Thelma Madine - Tales of the Gypsy Dressmaker

I looked down and saw these two tiny little things. One looked around twelve months old, the other a newborn baby. ‘I want them really sticking out.’ And then I want this, and I want that, the young girl carried on. She said that she wanted a bonnet for the really tiny one, who I noticed, when I looked in at her properly, was so small that she looked premature.

‘I’m not sure that the dresses are quite right for your newborn,’ I said to her.

‘Oh, she’s not newborn, she’s ten months. And she’s two,’ she said, pointing at the older baby. They really were the smallest babies I’ve ever seen.

Then the girl started asking if she could have diamonds on the dresses. Now, she was the first traveller to ask for diamonds, and as I’d never done that before I was a bit unsure. So I told her, ‘I can’t start them without half the money as a deposit.’ She said she’d go and get the money and be straight back. So off she went.

Ever since the stall had become popular with the travellers, a lot of the other stallholders had been warning me against working with them. ‘Be careful. Don’t trust them. Just don’t trust them,’ they’d say.

Surprisingly, Gypsy Rose Lee was always stressing the point. But by then I realised that she was different from them. Gypsy Rose was Romany. Romanies are wary of other travellers and, to be honest, sometimes I think they see themselves as a cut or two above them.

Gypsy Rose’s kids were around her stall all the time. They were lovely, really well-behaved, and they’d go and get us all cups of tea. The other traveller kids that came to us, on the other hand, mostly Irish, were loud and boisterous and just so full of confidence. And the language! My God, it was terrible. But I soon got used to that and realised it’s just the way they speak. It’s not threatening or anything.

So, I waited for the girl who wanted the diamond dresses to come back, and deep down I suppose I never expected to see her again – the travellers are always full of promises of coming back but quite often they don’t. But she did, and this time she had her husband in tow. He was carrying one of the babies and was smothering her in kisses. ‘What a lovely dad,’ I thought, surprised at how kind and affectionate he was being. He looked up at me and said, ‘How much are the dresses going to be?’

Now, for the tiny little baby’s outfit the girl had said that she wanted a diamond collar and diamond cuffs. She wanted diamanté all over the dresses, basically. I didn’t know a trade supplier of Swarovski crystals, so I knew I’d have to buy them at the full retail price, which would be dear.

‘£600 for the two,’ I said, thinking he’d say ‘No way’, saving me all the trouble of having to make such a tricky order.

But he didn’t even think about it. He put his hand in his pocket, flicked through the notes and handed me the cash. As they left I remember standing there thinking: ‘Jesus, I’d better make sure these dresses are really nice.’ The couple came back a few weeks later to pick them up. The young mum was over the moon.

A month or so after that I was talking to another traveller woman, Mary – Mary Connors. She was a good-looking woman, Mary, tall with long, brown, wavy hair. You could tell, just by looking at her, that she must have been stunning as a girl. By the time I got to know Mary she must have been around 35 and had had seven kids. She still had a cracking figure, though, and I always liked the way she dressed. Mary was smart and classy looking and would wear long skirts with boots, that kind of thing. She had a neat style, well-off looking, you know?

The other thing I liked about Mary was her confidence. She had an air of authority about her and I knew that she was well liked in the community. The fact that she had seven children earned her the respect of her peers, as the more children a traveller woman has the more status she gets. I always liked seeing Mary with her kids – she was a really warm person and a good mum. Her kids adored her.

But Mary was tough, and even though she was only in her mid-30s, you could tell that she had lots of experience. She was wise and taught me a lot, and would come to the stall just for a chat, asking how things were going and whether I’d had more traveller customers. When I described to her who had come in, she instantly knew who the family was and would tell me all about them. In a way Mary was educating me, teaching me more and more about the travellers that would finally make my business.

So she’d become a bit of a regular on the stall, and though we didn’t know each other really well then, we hit it off and she obviously enjoyed my company as much as I did hers, so she was always popping in for a gossip. One day she came in and asked me: ‘Did you do Margaret’s dresses for the wedding?’

‘Who’s Margaret?’ I said.

‘Margaret, you know, Sweepy’s Margaret?’

The thing is, the gypsies think that you know everyone that they do because they live in such a closed community and all know each other. But I had no idea who Margaret was. Also, in my experience all traveller women seemed to be called Margaret or Mary!

‘Oh, they were handsome, love,’ she said. ‘All these diamonds on them. Oh, they were really handsome.’

Then, of course, I knew who she was talking about.

‘Do you know him, love?’ she asked, meaning the man who’d given me the cash that day.

‘No, not really,’ I told her.

‘Oh, he’s a multi-millionaire,’ said Mary. I was gobsmacked, thinking back to the day that I first set eyes on young Margaret, remembering that black coat and how she was the poorest-looking soul I’d ever seen.

I know the family really well now. The girls in that pram are all grown up and they love the fact that they were the first to get their dresses covered in diamonds. They still talk about it.

Shannon, the two-year-old, is 16 now, and the really tiny one that I was worried about, Shamelia, is 15. They’ve got two more sisters now as well, and we have made swishy little dresses for them since they were little too. Shannon and Shamelia are a great barometer of how traveller tastes have changed. When we first started making designs for them their mum wanted all the Victorian stuff, but with lots of glitter, really pretty dresses. Now that the girls are older and have their own ideas about how they want to dress, it’s all sparkly Swarovski-covered catsuits and the like. They’ve grown up to be really gorgeous, lovely kids, these girls.

The thing is, travellers always like to dress their children well. And, you know, I think Liverpool people are exactly the same as gypsies that way, because if you don’t have much to call your own, your whole pride comes from how good your kid looks. Nothing feels better than to have your child with you, dressed up so nice that people stop and say, ‘Oh, look at what she’s wearing.’ You just want to give your kids everything. There are probably more designer kids’ boutiques in Liverpool than anywhere else today. Yet for the Liverpool mum there are never, ever enough.

I’m the same myself. About thirty years ago I bought my daughter Hayley a pair of shoes that cost around £70. To be honest, she wasn’t even at the walking stage, but I didn’t care, I just loved dressing my kids up.

A few years back, when my youngest daughter, Katrina, who’s seven now, went to nursery, all the girls who worked there used to get so excited when I dropped her off. I wasn’t on the telly then, so they didn’t know I was a dressmaker. ‘We can’t wait to see what she’s got on when she comes in,’ they’d say. So I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll definitely need to make sure I have something new on her every day if they are waiting to see what she’s wearing!’ Now I’m the same with my granddaughter Phoebe – I buy her new outfits all the time.