Читать книгу Tales of the Gypsy Dressmaker - Thelma Madine - Страница 12

So that’s how I came to be at Paddy’s all these years ago. Now it was January 1997 and my trickle of travellers had turned into a stream.

One Saturday, one of my regular gypsy customers came up and pointed at a dress. ‘I’m going to a wedding. Can you do this for her?’ she asked, looking down at her little girl.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘no problem,’ and started measuring up.

‘Can you do me one for the next wedding too? It’s my brother’s wedding next.’

‘Bloody hell,’ I said, looking up at her. ‘There’s a wedding every week in your family. How often do you go to weddings?’

‘Oh, nearly every week,’ she said. I just laughed.

The stall was getting more and more crowded, and Saturdays were becoming a bit intense. Some days it felt as though I’d done thousands of orders. I’d be measuring up one kid and then some other woman would say, ‘Over here, love, will you do her one, love?’ And I’d be like, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ trying to write the other measurements down.

‘Measure here, love, measure here,’ another voice would pipe up. Then I’d look and there would be four of them behind the counter, and a baby.

‘Don’t touch, don’t touch,’ I said, trying not to sound too tetchy. They were my customers at the end of the day, and I wanted to treat them well. But, honestly, it was chaos, with kids running over there, under here … There were travellers all over the place.

Then the queues started. I’d open up at nine a.m. and soon a line would start to form. I used to feel guilty about keeping people waiting, so I’d ask if they wanted a cup of tea and send out the Saturday girl. ‘I’ll just deal with this and I’ll come back to you,’ I’d say. ‘Just give me a minute.’

Only it always took longer than I expected, because when it came to giving them the price for what they’d ordered the traveller women wanted to stand and haggle with me all day. Or I’d be in the middle of serving the next family, and the first family would come back and add to the order that we’d already agreed a price for.

‘Can you just do me a red one as well, love, put a red one on that?’ So, I’d be like, ‘OK, yeah,’ just so they’d go away and let me get on. And then she’d come back. ‘But I want a hat with it, love.’

I remember going home one night and taking all the stuff in from the van. I was sure that I’d lost something or that a couple of things had been stolen. Finally, I thought, ‘Jesus, I can’t do this on my own any more.’

Don’t get me wrong, I was really happy about the way it was all going, really happy, but I needed help. So Dave said he’d start coming down to the stall to give me a hand. Also, I needed him to take the money as I didn’t like having cash on me when I was leaving the market.

By this time Mary Connors, the traveller that I had struck up a friendship with at the start, had started to come to the stall a lot, almost every Saturday, and I’d started to recognise her, affectionately, as Gypsy Mary. She knew everybody. ‘Whatever I do, they’ll follow,’ she used to say. I knew that Mary was a bit of a queen bee, so I believed her. And she’d also taken to looking out for me: ‘You’ve got to be careful with her,’ she’d warn me about some other traveller. ‘Don’t give her this,’ she’d say. ‘Don’t give them that.’ She was full of good advice, was Mary.

She was kind but with a tough heart, you know. So there was an element of the ‘If I do this for you, you do that for me’ sort of deal. ‘Don’t charge me what you charge them, and I’ll get you more business,’ she’d promise. You wouldn’t mess with Mary. She had six daughters, and every Christmas or Easter, or whenever there was a celebration, she’d have dresses made for the youngest ones. So, to be fair, she had bought quite a lot from me. Dave had even been down to a site she was living on in Manchester to deliver dresses to her. He used to come back and say that Mary and her family always made him feel welcome.

Mary’s youngest – Josephine – must have been about eighteen months. Josephine was adored by all the family and Mary used to buy loads for her. But the thing I remember most about Mary’s girls was that every one of them was stunning: they were all tall and slim, with long, flowing hair.

I hadn’t seen her for a while, and then one day at the end of January she turned up at the stall. ‘Our Mary’s getting married. She’s been asked for,’ she said, ‘and I want you to do the wedding dress.’

‘Oh God!’ I thought. My stomach turned over. It was January and the First Communion season hadn’t really kicked in yet, but it was about to. I’d done a wedding dress for a cousin of mine, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to do weddings as a business thing. I didn’t really want to do adult dresses at all. I was quite happy doing the little ones. I’d even taken the cutoff age down from seven to six after all the gypsies started asking for bigger dresses. Anyway, I could do the kids’ stuff with my eyes shut by then, because I knew what to do and where to get everything, but I really didn’t want to do big ones.

Also, I liked the idea of having my weeks free and not having to be on the stall until Saturday, so that I could really concentrate on new designs. I loved studying to find new styles and it was great having time to have a really good look through all my history books. I’d study the costumes in them for hours, looking at every detail and the different braids and edgings, working out how I could apply all that fine decoration to my designs.

