Don’t get me wrong, I was really happy about the way it was all going, really happy, but I needed help. So Dave said he’d start coming down to the stall to give me a hand. Also, I needed him to take the money as I didn’t like having cash on me when I was leaving the market.
By this time Mary Connors, the traveller that I had struck up a friendship with at the start, had started to come to the stall a lot, almost every Saturday, and I’d started to recognise her, affectionately, as Gypsy Mary. She knew everybody. ‘Whatever I do, they’ll follow,’ she used to say. I knew that Mary was a bit of a queen bee, so I believed her. And she’d also taken to looking out for me: ‘You’ve got to be careful with her,’ she’d warn me about some other traveller. ‘Don’t give her this,’ she’d say. ‘Don’t give them that.’ She was full of good advice, was Mary.
She was kind but with a tough heart, you know. So there was an element of the ‘If I do this for you, you do that for me’ sort of deal. ‘Don’t charge me what you charge them, and I’ll get you more business,’ she’d promise. You wouldn’t mess with Mary. She had six daughters, and every Christmas or Easter, or whenever there was a celebration, she’d have dresses made for the youngest ones. So, to be fair, she had bought quite a lot from me. Dave had even been down to a site she was living on in Manchester to deliver dresses to her. He used to come back and say that Mary and her family always made him feel welcome.
Mary’s youngest – Josephine – must have been about eighteen months. Josephine was adored by all the family and Mary used to buy loads for her. But the thing I remember most about Mary’s girls was that every one of them was stunning: they were all tall and slim, with long, flowing hair.
I hadn’t seen her for a while, and then one day at the end of January she turned up at the stall. ‘Our Mary’s getting married. She’s been asked for,’ she said, ‘and I want you to do the wedding dress.’
‘Oh God!’ I thought. My stomach turned over. It was January and the First Communion season hadn’t really kicked in yet, but it was about to. I’d done a wedding dress for a cousin of mine, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to do weddings as a business thing. I didn’t really want to do adult dresses at all. I was quite happy doing the little ones. I’d even taken the cutoff age down from seven to six after all the gypsies started asking for bigger dresses. Anyway, I could do the kids’ stuff with my eyes shut by then, because I knew what to do and where to get everything, but I really didn’t want to do big ones.
Also, I liked the idea of having my weeks free and not having to be on the stall until Saturday, so that I could really concentrate on new designs. I loved studying to find new styles and it was great having time to have a really good look through all my history books. I’d study the costumes in them for hours, looking at every detail and the different braids and edgings, working out how I could apply all that fine decoration to my designs.
I’d also spend days at the library, using their computers and searching the internet. Once I found some old hand-drawn patterns from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so I printed them out and took them home. I worked out how to scale them up, inch by inch, and made them into little kids’ outfits.
Every night I’d sit and cut or sew, and I wouldn’t go to bed until I’d finished something, making everything look as perfect as possible and as near to the styles in the books as I could possibly get them. Thinking back, they were quite amazing. I really liked Henry VIII’s style of clothing, and I remember looking at the big flat hats he used to wear, and those tunics. I loved those, the shape of them – how they were straight but then gathered at the bottom, like a little skirt, because he was so fat. It was just the way the fabric flowed. I remember looking at a picture of him in one and thinking, ‘That’d be lovely for a kid.’
So I made one in ivory velvet and designed a little coat to go over it. It was for a little girl and it looked really nice. It was so satisfying for me to do the kids’ clothes and try things out with the other girls that worked with me. Some of the ideas made it, some didn’t, but it was brilliant having the time to experiment. I really enjoyed that part of my job.
But this was Mary asking. She wouldn’t take no for an answer and I just felt that I couldn’t let her down. ‘I’ve got to do this somehow. I’ve just got to do this wedding dress,’ I thought to myself.
‘Yeah, all right,’ I said. ‘What colour?’
‘White!’ she said, casting me a funny look, as though I was thick.
Mary had brought a picture in with her. It was a bride wearing a dress with long sleeves, a tight sweetheart bodice, nipped in at the waist, and a really big meringue skirt. ‘OK, I said, that’s fine.’
Only, Mary wasn’t going to leave it at that.
‘I want it a lot bigger,’ she said. ‘Three times the size.’
‘Bigger than that!’ I said. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but I said OK, just hoping it wouldn’t come off.
‘I’ve got a deposit here. How much will it be?’
I told her I didn’t know how much it would be. I’d have to have a think. Like I said, I’d never done a wedding dress to order before.
‘Look, just give me a price. Tell me a price. Just give me a price, go on, give us one,’ she kept on.
‘I really do not know what it will cost, Mary,’ I kept telling her. ‘I haven’t done a dress that big.’ But she just wouldn’t leave it. Eventually, I was so exasperated that I blurted out the first price that came into my head, even though I knew it was way too low.
‘Tell me your best price and I’ll give you a deposit right now,’ she said, apparently not having heard the price I had just given her.
‘I’ve just told you my best price, Mary.’
‘And I want crystals on it, real crystals. Lots of them,’ she said, putting her hand in her bra and pulling out some money. Then she started to walk away. As I watched her go, my head was spinning – I hadn’t factored crystals into the price I’d given her. Then, just as she was about to disappear around the corner, she turned and shouted, ‘Oh, and I want a big train on it, love, like that,’ pointing to an imaginary train behind her. ‘About thirty feet.’
I called her back. ‘How long do you want your train?’
‘About thirty feet,’ she said again.
‘Thirty feet!’ I said, looking at her, surprised at the way she seemed to imagine that was a perfectly normal thing to ask for. I didn’t think she quite realised how long that would be. ‘That’s about from here to there, Mary,’ I shouted, pointing all the way along the path that ran by our stalls.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s it.’
‘Well, it will cost you more,’ I came back, hoping that she would think again.
‘Ah, go on now! It’s only a bit of material,’ she said and was gone.
The next week she came back to the stall with young Mary and six other girls in tow. ‘I’ve got Mary and some of the bridesmaids for you to measure.’
‘So you want bridesmaids as well, do you, Mary?’ I said.
‘Yeah, I told you. Eighteen bridesmaids.’
‘Eighteen!’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘And her cousin’s getting married the week before and she’s having a 100-foot train, so I want our Mary’s to be 107 foot now.’
I laughed and pointed right towards the very end of the market.
‘Yeah, I know, it’s going to cost me a bit more,’ she said, dead straight-faced.
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