Читать книгу Tales of the Gypsy Dressmaker - Thelma Madine - Страница 8

I think it was around October. It was definitely 1996. And I will never forget it was winter because Dave, my partner, would always arrive at my flat early, it was always pitch black, and it was always bloody freezing. But I suppose we got used to it as every week was the same – we’d be out loading the van at five a.m., as careful as we could with the little ivory and white christening gowns and boys’ suits that were beginning to make my stall one of the most talked-about on Paddy’s Market.

Great Homer Street Market – to give it its real name – was the scruffiest-looking place you’ve ever seen. It’s an Everton institution and it’s been there forever. My mum’s aunty even had a stall at Paddy’s in the 1930s – that’s how old it is. It’s massive and it’s got hundreds of indoor and outdoor stalls.

Now, I’ll bet you every kid in Liverpool has been to Paddy’s on a Saturday morning with their mum at some point, dragged around, feet sticking to the floor. There was always talk that Liverpool Council was going to redevelop Paddy’s, and the indoor part was moved to a better spot over the road, but really, it hasn’t changed, and I have always loved it. The stalls at Paddy’s stretch right out and along Great Homer Street, so you’d always find all sorts there, from fruit stands to second-hand clothes stalls and furniture places or people selling off job lots, that kind of thing. Years ago you’d get moneylenders hanging about too. ‘Mary Ellens’ – that’s what we used to call them.

When I set up my stall there the indoor part of the market was mainly filled with second-hand traders. Then, as you moved through, there would be other types of stalls – people who made their own stuff, like ladies’ clothes, knitted clothes, curtains, jewellery and kids’ clothes. Some of them were kind of homespun-looking, but some of it was really well made. The ones that always made me laugh, though, were the shoe stalls where they had big holes in the sides to pull string through so as to bind them together in a ‘pair’. Even funnier was that people actually bought them.

So this was Paddy’s, and every Saturday I’d set up my stall with children’s clothes I’d designed and made myself. I’d sold there before, but this time my stall was bigger. It was in the indoor part of the market, in the middle aisle at the back, alongside the dressmakers and second-hand clothes traders.

It was mainly christening dresses I was doing then, but I’d make other accessories to go with them to make a set. There would be these tiny top hats and bibs with children’s names embroidered on them. I’d even do these little ballet shoes. And bonnets – I loved making bonnets. I had had a thing about them ever since I was a kid and used to watch films like Little Women.

I taught myself how to make bonnets – no pattern; nothing. But I wanted to do them properly so I went to the library and looked for as many books about the American Civil War as I could find. I’d take them home and really study the pictures of the women in stiff peaked hats, you know, those ones with big ribbon ties under the chin.

I wanted to make my bonnets look exactly like the ones I saw in the books, and that meant making sure that I got every detail right, like the little frills inside the peaks. I would use different silks to create these, and it made all the difference. Then I’d add other details, like a huge bow on the side, say. The more I looked at the pictures of the bonnets in the books while I was making them, the more they turned out just like the ones I saw in films. They were lovely, they were, really lovely, and I’m sure that’s what started selling the christening robes – everyone wanted the matching bonnets.

Dave had helped me make my stall look really nice. He said you couldn’t see the little dresses very well when they were just hanging up, and that the way I had displayed them didn’t do them justice.

Dave is a builder and is really good at making things, so it was his idea to do stands to put the dresses on. They really made a difference and the stall looked classy, which was an achievement because the market was a right mess and it wasn’t unusual to see rats running around the back of the stalls. But after Dave did our corner up, it stood out. It took us two hours every Saturday morning to set up that stall. But it looked special – just rows and rows of pretty little white and ivory silk and satin dresses. It was quite talked about and people used to come by just to see it. Then the local press did a story on our stall and after that I got loads of interest, with people coming from miles around just to take photographs of the children’s outfits. The business really started to take off then.

There were a lot of gypsies who used to come to the market – all the travellers go to Paddy’s – but I didn’t realise they were gypsies then. The one person I knew with connections to that world was a woman in the market known as Gypsy Rose Lee, whose stall was next to mine.

