Thelma Madine - Tales of the Gypsy Dressmaker

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.