Tales of the Gypsy Dressmaker

1

The Tale of How It All Began

I think it was around October. It was definitely 1996. And I will never forget it was winter because Dave, my partner, would always arrive at my flat early, it was always pitch black, and it was always bloody freezing. But I suppose we got used to it as every week was the same – we’d be out loading the van at five a.m., as careful as we could with the little ivory and white christening gowns and boys’ suits that were beginning to make my stall one of the most talked-about on Paddy’s Market.

Great Homer Street Market – to give it its real name – was the scruffiest-looking place you’ve ever seen. It’s an Everton institution and it’s been there forever. My mum’s aunty even had a stall at Paddy’s in the 1930s – that’s how old it is. It’s massive and it’s got hundreds of indoor and outdoor stalls.

Now, I’ll bet you every kid in Liverpool has been to Paddy’s on a Saturday morning with their mum at some point, dragged around, feet sticking to the floor. There was always talk that Liverpool Council was going to redevelop Paddy’s, and the indoor part was moved to a better spot over the road, but really, it hasn’t changed, and I have always loved it. The stalls at Paddy’s stretch right out and along Great Homer Street, so you’d always find all sorts there, from fruit stands to second-hand clothes stalls and furniture places or people selling off job lots, that kind of thing. Years ago you’d get moneylenders hanging about too. ‘Mary Ellens’ – that’s what we used to call them.

When I set up my stall there the indoor part of the market was mainly filled with second-hand traders. Then, as you moved through, there would be other types of stalls – people who made their own stuff, like ladies’ clothes, knitted clothes, curtains, jewellery and kids’ clothes. Some of them were kind of homespun-looking, but some of it was really well made. The ones that always made me laugh, though, were the shoe stalls where they had big holes in the sides to pull string through so as to bind them together in a ‘pair’. Even funnier was that people actually bought them.

So this was Paddy’s, and every Saturday I’d set up my stall with children’s clothes I’d designed and made myself. I’d sold there before, but this time my stall was bigger. It was in the indoor part of the market, in the middle aisle at the back, alongside the dressmakers and second-hand clothes traders.

It was mainly christening dresses I was doing then, but I’d make other accessories to go with them to make a set. There would be these tiny top hats and bibs with children’s names embroidered on them. I’d even do these little ballet shoes. And bonnets – I loved making bonnets. I had had a thing about them ever since I was a kid and used to watch films like Little Women.

I taught myself how to make bonnets – no pattern; nothing. But I wanted to do them properly so I went to the library and looked for as many books about the American Civil War as I could find. I’d take them home and really study the pictures of the women in stiff peaked hats, you know, those ones with big ribbon ties under the chin.

I wanted to make my bonnets look exactly like the ones I saw in the books, and that meant making sure that I got every detail right, like the little frills inside the peaks. I would use different silks to create these, and it made all the difference. Then I’d add other details, like a huge bow on the side, say. The more I looked at the pictures of the bonnets in the books while I was making them, the more they turned out just like the ones I saw in films. They were lovely, they were, really lovely, and I’m sure that’s what started selling the christening robes – everyone wanted the matching bonnets.

Dave had helped me make my stall look really nice. He said you couldn’t see the little dresses very well when they were just hanging up, and that the way I had displayed them didn’t do them justice.

Dave is a builder and is really good at making things, so it was his idea to do stands to put the dresses on. They really made a difference and the stall looked classy, which was an achievement because the market was a right mess and it wasn’t unusual to see rats running around the back of the stalls. But after Dave did our corner up, it stood out. It took us two hours every Saturday morning to set up that stall. But it looked special – just rows and rows of pretty little white and ivory silk and satin dresses. It was quite talked about and people used to come by just to see it. Then the local press did a story on our stall and after that I got loads of interest, with people coming from miles around just to take photographs of the children’s outfits. The business really started to take off then.

There were a lot of gypsies who used to come to the market – all the travellers go to Paddy’s – but I didn’t realise they were gypsies then. The one person I knew with connections to that world was a woman in the market known as Gypsy Rose Lee, whose stall was next to mine.

Now, Gypsy Rose is a Romany. But back then I didn’t know the difference between a Romany and an Irish traveller, or whatever. I didn’t even relate her to being a traveller. To us, she was just someone who read palms, like those women in Blackpool near the pier – the ones who stop you and say, ‘Can I read your palm, love?’