Now, Gypsy Rose is a Romany. But back then I didn’t know the difference between a Romany and an Irish traveller, or whatever. I didn’t even relate her to being a traveller. To us, she was just someone who read palms, like those women in Blackpool near the pier – the ones who stop you and say, ‘Can I read your palm, love?’

Gypsy Rose was lovely. She was a good-looking woman with long, brown hair. She was kind and good company and not at all like the gypsies we were scared of as kids and that my mum had warned me about. I’ll never forget seeing my mum hiding in the house one day when I was little. This woman had knocked on the door trying to sell lucky heather and pegs.

‘Don’t ever open the door to them,’ Mum whispered, ‘because if you don’t buy off them they’ll put a curse on you. And don’t look one in the eye, right, or they’ll put a curse on you. And if you ever meet one and they try to give you lucky charms, take them, because if you don’t they’ll put a curse on you for that too.’

I was terrified of gypsies after that. Since then, I’ve had loads of curses put on me. Honestly, loads of them.

But I do remember the first time I encountered a real gypsy. This girl came to see me at my stall and was looking at the christening dresses. Up she walked. Dead tall, she was. And blonde. Really stunning. She was about nineteen and I remember her because she was really friendly, a naturally nice girl, you know. Michelle, that was her name. I’ll never forget her face. And I’ll never forget Michelle’s kids – gorgeous, they were. They stood out, all really blonde with pretty ringlets. That’s another reason I could sense something different about her – her kids just looked like they came from another era, as though they had stepped out of the pages of an old-fashioned story book.

‘Can you do Gone With the Wind dresses?’ she asked in a quiet voice.

You know by now what that film meant to me – Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara, velvet, big skirt, bonnet …

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I can do that.’

‘Well, how much will they be?’

I told her that I couldn’t give her a price because I didn’t use that kind of velvet at the time and I’d have to find out how much it cost.

‘Well, I want three red ones,’ she said, looking down at these three beautiful little girls trailing behind her.

‘You’ll have to leave a deposit,’ I said.

She handed over £80 and I measured up the kids. She said she’d be back the next Saturday to pick them up.

So off I went, thinking about Gone With the Wind and all those big, hooped dresses. The moment in the film that made the biggest impression on me was when Scarlett O’Hara has no money and she pulls the curtains down so that she can use the fabric to make a dress. And the sound of the dresses! Oh, I loved the way you could hear the taffeta swish when Scarlett walked in the room. I adored these dresses. I remember watching it one time, thinking, ‘Why don’t we all dress like that?’ You know, in big dresses with tiny little waists and with beautiful bonnets on the side of our heads.

Could I do Gone With the Wind dresses? I don’t think that girl could ever have known just how much she’d come to the right person. I couldn’t wait to get stuck in and start making them.

I’ve still got pictures of these little red velvet dresses somewhere. They stuck right out, and had wide ribbon belts around the waist with big red bonnets to match. It nearly killed me making them, as I was trying to get them done in time for the girl coming back while having to make new stuff for the market on Saturday as well.

In the end I did finish them in time, and I’ll always remember the struggle I had loading them into the van and carrying them to the market because the hooped underskirts weighed a ton. When I got to Paddy’s I laid them flat, behind the stall, ready for this girl to come in and pick them up that morning, which was when she said she’d come back.

It was getting later and later, and so at about twelve o’clock I thought, ‘These are going to get filthy lying through the back here by that dirty floor.’ You only have so much space behind your stall at Paddy’s, and people are always traipsing in and out, bringing more rubbish in with them. Not only that, there was a leak in the roof right above my area, so I thought, ‘I’ll just put them up with the other dresses for now.’

Baby Mary had just bought me a cup of tea. Her stall was right opposite mine. Baby Mary sold baby clothes and beautiful hand-knitted coats and hats. We were standing having a chat and she was looking up at the little Gone With the Wind dresses. ‘They’re lovely, them, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘Just gorgeous.’ I had to admit that they did look really nice. Another woman went by and said, ‘God, they’re lovely. How much are they?’ I told her that they were actually sold and that the girl who ordered them was coming back to pick them up later.

Then I remembered that I had the girl’s phone number, so I tried calling her. There was no answer; the phone didn’t seem to work. Later, I would come to realise that this was normal with travellers – phones that don’t work; numbers that don’t exist; calls that are never returned.

