the same.’

More than anything else, though, I just wanted to dress Hayley the way I liked. I thought about it a lot, and then it just came to me: I’ll start up my own children’s clothes business. And so I went about setting up a shop, Madine Miniatures. At the time I was married to Kenny, my three older kids’ dad. Kenny already had a successful glass firm, so we were well-off enough for me to give it a go. And things were not that great with me and Kenny by then, so starting the business was also a good way of taking my mind off our troubles at home. My mum had also just been made redundant from the GEC factory, where she had worked as one of her three jobs for twenty-five years. So she put all her redundancy money in to get the business started.

Soon it was up and running and I threw myself into the task of finding out when all the clothing fairs were on. I’d travel the country with my mum, looking for the best stuff we could find.

The first shop I opened was in Ormskirk, just north of Liverpool. But as there was already a kids’ clothing boutique there the reps would give them priority stock and wouldn’t sell to any competitors. But this meant that I was being left with the not-very-good stuff, which I certainly didn’t want. What I wanted to sell were special children’s outfits, the kind that gave me butterflies in my stomach when I looked at them.

I remember talking to one rep and asking if I could order this particular dress. ‘Sorry, you can’t have that,’ he said, in that nose-in-the-air kind of way, explaining that so-and-so from the other shop had bought it. I looked at him and thought, ‘You cheeky get! One of these days, you’ll be dying for me to stock your clothes!’

‘Don’t worry, love,’ my mum used to say, ‘you’ll think of something. We’ll just make sure you’re the biggest and the best.’ The thing is, the man was the rep for all these lovely Italian, German and Dutch designs that you couldn’t get over here. ‘OK,’ I thought, ‘I’ll just go to Italy, Germany and Holland to buy this stuff myself.’ And that’s exactly what I did – I brought ranges of kids’ clothing to Liverpool that nobody had ever seen or even heard of before.

I had a big opening day for that first shop, and everything felt good. Because we’d made sure that Madine Miniatures was stocked with quite unusual kids’ clothes and unique designs, it really took off, and before long we had six shops all over Liverpool. Madine Miniatures was getting a great reputation and our Communion dresses were the most sought-after in the city.

Communion dresses are a very big deal in Liverpool, with it being such a big Catholic community. Even today a big part of my business is designing Communion dresses. And there are three milestones in a gypsy girl’s life – her christening, her First Communion and, of course, her wedding.

I first started doing Communion dresses after noticing that all the ones I’d see at European suppliers were the same. And the one thing that a mum doesn’t want is her daughter’s Communion dress looking the same as the next girl’s. I’d look at them and think: ‘They’re all straight up and down. They don’t move. Where’s all the bloody fabric?’ And then I thought: ‘I’d make the skirt bigger and I wouldn’t have that there; I would put buttons down here …’ I was not very impressed by what I was looking at – but actually what I was really looking at was a giant gap in the market.

So I decided that the best thing to do was to make the dresses myself. Even though I couldn’t sew that well, I knew exactly what I wanted. My mum had learned how to sew at a night class when me and my brother Tom were kids. She would sit up all night making me new dresses, determined that I would always be the best-dressed little girl at school. Also, my Aunty Mary was a tailoress, so I thought, ‘I have all the ideas in my head, all I have to do is to draw them out and Mum and Aunty Mary can make them.’ I used to watch my mum and Aunty Mary sewing and then have a go myself. I wasn’t very good at it at first, but I wouldn’t give up until I got it perfect.

Soon the dresses were going down really well. Everyone wanted them, and after a while we were getting so many orders that we had to think about getting someone else in to help. Thank God we found Audrey. Now, Audrey was a little bit older but that was good because she was old school. She knew exactly what she was doing.

In fact, Audrey was so by the book that, come five p.m. every day, she’d have her coat on and she’d be off. Out the door by one second past, was Audrey. She was strictly a nine-to-fiver, but I have to give it to her, when she was there she didn’t stop for a minute. But as more orders came in we needed to put more time in, which made me determined to improve as a seamstress. Audrey taught me a lot – far more than the college I had started attending did. The more I learned, the more I could finish the dresses myself. We also took on a younger girl, Christine, to do the cutting. So, business was picking up, we were all working from a room above the shop in Ormskirk and everything was good.

Every time we put a new Communion dress in the shop, people would come in and admire it. ‘Oh, isn’t that lovely,’ they’d say. ‘I’m quite good at this,’ I thought, so I just focused on making my ideas for these Communion dresses come to life. I suppose, looking back, I’ve always been the kind of person who sets her mind to things, thinking, ‘Right, I’m just going to do it.’ I can’t do anything half-heartedly.

