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

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СКАЧАТЬ always start in the same way: ‘Ooh, Thelma,’ her mother’s now-familiar soft voice would say, ‘What she’d like is this, love.’

      I would start to reply when I’d hear her shouting in the background; she thought we didn’t understand her, we were trying to make her unhappy, we were ganging up on her.

      All the while she kept adding things onto the dress. The mum would phone up and say, ‘She wants these 3D Hawaiian flowers on here, here and here.’ It was as if Ashleigh would go to a wedding, see someone with something on their dress and then she would decide she wanted to have a bit of that on her dress too. Every time she went to another wedding, she’d want to add something from it as well. She wanted to outdo all of the other girls’ dresses by having something of theirs on her dress.

      She went to one wedding we did a dress for – a beautiful-looking kid, a completely different dress to anything we’ve done before – and first thing in the morning she was barking instructions down the phone.

      ‘She’s seen Melissa’s dress,’ her mum said. ‘It was out of this world, outstanding, so handsome. Is our dress going to be better than that?’

      ‘Well, she paid more than you,’ was my answer. I was at the end of my tether – I take pride in my work and the work of the team here. We really didn’t like being doubted so it was as much as I could offer.

      Having said that, Mrs Monaghan was always charming to me, no matter how Ashleigh was behaving in the background. She would always ask how I was; despite the demands, she was lovely to deal with.

      And Ashleigh herself was a sweetheart – when I got her direct. It was only with going through the parents that things got silly. The first half of every phone call I’d be thinking, she’s OK, really, I shouldn’t have been so hard on her. But then she’d turn and the pressure would start.

      She was just a 17-year-old girl and I was infuriated by how she’d get a rise out of me. At one stage she decided that she would like an extra 29 3D flowers added to her dress. Those flowers use almost an entire bag of crystals each – they are expensive but, more importantly, they are heavy. And she wanted them attached to the most lightweight of the sheer pieces of fabric that she had flowing down the top of the skirts.

      Pauline called her and started explaining to her mum that there was no way we could do that for her unless we went seriously over the budget we’d been given and it would also put the delicate fabric at great risk of ripping under their weight. We were sure they’d just rip off – the whole point of that part of the dress was that it looked flyaway, like a fairy’s dress, not for holding bloody great crystal flowers on!

      ‘We can have them maybe dotted around other areas on the dress,’ she explained, ‘but not on the ends of those petals like that – they’ll just pull off.’

      These flowers were the size of a saucer each; they were a serious amount of extra material and work. As I suspected, later that day Mrs Monaghan called about the costs: ‘Oh no, we can’t afford it.’

      Away went another entire day of extra work we’d spent on the dress and now we were just met with not getting paid for the cancelled work and yet more of Ashleigh’s shouting from behind her mother. Each time we’d had one of these conversations it took up the best part of a working morning or afternoon. One minute she wanted a belly top with huge skirts. Usually, if a girl’s having a belly top, her skirts are lower on the hip and slim-fitting, creating a bit of a slinky line. And if they’re having big skirts, they tend to have a corset which covers where the skirts are fastened. My skirts are so heavy that they really need to sit up on the waist, with the girl’s hips for the lower skirts to rest on. So a belly top with big skirts really doesn’t work – it’ll either sit on the hips and slide down under their own weight, or look a fright up round her waist. But whichever way we tried to explain this to Ashleigh, she still didn’t understand why large skirts wouldn’t physically hold up on a dress like that; she would not have it.

      The next minute there would be another quibble about the underskirts. Then there would be a panic about revised costs. And inevitably there would be more upsets, which often ended with the mother handing the phone over.

      ‘Here, you speak to Thelma,’ Mrs Monaghan would say to her daughter and then turn back to me: ‘It’s only you she listens to anyway.’

      It had reached the point in the factory where it would get to about 11am – the machines would be whirring, we’d have cups of tea on the go, the banter was good – and someone would always look up and say, ‘Has Ash called yet?’

      We were all waiting for it, the whole time, because we knew that once she called the mood would change and we’d be running around, trying to sort out the latest drama. It was a horrible tension to be working with by the end.

      Sometimes it would be eight or nine o’clock at night and there’d be no one there but me and the phone would still be going. If I didn’t pick up it would ring again – and again, and again. It was merciless.

      I couldn’t just sit there and work on a dress or catch up on paperwork. Oh no! She would carry on leaving messages.

      ‘It’s very important, Thelma …’

      ‘It’s Ashleigh’s mummy here …’

      ‘Thelma, we really do need to talk to you before bed …’

      Eventually I would relent and it would be something silly, like, ‘Ash is wondering, have you started the flowers yet?’

      I liked the woman – she was polite and kind, but a bit of a pushover. One evening when I pointed out that perhaps the fourth query of the day could have waited, she replied, ‘Ooh, you know what they’re like!’

      ‘Well, I know what yours is like,’ I said, ‘but if mine spoke to me like that she’d get a smack in the gob.’

      I knew this woman didn’t have any more money to spend but she so wanted to make her daughter happy and give her a dream day. But Ashleigh wanted constant reassurance; the more she nagged, the more she got.

      Girls that call in a lot are not uncommon, and I don’t really have a problem with it. I understand what a big deal these dresses are, for the mother and the bride. But there was only one other time we had a girl who rang as much as Ashleigh and she wasn’t nearly as much pressure. Don’t get me wrong, the constant chatting was not ideal, but this girl was a real sweetheart. She was from Belfast and we did her engagement dress, and then her wedding dress. She kept changing her mind about the engagement dress as every time she saw something she’d want it added: after many, many extra drawings the finished garment had feathers, diamonds, flowing arms and all sorts. In shocking pink too!

      She’d call in for what seemed like days on end and sometimes for no real reason. She never had complaints, she didn’t seem too fussed about how the timings were coming along, and the finances were all agreed, but she’d ask for a few details of what we were up to, check on who else was getting dresses done at the time, or anything else she might think of.

      At Nico, we’re open on a Saturday and often we’re there working on a dress on a Sunday too, but it took a while before Leanne realised that she was calling all weekend – from Friday night for almost 48 hours non-stop. It was starting to feel so personal.

      Lovely though she was, the situation was stopping us from getting any actual work done. And after what was nearly two years, what with the engagement СКАЧАТЬ