It was the afternoon by now and I was still hoping she might turn up. I was standing there having another cup of tea when another girl walked past.

‘How much are they, love?’ she asked.

‘About eighty quid,’ I said, just picking the first price that came into my head, while also kind of knowing that was far too cheap because there was quite a lot of velvet in them.

Anyway, as the afternoon went on more and more people stopped to look at the little red dresses, with their little matching bonnets perched to the side.

‘My God, there’s a lot of interest in them, isn’t there?’ said Baby Mary.

‘Yeah,’ I thought. ‘Isn’t there just.’

At that point another woman walked by, then came back to take a closer look.

‘Can you do them in different colours?’ she asked.

It seemed that about every ten minutes people walking past were stopping to ask about the outfits. How much are these? Can you do them in this? Can you do them in that? How long will it take you to do them?

I was beginning to realise that something strange was happening. ‘Who are these people?’ I thought. ‘Why are they so interested in these dresses?’

The thing is, when it first started to dawn on me that the young girl with the pretty kids wasn’t going to come back and pick up the dresses, I was annoyed. ‘If she doesn’t buy these outfits, who the hell else is going to?’ I wondered. They were just so over the top, all lace and frills and stuff, and I didn’t much fancy the idea of carrying them back home again.

But then this stream of interested onlookers kept on. Some even went off and brought others back with them to have a look. By about quarter to three in the afternoon loads of people had stopped by my stall. ‘What’s going on here?’ I wondered.

I noticed that the women who were stopping by were all rather similar, but different from the Liverpool girls who usually came to buy the christening stuff. They were all crowding around and getting quite close to me, as though they had no sense of personal space. It was pretty overpowering and really quite scary. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was about them that really struck me most but, looking back, I guess it was the way that they spoke.

All gypsies speak differently – the Romanies and the English gypsies probably sound nearest to the way settled people speak but their accents are different still, so you know that they are not what they call country folk. But it was the Irish travellers who really made me sit up and take notice that something was going on: they speak so fast that they’re hard to understand and they sound as though they’re talking in a foreign language. They are very, very loud and they all speak over each other. I found it quite intimidating, so that day I just stood there looking and listening and wondering what the hell was going on.

I also remember that these women looked different to our usual customers. It wasn’t instantly obvious, but I did notice that they were quite young, from the very young-looking – 14 or 15, say – to women in their late 20s and early 30s. And the young girls looked quite glitzy – in some cases a bit too racy, I remember. What with their tiny belly tops and short skirts, I thought that they were dressed quite inappropriately for their seemingly young years. Then the older women looked like they may have been big sisters – a bit more dressed-down and casual – but they talked to the younger girls as though they were their mums. All of them looked as though they cared about the way they looked, though, and I could tell that they had spent time doing their hair and things.

Their hair – that’s another thing that struck me. Almost every one of these girls and young women had beautiful hair – long, glossy, tumbling blonde or jet-black flowing hair. They were all striking looking. And boy, did they make a noise.

‘They’re travellers,’ said Gypsy Rose Lee.

I looked at her and then looked at all the girls crowding around the stall, and the penny started to drop. I was really fascinated then.

I took ten orders for those dresses that Saturday. After that first one, which I knew I’d undersold, I started asking for £100 per dress, as I needed more money for a roll of velvet in a different colour. It was getting nearer Christmas time, so a lot of them wanted red velvet, which was good because it meant that I could use up the 50-metre roll I had at home. As well as phone numbers, I took deposits from them all.

The next week I took a different style back with me, a more ornate dress with layers and layers of lace, a cape and what was to become my most sought-after top hat. I’d bought two rolls of velvet, as someone else wanted a dress in blue. I’d made it for the woman already, but as she wasn’t coming in to pick it up for three weeks I put it on display on the stand. I got more orders that week than I’d ever had before.