Gypsy Rose was lovely. She was a good-looking woman with long, brown hair. She was kind and good company and not at all like the gypsies we were scared of as kids and that my mum had warned me about. I’ll never forget seeing my mum hiding in the house one day when I was little. This woman had knocked on the door trying to sell lucky heather and pegs.

‘Don’t ever open the door to them,’ Mum whispered, ‘because if you don’t buy off them they’ll put a curse on you. And don’t look one in the eye, right, or they’ll put a curse on you. And if you ever meet one and they try to give you lucky charms, take them, because if you don’t they’ll put a curse on you for that too.’

I was terrified of gypsies after that. Since then, I’ve had loads of curses put on me. Honestly, loads of them.

But I do remember the first time I encountered a real gypsy. This girl came to see me at my stall and was looking at the christening dresses. Up she walked. Dead tall, she was. And blonde. Really stunning. She was about nineteen and I remember her because she was really friendly, a naturally nice girl, you know. Michelle, that was her name. I’ll never forget her face. And I’ll never forget Michelle’s kids – gorgeous, they were. They stood out, all really blonde with pretty ringlets. That’s another reason I could sense something different about her – her kids just looked like they came from another era, as though they had stepped out of the pages of an old-fashioned story book.

‘Can you do Gone With the Wind dresses?’ she asked in a quiet voice.

You know by now what that film meant to me – Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara, velvet, big skirt, bonnet …

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I can do that.’

‘Well, how much will they be?’

I told her that I couldn’t give her a price because I didn’t use that kind of velvet at the time and I’d have to find out how much it cost.

‘Well, I want three red ones,’ she said, looking down at these three beautiful little girls trailing behind her.

‘You’ll have to leave a deposit,’ I said.

She handed over £80 and I measured up the kids. She said she’d be back the next Saturday to pick them up.

So off I went, thinking about Gone With the Wind and all those big, hooped dresses. The moment in the film that made the biggest impression on me was when Scarlett O’Hara has no money and she pulls the curtains down so that she can use the fabric to make a dress. And the sound of the dresses! Oh, I loved the way you could hear the taffeta swish when Scarlett walked in the room. I adored these dresses. I remember watching it one time, thinking, ‘Why don’t we all dress like that?’ You know, in big dresses with tiny little waists and with beautiful bonnets on the side of our heads.

Could I do Gone With the Wind dresses? I don’t think that girl could ever have known just how much she’d come to the right person. I couldn’t wait to get stuck in and start making them.

I’ve still got pictures of these little red velvet dresses somewhere. They stuck right out, and had wide ribbon belts around the waist with big red bonnets to match. It nearly killed me making them, as I was trying to get them done in time for the girl coming back while having to make new stuff for the market on Saturday as well.

In the end I did finish them in time, and I’ll always remember the struggle I had loading them into the van and carrying them to the market because the hooped underskirts weighed a ton. When I got to Paddy’s I laid them flat, behind the stall, ready for this girl to come in and pick them up that morning, which was when she said she’d come back.

It was getting later and later, and so at about twelve o’clock I thought, ‘These are going to get filthy lying through the back here by that dirty floor.’ You only have so much space behind your stall at Paddy’s, and people are always traipsing in and out, bringing more rubbish in with them. Not only that, there was a leak in the roof right above my area, so I thought, ‘I’ll just put them up with the other dresses for now.’

Baby Mary had just bought me a cup of tea. Her stall was right opposite mine. Baby Mary sold baby clothes and beautiful hand-knitted coats and hats. We were standing having a chat and she was looking up at the little Gone With the Wind dresses. ‘They’re lovely, them, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘Just gorgeous.’ I had to admit that they did look really nice. Another woman went by and said, ‘God, they’re lovely. How much are they?’ I told her that they were actually sold and that the girl who ordered them was coming back to pick them up later.

Then I remembered that I had the girl’s phone number, so I tried calling her. There was no answer; the phone didn’t seem to work. Later, I would come to realise that this was normal with travellers – phones that don’t work; numbers that don’t exist; calls that are never returned.

It was the afternoon by now and I was still hoping she might turn up. I was standing there having another cup of tea when another girl walked past.

‘How much are they, love?’ she asked.