After I came up with a few dress design ideas, I started really going for it. I always thought that the dresses could be bigger, because no one else was doing ones like that, so I looked through all my history books and wedding magazines for ideas – because, essentially, they were little wedding dresses. I’d have them with these big, Victorian-style leg-o’-mutton sleeves and then maybe add a little cape. And I always liked to put a large bow or flower on them to finish them off. That way they really made a statement.

People loved them and, as more and more requests came in for them, we started having to limit each school to ten differently designed Communion dresses. The way it worked was this: every season I’d create ten different designs, and the first mum from each school to put a deposit down on the design she liked best was the only one who could have that dress, and so on. It meant that ten little girls in the same school might be wearing our dresses come Communion Day, but there would never be two wearing the same one.

Even so, there was often pandemonium over who got these dresses, with real rivalry breaking out between the mums at each school. I remember that there were women literally fighting in the shop in County Road. Honest to God, they were actually punching each other.

Another time I did this dress – I think I was into Elizabeth I at the time – with the ruff collar and the really tight, tiny waist with a V-shaped bodice all covered in pearls. I made the skirt in satin panels, which were differently decorated. Everyone who saw it was like, ‘Oh My God, it’s amazing. It’s fantastic. I don’t care how much it is. I’ve got to have that dress.’ There was a big hullabaloo over who was going to get that too.

The thing is, it was all good for business and I was able to start building up a team. I took on another three girls, and then Pauline started working in the County Road shop. Pauline had been a customer originally, but as time went on she began to pop in every day to have a chat and see the new dresses that had come in. She became such a part of the furniture that one day, when I was run off my feet, I asked her to muck in and help me out there and then. I was well aware that Pauline knew that shop – and the stock it carried – inside out.

It was one of the best moves I ever made. Pauline is the best saleswoman you could ever wish for. We have worked together on and off ever since. Pauline whipped our customers up into a right frenzy about the Communion dresses. ‘Oh, you should see the new designs coming in,’ she’d say. ‘They’re gorgeous. You’ll be amazed when you see them.’ All the women, desperate that their kid would look the best of the lot, would be like, ‘Oh, put my name down for one, put my name down.’ None of these dresses ever reached the shop – because before they could get there Pauline had sold every single one.

So, it was really through the Communion dresses that I first got into dressmaking. And all these things that I liked, all these old, historical costumes that I was influenced by, were obviously touching a nerve with people, because the next thing I knew I had an agent in Belfast who started selling our dresses all over Ireland.

The business was doing well and everything was OK on that front. But things with me and Kenny were getting worse. The more successful I became, the more strained things were between us. Kenny, you see, always liked to be in control, and as I became immersed in my own thing I was becoming more independent.

Then I had another setback. The main shop in Liverpool kept getting broken into, and this put a massive strain on the business because it was becoming increasingly hard to get insurance. Eventually the only way I could keep things afloat was to close all of the shops except two. Looking back, it was probably too much having six of them and trying to make clothes and sell them at the same time.

There had also been a dispute over outstanding rent at the Ormskirk shop that we had sub-let. The woman who took it on refused to pay the rent because of a repair that had not been done. She moved out and left us with the bill. So, in what would be the first of many court appearances over the coming years, I was made bankrupt. I was distraught. But when I got my head around it I realised that things weren’t as bad as I had at first thought.

By this time Kenny had sold his business and he suggested that I put my business in his name, which of course meant that, effectively, I would be working for him. Businesswise it did seem to be the only way forward. We had a big house with loads of land, and a big garage too, so I was able to bring all the girls to work there, and that meant we could cut down on overheads.

The only difference was that when I had to go and buy fabric in Manchester Kenny would have to sign blank cheques for me to take, as he was in charge of the business bank account. Eventually it became impossible for me to have all the cheques I needed every time I wanted to buy something, so I would just sign them in his name. I thought he was fine with that – it wasn’t a big deal. Not then, anyway.

After the last robbery at the Liverpool shop, the police finally caught the thieves, so as part of the insurance claim I had to go to court to confirm that these people had no permission to be in my shop. As I was going up to the courtroom in the lift, two policemen and a young lad got in. I heard them talking and this lad – he must have been about 20 – looked at me and said: ‘Was it your shop we robbed?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, looking at him, surprised.

‘No offence, love, but you didn’t half pile it on there, did you?’ he said, trying to make out that our claim was higher than the shop stock was worth.

‘It’s all expensive designer stuff, you know,’ I said, affronted.

‘Ah well, nothing personal,’ he smirked.

Then, as the lift stopped and the police started to usher him out, do you know what the cheeky little get did? He turned to me and asked: ‘Sure you don’t want any videos or owt?’ Some people just can’t help themselves, can they?