I was still trying to make everything myself, but with all these new orders coming in that was becoming impossible. So I asked a seamstress called Audrey, who I used to work with, to help me. Audrey had actually taught me to sew properly a few years back when I had my first children’s clothes business, so she knew exactly what to do. Then we got another girl, Angela, and there were three of us doing it. We still had to work all week, with me working every night to get them done, though. The bonnets used to take the longest to do because Angela and Audrey found them tricky – maybe they hadn’t watched Gone With the Wind as many times as I had. They gave it a good go, but their bonnets weren’t quite as detailed as I knew they should be, so I had to do them myself, which was a nightmare as each one took about three hours to make. Finally, after lots of practice, I got the making time down to an hour.

By November I was getting loads more customers, so I thought I might start doing boys’ outfits as well, as not many people were doing them. I started to make suits with little matching caps with feathers, or with a big, droopy tassel – like an emperor’s hat. I also made old-fashioned Oliver Twist-style suits and caps. I got a reputation for doing boys’ suits then. But I have to admit that these were no ordinary suits. Seeing pictures of them now reminds me of all those nights I stayed up to get them finished in time for the market. They were so over the top, but that’s why I loved making them.

But then I’ve always loved historical costumes, especially the really old-fashioned ones that Henry VIII and Elizabeth I wore. All those big Tudor sleeves, lace collars and ruffs and things fascinated me. And anything Victorian – I just love Victorian styles.

One of my favourite things about the whole dressmaking process is going to the library to look at all the books about history and the clothes people wore in the old days. I liked the way the Little Princes in the Tower were dressed. You know, those two little boys who were locked up by their uncle hundreds of years ago. After looking at pictures of them I made these little gold, embroidered coats with little matching cravats for boys. They turned out really smart.

Of course, looking at all these old books gave me loads of new ideas, and the clothes I made were all very costume-like, I suppose, because that’s what I liked. But I do remember feeling a bit worried that the boys’ ones wouldn’t sell because they were so different from what we had been doing.

As ever, though, Dave was quick to reassure me: ‘You know what, babe, they’re brilliant.’ He said he’d never seen anything like them. Everyone knew Dave on the market then, because he used to come with me on Saturday mornings. He’d load all the stuff in his van and take me down there. But to give you an even better idea of the kind of man Dave really is – in the end he gave up his Everton season ticket to come and help me every Saturday.

Dave gave me confidence and encouraged me all the way. That felt good and it was great to have him around. Of course, he was right, I needn’t have worried: the little boys’ suits went down a storm.

I really loved doing Paddy’s Market, and I became good friends with a lot of the other stallholders and regular customers there. We’d fetch each other cups of tea and look out for each other. We were like a family.

Occasionally, the DSS or the police used to come to Paddy’s and do raids, looking for counterfeiters or people who were working while signing on. When someone heard that they were coming, word would spread through the market like a speeded-up Chinese whisper. You’d see people with dodgy DVDs and the like flying all over the place. The stalls would clear as if by magic. It was dead funny. We used to have some laughs on that market, we really did.

Just how much my Paddy’s mates would look out for me would become clearer later when I was to go through what would be one of the worst times of my life. When the going got really rough, not only did my market friends not let me down, they stuck right by me.

Things did start to get a little strained, though, when the travellers came to my stall. They’d all crowd round at once – the sister, the mother, the kids – touching things, asking things, all trying to talk to me while I worked out a price for what they wanted. It was pandemonium.

Some of the travellers who didn’t know I had a stall there, but who had seen other gypsies with the dresses, would come by and say things like, ‘Oh God, I didn’t know you were here. I’ve just given a deposit to the other woman around the corner for a dress, but I’m going to go round and get my money back.’ And they would.

I think it got up the noses of some stallholders, who didn’t seem that happy about the amount of attention I was getting. Some of them probably resented me for it. I suppose I can’t really blame them, because at times my stall would be teeming with women placing orders.

‘How much, love?’ they’d ask – usually all at once, while talking to their kids and sisters at the same time, the kids talking over them.

‘The price is on it, look, up there,’ I’d say.

But then they’d start: ‘Oh, go on, love, you can do better than that. I’m going to order three of them. I’ll give you £1,000 now, love.’

Now, I hadn’t seen £1,000 for a long time and so I’d be like, ‘Oh, all right, go on then.’

