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 the dresses while her mum was settling up for orders and she was chattering away about how they were all going to meet on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Then she said something about them all being in their trailers. It had never actually occurred to me that gypsies still lived in caravans.
‘Bloody hell,’ I thought, ‘how are you all going to get round the Christmas table in a caravan with these dresses on?’ I thought of all these lovely little girls in all their lovely little velvet dresses … Then I pictured all of them covered in chocolate on Christmas Day. I didn’t feel as romantic about the whole thing after that.
But then I was exhausted. It had been a rollercoaster couple of months and I knew I needed a rest before our busiest time of the year – First Communion season, which was going to start as soon as Christmas and New Year were over.
‘Thank God it’s Christmas Eve,’ I said to Dave, when he got back from delivering our last order to a traveller site in Leeds. ‘At least they’re not going to want any of these dresses in summer …’
2
The Tale of the First Communion Dresses
My gypsy customers started coming back to Paddy’s the first few weeks in January. Only now they were coming from all over the country, not just Liverpool or Manchester but from London and Ireland too. As I was getting to know them all a little better, I started giving my phone number out to some of the travellers. They had also started to talk to me more.
One Saturday, a girl approached the stall with a pram. She had a big black coat on and was wrapping it tightly around her. The coat seemed huge because she was tiny. She was very, very young, and, to be honest, looked like she had the world on her shoulders. She kind of shuffled up.
‘Are you the Liverpool woman who makes the dresses?’ she asked, softly. ‘I want dresses made for two little girls,’ she said, pointing to the pram.
I looked down and saw these two tiny little things. One looked around twelve months old, the other a newborn baby. ‘I want them really sticking out.’ And then I want this, and I want that, the young girl carried on. She said that she wanted a bonnet for the really tiny one, who I noticed, when I looked in at her properly, was so small that she looked premature.
‘I’m not sure that the dresses are quite right for your newborn,’ I said to her.
‘Oh, she’s not newborn, she’s ten months. And she’s two,’ she said, pointing at the older baby. They really were the smallest babies I’ve ever seen.
Then the girl started asking if she could have diamonds on the dresses. Now, she was the first traveller to ask for diamonds, and as I’d never done that before I was a bit unsure. So I told her, ‘I can’t start them without half the money as a deposit.’ She said she’d go and get the money and be straight back. So off she went.
Ever since the stall had become popular with the travellers, a lot of the other stallholders