Thelma Madine - Tales of the Gypsy Dressmaker

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?