The travellers always wanted discounts. But it wasn’t just 10 per cent that they wanted off, and the same scene would be played out every time it came to the money bit. ‘I haven’t got any more money, love. Come on, that’s all I’ve got, love. Oh, go on, love.’

Before I knew it I’d be making ten dresses, so though I’d just been given £1,000, I was already out of pocket. I was making those dresses for practically nothing.

I knew I’d have to change my tune, because if I didn’t I was never going to make a profit. As it turned out I didn’t have to think about it too much, as it just happened quite naturally one Saturday. We were really busy and the stall was chaos – all these women chattering and shouting out all over the place. I thought my head was going to burst open. Only my mouth did instead.

‘That’s it!’ I screamed. ‘Nobody is getting served until you all shut up!’

‘Oh, love. Sorry, love,’ said one of the women. ‘We don’t mean any harm. We just talk loud. It’s just our way.’

They weren’t so perturbed and I realised that she was right, that was just their way, and if I wanted these women to carry on buying my dresses I’d just have to find my way of dealing with their way. From then on I got into the bargaining and even started to enjoy it. All I had to do, I learned, was stick to my guns. And it all added to the chaotic nature of the market.

Whether it was the travellers, local Liverpool girls, or the occasional raids, there was never a dull moment at Paddy’s, because if there’s one thing that flea markets throughout the world have in common, it’s great characters. And my stall was surrounded by them.

There was Baby Mary opposite me, Second-hand Mary over on one side, and Dancing Mary, who used to do all the dancing gear for kids at the back of me, and a regular at the market, Mary Hughes. Honest to God, I think they were all Marys!

Then there was Second-hand Joan. She was a real con merchant. Second-hand Joan used to borrow money from everyone but always seemed to have trouble paying it back. Second-hand Mary and Baby Mary had warned me never to lend Second-hand Joan anything.

Funnily enough, about three years ago Joan came into Nico, my shop in Liverpool that you might have seen me in when Big Fat Gypsy Weddings was on TV. She asked me if I had any old stuff that I could give her for her stall. I was happy to offload bits and bobs that we had lying around, so I went off upstairs to have a look. Joan followed me, but when we got up there I turned around and she literally fell to her knees.

‘Please help me, Thelma,’ she cried. ‘Help me. Please help me! I’ve got to pay all this money.’ She asked me to lend her £2,000. I just looked at her. It was all a bit awkward.

‘I just don’t have that kind of money to give you right now, Joan,’ I said.

‘Oh, but can you get me it? Can you get me it?’ she sobbed.

I felt sorry for her, as I knew that feeling. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I’ll try. But for God’s sake, get up, Joan!’

I quickly walked back downstairs. Pauline – who has been my trusty right-hand woman for as long as anyone can remember, but who no one forgets – was staring at me as we walked down. She had a look on her face that said: ‘Don’t you dare – don’t you dare trust her.’ We managed to calm Joan down a bit and got her to leave.

Then, just as if someone had written it in a play, who should walk in minutes later but Baby Mary. It was like Paddy’s Market days all over again. ‘Give her nothing,’ she said. ‘She owes so and so and so and so. She’s borrowed some money from some woman on the market and her husband has come down and said, “You get my wife’s money back now!” So now she’s come to you to get it.’

I didn’t give Joan the money – though I did think about it, because, as you’ll find out, it wasn’t that many years before that I had been in a desperate situation myself. I felt genuinely sorry for her. And I had been pleased to see her again because I used to talk to her a lot on the market.

But that night I went to the bingo with my mum and who should be sitting there playing? Joan! Yes, the woman with no money – out playing bingo! But then, you’ll always get her type on a market.

After a few months at Paddy’s, I’d kind of started to recognise the travellers from the other people at the market. One day this woman came to the stall – older than most of the traveller girls that came in – and I wasn’t sure if she was a traveller or not. She told me she had nine sons and had just had a baby girl after twenty years. She was absolutely besotted with the child.

This woman was from London, and had heard about me and our dresses, so she’d made the trip up to Liverpool with her husband to find me. That Saturday will always stick in my mind because when her husband came over he looked around the outfits on the stall and, after about four seconds, looked at me and said, ‘I’ll take the lot.’