I’d also spend days at the library, using their computers and searching the internet. Once I found some old hand-drawn patterns from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so I printed them out and took them home. I worked out how to scale them up, inch by inch, and made them into little kids’ outfits.

Every night I’d sit and cut or sew, and I wouldn’t go to bed until I’d finished something, making everything look as perfect as possible and as near to the styles in the books as I could possibly get them. Thinking back, they were quite amazing. I really liked Henry VIII’s style of clothing, and I remember looking at the big flat hats he used to wear, and those tunics. I loved those, the shape of them – how they were straight but then gathered at the bottom, like a little skirt, because he was so fat. It was just the way the fabric flowed. I remember looking at a picture of him in one and thinking, ‘That’d be lovely for a kid.’

So I made one in ivory velvet and designed a little coat to go over it. It was for a little girl and it looked really nice. It was so satisfying for me to do the kids’ clothes and try things out with the other girls that worked with me. Some of the ideas made it, some didn’t, but it was brilliant having the time to experiment. I really enjoyed that part of my job.

But this was Mary asking. She wouldn’t take no for an answer and I just felt that I couldn’t let her down. ‘I’ve got to do this somehow. I’ve just got to do this wedding dress,’ I thought to myself.

‘Yeah, all right,’ I said. ‘What colour?’

‘White!’ she said, casting me a funny look, as though I was thick.

Mary had brought a picture in with her. It was a bride wearing a dress with long sleeves, a tight sweetheart bodice, nipped in at the waist, and a really big meringue skirt. ‘OK, I said, that’s fine.’

Only, Mary wasn’t going to leave it at that.

‘I want it a lot bigger,’ she said. ‘Three times the size.’

‘Bigger than that!’ I said. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but I said OK, just hoping it wouldn’t come off.

‘I’ve got a deposit here. How much will it be?’

I told her I didn’t know how much it would be. I’d have to have a think. Like I said, I’d never done a wedding dress to order before.

‘Look, just give me a price. Tell me a price. Just give me a price, go on, give us one,’ she kept on.

‘I really do not know what it will cost, Mary,’ I kept telling her. ‘I haven’t done a dress that big.’ But she just wouldn’t leave it. Eventually, I was so exasperated that I blurted out the first price that came into my head, even though I knew it was way too low.

‘Tell me your best price and I’ll give you a deposit right now,’ she said, apparently not having heard the price I had just given her.

‘I’ve just told you my best price, Mary.’

‘And I want crystals on it, real crystals. Lots of them,’ she said, putting her hand in her bra and pulling out some money. Then she started to walk away. As I watched her go, my head was spinning – I hadn’t factored crystals into the price I’d given her. Then, just as she was about to disappear around the corner, she turned and shouted, ‘Oh, and I want a big train on it, love, like that,’ pointing to an imaginary train behind her. ‘About thirty feet.’

I called her back. ‘How long do you want your train?’

‘About thirty feet,’ she said again.

‘Thirty feet!’ I said, looking at her, surprised at the way she seemed to imagine that was a perfectly normal thing to ask for. I didn’t think she quite realised how long that would be. ‘That’s about from here to there, Mary,’ I shouted, pointing all the way along the path that ran by our stalls.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s it.’

‘Well, it will cost you more,’ I came back, hoping that she would think again.

‘Ah, go on now! It’s only a bit of material,’ she said and was gone.

The next week she came back to the stall with young Mary and six other girls in tow. ‘I’ve got Mary and some of the bridesmaids for you to measure.’

‘So you want bridesmaids as well, do you, Mary?’ I said.

‘Yeah, I told you. Eighteen bridesmaids.’

‘Eighteen!’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘And her cousin’s getting married the week before and she’s having a 100-foot train, so I want our Mary’s to be 107 foot now.’

I laughed and pointed right towards the very end of the market.

‘Yeah, I know, it’s going to cost me a bit more,’ she said, dead straight-faced.

The wedding was at the end of April. This was the end of January, so I was looking at making nineteen dresses in three months. ‘Oh my God,’ I thought, when I worked it out. ‘That’s just impossible.’ But I had taken the deposit and I just couldn’t say no to Mary. I wouldn’t – young Mary was so excited about the dress. Which, of course, was turning out to be absolutely nothing like the picture her mum had shown me.

That week I remember just sitting at home. I sat for ages and I couldn’t think about any of the other orders I had. I came close to telling Mary that I couldn’t do it and offering to give her the money back. Then it occurred to me that because Mary knew so many people, if she told them I didn’t do it, there was a good chance that it might ruin my reputation with the other travellers.

