Thelma Madine - Tales of the Gypsy Dressmaker

Still, we lived in a lovely house in a nice area. How could I take that away from my kids? The thought of it made me stay in my marriage far longer than I knew I should.

Then, one Friday night, Kenny came home and said he wanted to talk. He was all dead nice and said, ‘Listen, I don’t want to keep going out on my own, and I want you to stop doing that too.’

I looked at him and said, ‘No, I don’t want to stop. If you want to stop going out then that’s up to you, but I’m not.’ I knew then that there was nothing left between us. It was the end. I had spent so many years doing what he wanted and being frightened not to. Now it felt easy; I wasn’t scared to say what I wanted.

The following Monday morning, me and Pauline and the other girls in the Central Station shop were all standing around talking and catching up on the weekend. No one was more surprised than me to see Kenny coming up to the shop. He opened the door and walked right up to me. ‘My shop – give me the keys,’ he barked.

His shop! Yes it was in his name, but it was my mum’s money and my hard work that built up the business. Still, I picked them up, looked straight at him and said, ‘Here you are.’ Then I turned around and said, ‘Come on, girls,’ and we walked out of the shop.

Kenny just stood there, watching. Me and the girls, who were a little bit in shock, went around the corner to this little café. Then we phoned the Indian fella who owned the shop opposite ours and asked him to look across to see what Kenny was doing.

‘Can you see anything?’ we kept asking him. ‘What’s he doing now?’ He said he could see loads of women coming into the shop. It was Communion time, so it was one of our busiest periods. We were all laughing at the thought of Kenny standing there with his hands open, not knowing what to do. But I just thought, ‘You know what, let him have it.’ And I did. He got the shop, but I felt free.

Just after that Kenny moved out and set up home with his girlfriend.

Apart from the kids, the business was his last hold over me. He couldn’t do anything then. Nothing. The shop closed down pretty soon after. But I couldn’t sleep for thinking about the customers who had come to us to have their Communion dresses made. I still had all the numbers and all the books, so I chased up the girls who had left deposits and said, ‘OK, no problem. I’ll do your dress for you and deliver it when it’s done.’ But we hadn’t managed to contact all the people, so I rang the local radio station and asked them if they could do a little appeal, asking the people I couldn’t contact to get in touch with me. They read it out over the air, and it worked! I managed to finish every order. At night, I’d jump in the car with Pauline and go round delivering them all.

Kenny still came to the house, and each time he came he would take more and more away with him. One September night he came to the house, picked up my car keys and drove off in our car.

It was my car too – I had bought it with money I had earned – but it was in his name. The worst thing about that was that we lived in a place that was quite out of the way, so I really needed a car to get around and to ferry Hayley about to all her mates’.

I was really upset by that. I called Pauline to tell her that I wouldn’t be able to come and see her sing in the karaoke final. But she wasn’t having any of it. ‘Get down here now,’ she said. ‘Don’t sit there on your own, crying – that’s just what he wants. Get a taxi and I’ll pay for it when you get here.’ She was right. I called the taxi.

That night Pauline introduced me to Ruth, a woman she had met at some of the singing competitions. Pauline had told Ruth what was happening with me and Kenny, and Ruth asked me more. I spent most of that evening pouring my heart out to her.

‘What’s your biggest problem?’ she asked me, trying to get some perspective on the situation.

‘Well, apart from the fact that I’ve no car, no business, no money, and am bankrupt, where do you want me to start?’ I said to her, with tears starting to run down my face.

On top of that, I’d just received a healthy amount of orders from my agent in Ireland that morning. ‘Now I’ll have to call her and tell her that I can’t do them,’ I said to Ruth. To my amazement she offered to help.

‘What do you need to fulfil the Irish orders?’ she asked.

‘About £5,000 for fabric and a car to go to the warehouses,’ I told her.

‘Come and see me tomorrow,’ she said. I couldn’t believe it. Here was a complete stranger offering to help me. I suppose alarm bells should have rung then, but I was probably the most vulnerable I’d ever been and I needed a lifeline. I needed someone to hold on to.

I went to Ruth’s house and she told me her plans. Her boyfriend would lend me the money I needed, and she suggested that, rather than me carrying on by myself, she and I could go into business together. She told me she had a business degree, so if I made the dresses she could look after the financial side of things. She set up a bank account in the name of My Fair Lady and rang the agent in Ireland explaining that she would be dealing with the business while I got on with the dressmaking. She set up credit accounts with some of the suppliers too.

When she came to my house one night to drop off some fabric, her jaw dropped when she saw where I lived. ‘I used to live in a house like this, about fifteen years ago,’ she told me, her voice filled with regret. ‘That’s until my ex-husband kicked me and the kids out on Christmas Eve.’ Ruth went on to tell me more about her past life. I felt for her – her story sounded so similar to mine.

The next day I made a start on the orders. That evening Ruth arrived at my door in floods of tears. Her boyfriend had run off with everything in the house, she told me, including my computer and other things I had lent her to get the business up and running.

I tried to calm her down. She said she would think about how to get the money and then she said, ‘Have you got any jewellery that we could pawn? It will keep us going until we get the money together.’ I had never been in a pawn shop in my life and didn’t know what to do. ‘Give it to me and I’ll sort it out,’ Ruth convinced me. In the meantime, in my desperation I turned to the only person I could and asked my Aunty Gladys to lend me £3,000 to keep things going.

We bought more fabric with the money and I carried on with the orders. ‘We should open a stall on the market with the old stock from your garage,’ Ruth suggested. So we did. She set up at Paddy’s and started selling there on Saturdays. Things went well for a bit, but then trade started to slow down when the First Communion season came to an end. So Ruth found a unit in another retail space and I started to make christening outfits for her to sell in it. But I had started to feel a bit unsure of Ruth, as she was becoming over-friendly. Then Ruth and Pauline stopped getting on and Pauline stopped working with us.

All this time, Tracey and Hayley were still in the family home. But I had no money whatsoever, not a penny, and I had to keep working to supply the shop as I needed to keep the house going. I also wanted to pay my aunty back as soon as I could. It was tough. In fact, it was turning out to be the hardest winter I’d had.

It’s funny how things work out, though, because me and my kids ended up having a cracking Christmas that year. When I was with Kenny, and used to consider leaving him, I would say to myself, ‘What would you do at Christmas?’ But we had a ball.

The house was massive and we didn’t have any oil for heating, and it was freezing, so the only thing for it was to go to the pub – me, Hayley, Tracey and her boyfriend. I stuck a duck in the oven and we all went for a couple of drinks (though, of course, Hayley was only drinking Coke). By the time we got back from the pub the duck was burnt. But we ended up playing games and having such a good laugh together that it didn’t matter. We had no money but we had a good time.