And he did. He took every single thing I had that day that would fit the little girl. Everything. And just before they turned to leave he said, ‘I want you to make more for her because we live in London and we’re going back there. Can you make me all different ones? In different colours?’ I think I worked solidly for three weeks after that, just making dresses for that woman’s baby.

I knew that the dresses we made were special, and as the travellers used to request that more and more be added to the designs they started to look even more so. But sometimes I remember thinking while I was making them, ‘How the hell are the poor kids going to walk in these?’ I suppose, as some of them were for girls who were only around six months old, that wouldn’t be such a problem. But they were big and heavy and they really stuck out. And sometimes the little ruff necks would be stiff because I couldn’t use anything softer to make them stand up. So I’d suggest to the women that it might be a good idea to have a different design and to maybe leave out the hoop so that the baby could move a little easier.

‘I don’t think this will be very comfortable, you know, for the baby to lie in,’ I’d say.

‘No, no, love, she’ll be all right, she’ll be all right,’ they’d come back. These women were determined to have the biggest and best, regardless.

Not so long ago I was reminded of those days when I had gone to meet some English gypsies at their house, which was a massive place in Morecambe. I was a little bit apprehensive about going at first, as the travellers can be a bit wary of you if they don’t know you, and some of the Romany and English gypsies were not happy at the way they had been portrayed on the TV programme. So I was thinking, ‘Oh, we’re going to get a right reception here.’

But when we walked in they were all just so happy to see me. Pauline and me got chatting to them and one of the young girls came up to me and said: ‘I’ve got a dress you made for me when I was four. Do you remember?’ I couldn’t, because she must have been about sixteen or seventeen by this time. ‘Have you still got it?’ I asked. So she ran upstairs and brought down this little brown and ivory velvet dress.

At that point her dad walked in and said, ‘Do you remember we came to your house on Christmas Eve to pick it up?’

‘God,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I do remember that!’ It was about thirteen years ago. ‘Bloody hell,’ I thought, looking at that dress again. It was still in perfect condition, still in its bag and everything. It was short and sticky-out, made in velvet panels that were all braided around the edge, and it had a little coat that went over it, with a tiny muff and a beret. I had seen that outfit on a woman in a book about the 1800s and then made my own little version of it.

When I looked at that dress it brought back all these really happy memories of that time at Paddy’s in the late 1990s and how everything had started to pick up with those little Gone With the Wind dresses. They really were sweet.

I suppose my original Victorian designs look a bit dated now, when you think about the requests we get for Communion dresses these days, with their giant skirts, hundreds of ruffles, miles of material and all the glittery crystals and crowns, and the kids turning up to church in their own pink limos. And I couldn’t be happier doing all the fantastic and elaborate designs that we are asked for today, but I do have fond memories of making these early designs, of being so determined to get them right, so that all these gorgeous little kids would look like characters out of a film, all perfectly pretty. And I’m dead chuffed when my long-standing traveller customers want to pull them out and show me those early ones again. Luckily, my English and Romany customers still like to dress their kids in these romantic old styles, so I do still get a chance to make them.

By the end of that first year on the market I’d got to know a little bit more about the travellers’ ways; I suppose I’d started to accept their way of doing things and was becoming less surprised that travellers’ lives weren’t much like mine. But a memory that still really sticks in my mind was of a little girl hanging about the stall in December. She was looking at the dresses while her mum was settling up for orders and she was chattering away about how they were all going to meet on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Then she said something about them all being in their trailers. It had never actually occurred to me that gypsies still lived in caravans.

‘Bloody hell,’ I thought, ‘how are you all going to get round the Christmas table in a caravan with these dresses on?’ I thought of all these lovely little girls in all their lovely little velvet dresses … Then I pictured all of them covered in chocolate on Christmas Day. I didn’t feel as romantic about the whole thing after that.

But then I was exhausted. It had been a rollercoaster couple of months and I knew I needed a rest before our busiest time of the year – First Communion season, which was going to start as soon as Christmas and New Year were over.

‘Thank God it’s Christmas Eve,’ I said to Dave, when he got back from delivering our last order to a traveller site in Leeds. ‘At least they’re not going to want any of these dresses in summer …’