Thelma Madine - Tales of the Gypsy Dressmaker

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.’

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.