Gypsy Wedding Dreams: Ten dresses. Ten Dreams. All the secrets revealed.. Thelma Madine

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      I’ve got very little to complain about at Nico, but every now and again we have a bride in who really pushes us to the limit. Lateness, disorganisation, even chaos with the finances … these, I can deal with. But some girls really are a nightmare. And for them, we have ‘The Book’. There is no actual book – it’s more of a list that we keep in the office that has on it the names of people we will never work with again: the ones who simply aren’t worth the trouble, those who have been unforgivably rude or simply wasted too much of our time.

      Ashleigh Monaghan is the best example of this, as well as being the exception. Because despite her being in The Book, we still ended up making her wedding dress. It all began with her engagement dress, which we did not meet her for. Flamingo pink, it was for a July engagement. It came in two pieces: a halterneck, with leaves all the way around her neck and collar, and then a short skirt with a long train at the back. She had 3D roses all over it – wired up so that they didn’t sit flat on the dress but stood out to make a stunning dramatic statement.

      But she was pressure: every day was pressure. Ashleigh wanted more and more from us, and we’d give her more, but then she didn’t want to pay for it. She would snap at her mum, she would shout at us if she didn’t like our answer and then she would be on the phone at all times of day and night. I had Ashleigh and her mum on the phone, both pleading from different angles sometimes. Even though we never met her then, she still made it into The Book. Not formally, but we had marked her as difficult from the very beginning.

      That engagement dress was an absolute stunner. We had girls come into the factory while it was being made or before it was sent off to her and they actually cried when they saw it. Honestly, they were that sad it wasn’t their dress, their idea, that they burst into tears. I’d never had that before and I was glad that at least someone was getting pleasure out of the dress because by that stage Pauline had started to take all the phone calls in the factory, lying that I was either out or busy – I couldn’t take any more. Over the years she has got pretty good at those fake calls – ‘She’s just popped to the bank, love, sorry!’, ‘She’s on a trip for a wedding, love, sorry!’ – and so on. But she had never had to handle them in such volume before. When she finally got it, apparently Ashleigh did love the dress; she called me, crying on the phone because she loved it so much. She was very over-emotional, in as positive a way now as she had been with her negativity before. I was thrilled that she loved it, but after I put the phone down on that call I said to the rest of the team:

      ‘Well, we just have to make sure we don’t do her wedding! If she behaves like that over an engagement dress, we’ll never hear the end of the wedding.’

      There had been talk of a wedding dress while we were negotiating the engagement dress. She wanted us to do it – sometimes people say they are going to use us for their wedding dress so they can get some gloves or a couple of extras thrown in on the engagement dress – but she was quite sure that she wanted to use me. But this time I stayed quiet; I just kept my mouth shut whenever there was talk of ‘the next dress’, for my sake and the rest of the team.

      Some months later we received the measurements and a drawing for a wedding dress order through the mail. This wasn’t entirely unusual because sometimes travellers are literally travelling while they’re planning a wedding and can’t make it to the shop for a first fitting. If they’re very sure of their size – either because they’ve had one of my dresses before as a bridesmaid or for a party, or because they’ve been fitted in the past – and their dream design, often they just trust me with the rest. In with the usual selection of crank mail and bizarre charity requests, we’ll get a scrap of handwritten paper that is in fact an entirely serious order. If I’ve worked with a bride that the family might know and they’ve seen that I get it done how and when I’ve said I will, they don’t worry as much about meeting me.

      Often I’ll get the design – sometimes just a basic drawing and lots of description – along with the measurements, and we’ll get back to them with our finished suggested design, this time drawn up properly by Leanne or me, and a quote. It’s pretty simple once you’ve done it a few times, and it can save a lot of time and drama with some brides!

      In this case, the order – together with an initial sketch of the design – came from a woman whose name we had not heard before, but she seemed very organised and familiar with the process, so none of us thought to question it. There was no need to make a fuss where one wasn’t needed, we thought.

      The inspiration was Barbie of Swan Lake, with diaphanous fairy wings on the upper arms and a similar design flowing down over the large underskirts beneath; it all looked very delicate, very floaty. We sent back our drawings and an estimate of the cost. At this point there were no names mentioned, apart from that on the envelope.

      The deposit arrived straight away, with no problems at all. A few weeks later I was chatting to the mother, confirming price details of some alterations we were making to add to the dress, when she said: ‘That’s the thing – the engagement dress was so spectacular that we all feel under pressure to make this one even better. It has to top the engagement dress, and that’s no mean feat.’

      ‘Really, love, who did the engagement dress then?’ I asked, confused why she was putting me under so much pressure.

      ‘You did, Thelma,’ came the reply.

      My blood went cold and I completely froze as I realised who I was talking to. There was no question about it. It was that girl – the one we had sworn we would never work with again.

      Once the conversation had ended I turned back to the rest of the team, my head in my hands.

      ‘How the hell have we taken this order?’ I asked.

      The girls said it couldn’t be her, but I knew it was. We all sat round and tried to work it out.

      ‘It can’t be her,’ said Leanne. ‘It’s not her name on the order.’

      ‘It’s her,’ I said. I was annoyed, we were in too deep: she had paid her deposit and it was a dress we knew we could do a good job with. We had to do the dress. How had we not known it was her?

      It was only later that I spotted in the files that the mother had used her name to place the wedding dress order rather than use Ashleigh’s name, which would have been usual. None of us had remembered the mum’s name from the engagement order as she was very mild mannered, and so many travellers have the same surname that we really only refer to brides by their first name and the design of the dress – for example, ‘Cherry girl’ or ‘Shell girl’. That’s all we write on the files until we’ve got to know the bride and her family a bit better.

      We really would have said a flat-out no, had we had realised it was Ashleigh. Not because we disliked her but because she was so relentless. But we’d made an agreement, and we’d taken the money, so before long we were busy making the dress. And, as I’d feared, we were quickly doing five times more work for that one gown than for any other customer. The phone calls, the negotiations, the questions, it felt all-consuming, and it made me protective of the rest of our customers – it wasn’t fair that their experience was being infringed upon because of one girl making a huge fuss. Even bearing in mind the years I have spent dealing with the traveller community and all their quirks, this was way beyond anything we could cope with at Nico. It wasn’t a tradition I didn’t understand, it was pure mayhem.

      Part of the reason why it became such a huge saga was that Ashleigh wouldn’t talk to me directly. She would call – several times a day – but put her mother on the phone while she was in the background, yelling. I could have had a straight conversation with her and got it out of her what she СКАЧАТЬ