But it was around this time that everything started to really go wrong. Since Kenny had sold his business he wasn’t working and so he was getting up at around midday and then going out and not coming back until early hours in the morning. I’d still be working in the garage, and he’d pop his head around the garage door and say, ‘You still working?’

‘Yes, I’m still working,’ I would think to myself, looking at him. ‘I’m the only one in this house working.’ In fact I was working all hours to try and rebuild the business and to keep the family going, after he had sold his business. But the bank account was in his name. I was still bankrupt and now Kenny was in control.

Our marriage had been rocky for a while, and the children were growing up. Hayley, my youngest, was now 12, Tracey was 19, and my son Kenny was 20. He had moved into a flat with his girlfriend, and they had just had a baby, Daniel – my first grandchild.

So, after years of always being at home or working all hours, I started going out with Pauline on Friday nights. Pauline understood what I was going through with Kenny and tried to take my mind off things. She is a good singer and she liked to enter all the pub karaoke competitions. They were a really big deal in Liverpool pubs at the time and you could earn good money if you won.

I started going with her on Sundays too, and Kenny didn’t like it. By this time, though, I didn’t care that we didn’t do anything together. Then I heard that he was seeing someone else. Had I been told that a few years back I would have been devastated, but I had started building a life of my own by then and I was enjoying my evenings out with Pauline. In the end, me and Kenny were just keeping up appearances, but because we had Hayley, who was still quite young, to think about, we kept going. I wanted her to be brought up by two parents, her mum and dad, like her brother and sister had been.

And, on the face of it, me and Kenny had the perfect marriage – big house, nice car, lovely kids. But he had let me down time and again. He just couldn’t take the responsibility of looking after a family, and I was the one who was left to do that. But boy, did he make me suffer.

Still, we lived in a lovely house in a nice area. How could I take that away from my kids? The thought of it made me stay in my marriage far longer than I knew I should.

Then, one Friday night, Kenny came home and said he wanted to talk. He was all dead nice and said, ‘Listen, I don’t want to keep going out on my own, and I want you to stop doing that too.’

I looked at him and said, ‘No, I don’t want to stop. If you want to stop going out then that’s up to you, but I’m not.’ I knew then that there was nothing left between us. It was the end. I had spent so many years doing what he wanted and being frightened not to. Now it felt easy; I wasn’t scared to say what I wanted.

The following Monday morning, me and Pauline and the other girls in the Central Station shop were all standing around talking and catching up on the weekend. No one was more surprised than me to see Kenny coming up to the shop. He opened the door and walked right up to me. ‘My shop – give me the keys,’ he barked.

His shop! Yes it was in his name, but it was my mum’s money and my hard work that built up the business. Still, I picked them up, looked straight at him and said, ‘Here you are.’ Then I turned around and said, ‘Come on, girls,’ and we walked out of the shop.

Kenny just stood there, watching. Me and the girls, who were a little bit in shock, went around the corner to this little café. Then we phoned the Indian fella who owned the shop opposite ours and asked him to look across to see what Kenny was doing.

‘Can you see anything?’ we kept asking him. ‘What’s he doing now?’ He said he could see loads of women coming into the shop. It was Communion time, so it was one of our busiest periods. We were all laughing at the thought of Kenny standing there with his hands open, not knowing what to do. But I just thought, ‘You know what, let him have it.’ And I did. He got the shop, but I felt free.

Just after that Kenny moved out and set up home with his girlfriend.

Apart from the kids, the business was his last hold over me. He couldn’t do anything then. Nothing. The shop closed down pretty soon after. But I couldn’t sleep for thinking about the customers who had come to us to have their Communion dresses made. I still had all the numbers and all the books, so I chased up the girls who had left deposits and said, ‘OK, no problem. I’ll do your dress for you and deliver it when it’s done.’ But we hadn’t managed to contact all the people, so I rang the local radio station and asked them if they could do a little appeal, asking the people I couldn’t contact to get in touch with me. They read it out over the air, and it worked! I managed to finish every order. At night, I’d jump in the car with Pauline and go round delivering them all.

Kenny still came to the house, and each time he came he would take more and more away with him. One September night he came to the house, picked up my car keys and drove off in our car.

It was my car too – I had bought it with money I had earned – but it was in his name. The worst thing about that was that we lived in a place that was quite out of the way, so I really needed a car to get around and to ferry Hayley about to all her mates’.

I was really upset by that. I called Pauline to tell her that I wouldn’t be able to come and see her sing in the karaoke final. But she wasn’t having any of it. ‘Get down here now,’ she said. ‘Don’t sit there on your own, crying – that’s just what he wants. Get a taxi and I’ll pay for it when you get here.’ She was right. I called the taxi.

