Tales of the Gypsy Dressmaker. Thelma Madine

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СКАЧАТЬ added to the chaotic nature of the market.

      Whether it was the travellers, local Liverpool girls, or the occasional raids, there was never a dull moment at Paddy’s, because if there’s one thing that flea markets throughout the world have in common, it’s great characters. And my stall was surrounded by them.

      There was Baby Mary opposite me, Second-hand Mary over on one side, and Dancing Mary, who used to do all the dancing gear for kids at the back of me, and a regular at the market, Mary Hughes. Honest to God, I think they were all Marys!

      Then there was Second-hand Joan. She was a real con merchant. Second-hand Joan used to borrow money from everyone but always seemed to have trouble paying it back. Second-hand Mary and Baby Mary had warned me never to lend Second-hand Joan anything.

      Funnily enough, about three years ago Joan came into Nico, my shop in Liverpool that you might have seen me in when Big Fat Gypsy Weddings was on TV. She asked me if I had any old stuff that I could give her for her stall. I was happy to offload bits and bobs that we had lying around, so I went off upstairs to have a look. Joan followed me, but when we got up there I turned around and she literally fell to her knees.

      ‘Please help me, Thelma,’ she cried. ‘Help me. Please help me! I’ve got to pay all this money.’ She asked me to lend her £2,000. I just looked at her. It was all a bit awkward.

      ‘I just don’t have that kind of money to give you right now, Joan,’ I said.

      ‘Oh, but can you get me it? Can you get me it?’ she sobbed.

      I felt sorry for her, as I knew that feeling. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I’ll try. But for God’s sake, get up, Joan!’

      I quickly walked back downstairs. Pauline – who has been my trusty right-hand woman for as long as anyone can remember, but who no one forgets – was staring at me as we walked down. She had a look on her face that said: ‘Don’t you dare – don’t you dare trust her.’ We managed to calm Joan down a bit and got her to leave.

      Then, just as if someone had written it in a play, who should walk in minutes later but Baby Mary. It was like Paddy’s Market days all over again. ‘Give her nothing,’ she said. ‘She owes so and so and so and so. She’s borrowed some money from some woman on the market and her husband has come down and said, “You get my wife’s money back now!” So now she’s come to you to get it.’

      I didn’t give Joan the money – though I did think about it, because, as you’ll find out, it wasn’t that many years before that I had been in a desperate situation myself. I felt genuinely sorry for her. And I had been pleased to see her again because I used to talk to her a lot on the market.

      But that night I went to the bingo with my mum and who should be sitting there playing? Joan! Yes, the woman with no money – out playing bingo! But then, you’ll always get her type on a market.

      After a few months at Paddy’s, I’d kind of started to recognise the travellers from the other people at the market. One day this woman came to the stall – older than most of the traveller girls that came in – and I wasn’t sure if she was a traveller or not. She told me she had nine sons and had just had a baby girl after twenty years. She was absolutely besotted with the child.

      This woman was from London, and had heard about me and our dresses, so she’d made the trip up to Liverpool with her husband to find me. That Saturday will always stick in my mind because when her husband came over he looked around the outfits on the stall and, after about four seconds, looked at me and said, ‘I’ll take the lot.’

      And he did. He took every single thing I had that day that would fit the little girl. Everything. And just before they turned to leave he said, ‘I want you to make more for her because we live in London and we’re going back there. Can you make me all different ones? In different colours?’ I think I worked solidly for three weeks after that, just making dresses for that woman’s baby.

      I knew that the dresses we made were special, and as the travellers used to request that more and more be added to the designs they started to look even more so. But sometimes I remember thinking while I was making them, ‘How the hell are the poor kids going to walk in these?’ I suppose, as some of them were for girls who were only around six months old, that wouldn’t be such a problem. But they were big and heavy and they really stuck out. And sometimes the little ruff necks would be stiff because I couldn’t use anything softer to make them stand up. So I’d suggest to the women that it might be a good idea to have a different design and to maybe leave out the hoop so that the baby could move a little easier.

      ‘I don’t think this will be very comfortable, you know, for the baby to lie in,’ I’d say.

      ‘No, no, love, she’ll be all right, she’ll be all right,’ they’d come back. These women were determined to have the biggest and best, regardless.

      Not so long ago I was reminded of those days when I had gone to meet some English gypsies at their house, which was a massive place in Morecambe. I was a little bit apprehensive about going at first, as the travellers can be a bit wary of you if they don’t know you, and some of the Romany and English gypsies were not happy at the way they had been portrayed on the TV programme. So I was thinking, ‘Oh, we’re going to get a right reception here.’

      But when we walked in they were all just so happy to see me. Pauline and me got chatting to them and one of the young girls came up to me and said: ‘I’ve got a dress you made for me when I was four. Do you remember?’ I couldn’t, because she must have been about sixteen or seventeen by this time. ‘Have you still got it?’ I asked. So she ran upstairs and brought down this little brown and ivory velvet dress.

      At that point her dad walked in and said, ‘Do you remember we came to your house on Christmas Eve to pick it up?’

      ‘God,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I do remember that!’ It was about thirteen years ago. ‘Bloody hell,’ I thought, looking at that dress again. It was still in perfect condition, still in its bag and everything. It was short and sticky-out, made in velvet panels that were all braided around the edge, and it had a little coat that went over it, with a tiny muff and a beret. I had seen that outfit on a woman in a book about the 1800s and then made my own little version of it.

      When I looked at that dress it brought back all these really happy memories of that time at Paddy’s in the late 1990s and how everything had started to pick up with those little Gone With the Wind dresses. They really were sweet.

      I suppose my original Victorian designs look a bit dated now, when you think about the requests we get for Communion dresses these days, with their giant skirts, hundreds of ruffles, miles of material and all the glittery crystals and crowns, and the kids turning up to church in their own pink limos. And I couldn’t be happier doing all the fantastic and elaborate designs that we are asked for today, but I do have fond memories of making these early designs, of being so determined to get them right, so that all these gorgeous little kids would look like characters out of a film, all perfectly pretty. And I’m dead chuffed when my long-standing traveller customers want to pull them out and show me those early ones again. Luckily, my English and Romany customers still like to dress their kids in these romantic old styles, so I do still get a chance to make them.

      By the end of that first year on the market I’d got to know a little bit more about the travellers’ ways; I suppose I’d started to accept their way of doing things and was becoming less surprised that travellers’ lives weren’t much like mine. But a memory that still really sticks in my mind was of a little girl hanging about the stall in December. She was looking at СКАЧАТЬ