‘About eighty quid,’ I said, just picking the first price that came into my head, while also kind of knowing that was far too cheap because there was quite a lot of velvet in them.

Anyway, as the afternoon went on more and more people stopped to look at the little red dresses, with their little matching bonnets perched to the side.

‘My God, there’s a lot of interest in them, isn’t there?’ said Baby Mary.

‘Yeah,’ I thought. ‘Isn’t there just.’

At that point another woman walked by, then came back to take a closer look.

‘Can you do them in different colours?’ she asked.

It seemed that about every ten minutes people walking past were stopping to ask about the outfits. How much are these? Can you do them in this? Can you do them in that? How long will it take you to do them?

I was beginning to realise that something strange was happening. ‘Who are these people?’ I thought. ‘Why are they so interested in these dresses?’

The thing is, when it first started to dawn on me that the young girl with the pretty kids wasn’t going to come back and pick up the dresses, I was annoyed. ‘If she doesn’t buy these outfits, who the hell else is going to?’ I wondered. They were just so over the top, all lace and frills and stuff, and I didn’t much fancy the idea of carrying them back home again.

But then this stream of interested onlookers kept on. Some even went off and brought others back with them to have a look. By about quarter to three in the afternoon loads of people had stopped by my stall. ‘What’s going on here?’ I wondered.

I noticed that the women who were stopping by were all rather similar, but different from the Liverpool girls who usually came to buy the christening stuff. They were all crowding around and getting quite close to me, as though they had no sense of personal space. It was pretty overpowering and really quite scary. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was about them that really struck me most but, looking back, I guess it was the way that they spoke.

All gypsies speak differently – the Romanies and the English gypsies probably sound nearest to the way settled people speak but their accents are different still, so you know that they are not what they call country folk. But it was the Irish travellers who really made me sit up and take notice that something was going on: they speak so fast that they’re hard to understand and they sound as though they’re talking in a foreign language. They are very, very loud and they all speak over each other. I found it quite intimidating, so that day I just stood there looking and listening and wondering what the hell was going on.

I also remember that these women looked different to our usual customers. It wasn’t instantly obvious, but I did notice that they were quite young, from the very young-looking – 14 or 15, say – to women in their late 20s and early 30s. And the young girls looked quite glitzy – in some cases a bit too racy, I remember. What with their tiny belly tops and short skirts, I thought that they were dressed quite inappropriately for their seemingly young years. Then the older women looked like they may have been big sisters – a bit more dressed-down and casual – but they talked to the younger girls as though they were their mums. All of them looked as though they cared about the way they looked, though, and I could tell that they had spent time doing their hair and things.

Their hair – that’s another thing that struck me. Almost every one of these girls and young women had beautiful hair – long, glossy, tumbling blonde or jet-black flowing hair. They were all striking looking. And boy, did they make a noise.

‘They’re travellers,’ said Gypsy Rose Lee.

I looked at her and then looked at all the girls crowding around the stall, and the penny started to drop. I was really fascinated then.

I took ten orders for those dresses that Saturday. After that first one, which I knew I’d undersold, I started asking for £100 per dress, as I needed more money for a roll of velvet in a different colour. It was getting nearer Christmas time, so a lot of them wanted red velvet, which was good because it meant that I could use up the 50-metre roll I had at home. As well as phone numbers, I took deposits from them all.

The next week I took a different style back with me, a more ornate dress with layers and layers of lace, a cape and what was to become my most sought-after top hat. I’d bought two rolls of velvet, as someone else wanted a dress in blue. I’d made it for the woman already, but as she wasn’t coming in to pick it up for three weeks I put it on display on the stand. I got more orders that week than I’d ever had before.

I was still trying to make everything myself, but with all these new orders coming in that was becoming impossible. So I asked a seamstress called Audrey, who I used to work with, to help me. Audrey had actually taught me to sew properly a few years back when I had my first children’s clothes business, so she knew exactly what to do. Then we got another girl, Angela, and there were three of us doing it. We still had to work all week, with me working every night to get them done, though. The bonnets used to take the longest to do because Angela and Audrey found them tricky – maybe they hadn’t watched Gone With the Wind as many times as I had. They gave it a good go, but their bonnets weren’t quite as detailed as I knew they should be, so I had to do them myself, which was a nightmare as each one took about three hours to make. Finally, after lots of practice, I got the making time down to an hour.