But what really persuaded me was young Mary’s excitement about the whole thing. I couldn’t stop thinking about this young kid getting married, and how it was all booked, and how she thought she was going to have the best dress ever with this massive train.

It took me that whole week to work out in my head how to start. At first I just couldn’t understand what she was asking for. I’d never seen a wedding dress anything like that size. I kept thinking, ‘That girl’s got a lovely figure. Why would she want something this size? It’s ridiculous.’ Eventually, I thought, ‘I’m wasting time here. Just do it. You’ve just got to go for it. Just do it.’

I couldn’t buy a commercial pattern because there weren’t any for a dress like that. So I looked at all my costume books to see how they pulled the skirt fabric into the waist. Also, young Mary, whom I’d measured by then, had a 24-inch waist. And she wanted the best satin, not any thin fabric; it had to be Duchess satin, which is really heavy. But that’s what I reckoned the Victorians would have used, so I looked at the way they did it and copied it. I also knew that there was only so much fabric I could fit into a tiny waistband.

Then I started to think, ‘Where am I going to fit this dress?’ I couldn’t do it in the market. So Gypsy Mary came to my flat. She’d usually come with young Mary and three of her other girls in tow – two of the older ones who were going to be bridesmaids, and Josephine, always Josephine. Quite often she would end up staying all day at the flat, making tea and cooking dinner for everyone so that I could carry on making the dresses. Mary was always telling me stories about traveller culture. I was fascinated. I began to look forward to her visits.

‘This dress has got to be fantastic,’ she’d say. ‘There are people coming from all over to this wedding, from America, everywhere. There will be 500 people there, so it’s got to be really good.’

The pressure was ramping up, but the good thing was that I could count on Angela and Audrey to help me. We had another Audrey helping at that time too. So there was me in my flat, with Mary and the kids, the two Audreys working in their houses and Angela in hers. Everyone worked on different bits, and then I would collect them all and piece them together at my flat. The girls also did the bridesmaids’ dresses. That’s how I’d worked out was the best way to do it, because there was physically not enough space to fit all these dresses into my flat. Especially that wedding dress.

The fabric was sixty inches wide, which is the widest you can get, but that still wasn’t quite wide enough, so I had to fathom how to stitch panels together to get a fuller effect. I was working on a dressmaker’s dummy, but the skirts were so heavy that it was bending over. Every time I tried to put the underskirts on, the dummy collapsed. I thought of every way I could to try to make it work.

I went back to my books and had a really good look at the Victorian crinolines. They were all held up by big whalebone cages, so I thought, ‘I’ll make a cage out of stiff fabric and steel strips, and if I have some going this way and some going that, it should carry the weight.’ But it collapsed: the steel wasn’t strong enough.

I even tried making a sample on a smaller scale, and it seemed to work, but when I tried it bigger, it didn’t. God, when I think of all the ways I tried to get around it. I remember one morning seeing the dummy all bent over and doubled up. Finally I decided to try it on one of the girls, and it was actually OK. On a body it was sticking out exactly as I wanted. It worked.

And then there was the train.

In my head that was going to be the easy part. After all, as Mary said, essentially it was ‘just a long piece of fabric’. But it wasn’t easy at all – and it wasn’t just one long strip of fabric, either. It was thick satin and I had to do it in panels. Now, after trying to fit the huge, heavy skirts on to the dress, here I was with this massive train having to go on the waist as well. Can you imagine all that having to be supported by this tiny girl’s 24-inch waist?

The train was so heavy it was pushing the dress forward, so I had to devise something to make it come out and over the dress. I went back to my books and decided that a bustle – a frame often used to support heavy fabric dresses in the 1800s – might be the best solution. It was trial-and-error time again.

Dave, as ever, was amazing: ‘Come on, you can do it,’ he’d say. ‘You know you can do it. You’ll work it out.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Yes, you can. I’ll help you.’

And he did. Dave always helped me make things happen.

The funny thing is, I get so many calls from people today asking how I make the dresses – ‘How do you do this bit? How can I make my bodices stay like that?’

‘You chancer!’ I want to reply. ‘It took me years to work all this stuff out. Do you think I’m just going to tell you over the phone in two minutes?’ But, of course, I just politely tell them that it’s best that they work it out for themselves as every design is different and our dresses won’t be the same as theirs.

We put the bustle under the train so that it kept the fabric up and off the back of the dress, but as soon as the girl moved in it the dress bent back in again.

Then Mary came in to see her daughter’s dress one day. She wanted more crystals on it, and I was still buying them retail as I didn’t know a supplier. So I bought two packets of Swarovski crystals – about 3,000 of them – which seemed like loads, and scattered them all over the dress.