That night Pauline introduced me to Ruth, a woman she had met at some of the singing competitions. Pauline had told Ruth what was happening with me and Kenny, and Ruth asked me more. I spent most of that evening pouring my heart out to her.

‘What’s your biggest problem?’ she asked me, trying to get some perspective on the situation.

‘Well, apart from the fact that I’ve no car, no business, no money, and am bankrupt, where do you want me to start?’ I said to her, with tears starting to run down my face.

On top of that, I’d just received a healthy amount of orders from my agent in Ireland that morning. ‘Now I’ll have to call her and tell her that I can’t do them,’ I said to Ruth. To my amazement she offered to help.

‘What do you need to fulfil the Irish orders?’ she asked.

‘About £5,000 for fabric and a car to go to the warehouses,’ I told her.

‘Come and see me tomorrow,’ she said. I couldn’t believe it. Here was a complete stranger offering to help me. I suppose alarm bells should have rung then, but I was probably the most vulnerable I’d ever been and I needed a lifeline. I needed someone to hold on to.

I went to Ruth’s house and she told me her plans. Her boyfriend would lend me the money I needed, and she suggested that, rather than me carrying on by myself, she and I could go into business together. She told me she had a business degree, so if I made the dresses she could look after the financial side of things. She set up a bank account in the name of My Fair Lady and rang the agent in Ireland explaining that she would be dealing with the business while I got on with the dressmaking. She set up credit accounts with some of the suppliers too.

When she came to my house one night to drop off some fabric, her jaw dropped when she saw where I lived. ‘I used to live in a house like this, about fifteen years ago,’ she told me, her voice filled with regret. ‘That’s until my ex-husband kicked me and the kids out on Christmas Eve.’ Ruth went on to tell me more about her past life. I felt for her – her story sounded so similar to mine.

The next day I made a start on the orders. That evening Ruth arrived at my door in floods of tears. Her boyfriend had run off with everything in the house, she told me, including my computer and other things I had lent her to get the business up and running.

I tried to calm her down. She said she would think about how to get the money and then she said, ‘Have you got any jewellery that we could pawn? It will keep us going until we get the money together.’ I had never been in a pawn shop in my life and didn’t know what to do. ‘Give it to me and I’ll sort it out,’ Ruth convinced me. In the meantime, in my desperation I turned to the only person I could and asked my Aunty Gladys to lend me £3,000 to keep things going.

We bought more fabric with the money and I carried on with the orders. ‘We should open a stall on the market with the old stock from your garage,’ Ruth suggested. So we did. She set up at Paddy’s and started selling there on Saturdays. Things went well for a bit, but then trade started to slow down when the First Communion season came to an end. So Ruth found a unit in another retail space and I started to make christening outfits for her to sell in it. But I had started to feel a bit unsure of Ruth, as she was becoming over-friendly. Then Ruth and Pauline stopped getting on and Pauline stopped working with us.

All this time, Tracey and Hayley were still in the family home. But I had no money whatsoever, not a penny, and I had to keep working to supply the shop as I needed to keep the house going. I also wanted to pay my aunty back as soon as I could. It was tough. In fact, it was turning out to be the hardest winter I’d had.

It’s funny how things work out, though, because me and my kids ended up having a cracking Christmas that year. When I was with Kenny, and used to consider leaving him, I would say to myself, ‘What would you do at Christmas?’ But we had a ball.

The house was massive and we didn’t have any oil for heating, and it was freezing, so the only thing for it was to go to the pub – me, Hayley, Tracey and her boyfriend. I stuck a duck in the oven and we all went for a couple of drinks (though, of course, Hayley was only drinking Coke). By the time we got back from the pub the duck was burnt. But we ended up playing games and having such a good laugh together that it didn’t matter. We had no money but we had a good time.

A couple of days into the new year I got a call from Audrey, the seamstress who had worked for me and taught me in the early days. She told me that Ruth had been in touch, asking if she and one of the other girls wanted to come and work for her, because I didn’t want to do the dresses any more. Ruth was trying to cut me out. I went down to see her in the unit. I was livid. ‘I want nothing more to do with you,’ I screamed at her.

And then it just clicked: I was the business. Without my skills, my contacts and the generosity of my family, Ruth’s ‘business’ would never have got off the ground. Had I not been at such a low point that night I met her in the pub, and had I looked at things calmly instead of getting in a panic about what was happening with Kenny, I could have done everything myself. It dawned on me then that all I had done was to replace a controlling husband with a controlling friend.

‘I’m taking over the stall in Paddy’s,’ I told Ruth. ‘You can keep everything else.’