‘Oh, no, that’s not enough, Thelma,’ she said. So I got some more.

Another day, young Mary looked at the dress. ‘I want something round the edge of the trail,’ she said. ‘I want some edging.’ Of course, she didn’t want to pay any extra for it – her mum, Gypsy Mary, was a good teacher in that respect. So I sat there night after night, stitching the edge of this train with organza and crystals – all 107 feet of it.

Finally, it was done and it was really, really heavy. In the end, I thought, ‘I’ve done what I can and that’s what she wanted. If it collapses, it collapses. There’s nothing I can do.’

But it was me who collapsed. I got really ill, probably with exhaustion. Then I got bronchitis.

Mary turned up at the house one day when I was not at all well. ‘Thelma,’ she said, ‘I want you to do an outfit for my other daughter.’

‘I can’t, Mary,’ I said. ‘Honestly, I’m just physically not up to it.’

‘Oh, it’ll be an easy one,’ she said. ‘The wedding dress is nearly done now.’

So I ended up having to do another outfit for the after-party as well. Those three months of my life were hell. I remember sitting there thinking, ‘I will never ever make another wedding dress so long as I live.’

Dave and me were invited to the wedding, but we couldn’t go as it was in Peterborough and it would have been impossible to get back in time to do the market the following day. I remember the day the family came to pick up the dresses. It was the afternoon before the wedding and I’d worked right through the night making sure it was perfect, and at about four o’clock Dave put everything in their van. As they left, Mary called me to one side.

‘Don’t tell anyone what the dress is like, or the colour of the bridesmaids’ dresses,’ she whispered. ‘And don’t mention where the wedding is.’

‘OK, Mary,’ I said. ‘That must be the hundredth time you’ve told me not to tell anybody anything.’

‘It’s just really important that no one knows about the wedding,’ she said again. But it wasn’t until some while later that I would come to realise why secrecy was important to her.

When the door closed behind them, I just sat on the end of the bed. I felt loads of things, but mostly glad that the dress was complete, and relieved that it was gone and out of the house. I didn’t have the same happy feeling that I got when I finished the kids’ dresses. I felt inadequate, to be honest, because that dress just wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t perfect. Even when it was finished it still wasn’t the way I wanted it, but there was no more time to do it. All the same I was happy knowing that young Mary was so thrilled, and her mum was so proud of her in it.

Even now I smile when I think about that bloody train. In the end, we’d had to roll the train up on a pole, like a scroll, with a handle at either end, so that they could carry it to the church and then roll it out and put it on when they got there.

That day, sitting on the bed, I could still hear Dave talking to them outside. Finally the van door slammed shut. I put my head down. I could feel my body sinking into bed. ‘This must be how you feel when you die,’ I thought. But I can’t remember what happened after that, because I slept for two days.

Someone had told the local paper about the wedding dress and its huge train, so the next time I saw it was in the paper. They’d photographed it from above, and you could see this tiny little figure at the altar and the train just going on and on and out the church door.

I must admit, when I saw it there on the page it did look good – even though it would have looked a lot better with a smaller train – and I started feeling a slight sense of achievement. It felt good to know that finally, despite everything, it was out there. It’s funny because, looking at it now, young Mary’s dress itself isn’t even big. It looks more like one of our Communion dresses.

I suppose that most people would think I was mad to carry on doing all that, but I was just so determined to rise to the challenge. Mary had pushed me, then pushed me further than I ever felt it possible to go, but also, in a way, she got me started doing what I do now. So I have a lot to thank her for, not least for teaching me about the travellers’ way of life. I’d still be doing the kids’ clothes if she hadn’t asked for that wedding dress. And all the extras that went with it.

And there was another reason for wanting to do right by Mary. All that time she came to my flat when I was making that first ever gypsy wedding dress, which she had pushed me so hard to do even when I hadn’t wanted to, and which had nearly killed me, we’d got to know each other. We told each other things and we’d become friends.

After the wedding, everyone was talking about young Mary’s wedding dress, as well as the after-party outfits and bridesmaids’ dresses we had made. Because the travellers all go to the same events and all know each other, news travels quickly. So then I started getting phone calls asking, ‘Is this the woman from Liverpool who makes the dresses?’ Then they’d say, ‘Can you make me one of these, love?’ It would be all make me this, that and the next thing. ‘I’ll send you the money, love.’

So now I had all these phone orders, which meant I had to call the travellers a lot too, and this is when I really found out that gypsies don’t communicate like settled people do. For a start they never, ever return your calls. And, on the rare occasion that they pick up, they’ll tell you that they don’t know who or what you’re talking about. ‘Oh, I don’t know her, love,’ is what they’ll say, even though you’ve talked to them face to face a hundred times before.