A Pocketful of Holes and Dreams (19 page)

Mr B said nothing for a moment, just looked Johnny straight in the eyes, one giant to another. Finally he spoke. ‘OK. You owe me one,’ he said. With that, he and Johnny shook hands and then embraced, before he turned and left.

I was mesmerized by what I had just witnessed. It had been like a scene from
The Godfather
, only this time set in my small shop in Liverpool.

For the next six months or so, every Friday afternoon at 3.30, Johnny would drop into the shop – apparently just passing by – for a cup of tea. Although it went unsaid, I knew that he just wanted to make sure Mr B never bothered me again.

In the twelve years I remained on Church Street, I never saw Mr B again and I often wondered why Johnny had gone out of his way to help me like that. At the end of the day, it was probably because he was a genuinely nice guy. Or maybe, just maybe, Mum had paid him a visit as well!

18. Mannequins and Nappies

I didn’t have any money to spend on advertising so I had to come up with something fast. One day, I was walking through Church Street, not too far from our shop, when I noticed a crowd of people gathered around two black teenage girls dancing like robots to music from a ghettoblaster. Robotic dancing was the new thing at that time, and watching them, I had an idea: I could pay them to dance outside my shop. If they drew the same crowd, it would be good publicity. When I spoke to them, they were very keen, so I asked them to come to the shop at 9 a.m. the following Saturday.

That left me a week to turn my idea into reality. I had 2,000 flyers printed announcing the arrival of Girls Talk, then bought two white boiler suits and two baseball caps, and had them printed with the name of the shop in brilliant red.

The following Saturday the girls put on their outfits, adding black stockings over their faces and black gloves on their hands. They looked spectacular and once they had started their performance, a crowd quickly drew up, keeping Gina and me busy handing out the flyers. Within an hour, Girls Talk was packed with eager shoppers, all happily spending their money. And this continued for the rest of the day. Towards the end of the afternoon, however, my two robots came into the shop accompanied by two ‘bizzies’.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ one of the policemen asked, ‘are you responsible for these two young women?’

‘Yes, I am,’ I replied. ‘Why? What’s wrong?’

‘I’m afraid we cannot allow them to continue their dancing,’ he explained. ‘It’s against the law.’

‘Against the law?’ I was puzzled. ‘They’re not busking or doing anything wrong – just entertaining the shoppers as they pass by.’ I really couldn’t see what the problem was.

‘If we let it continue,’ said the policeman, ‘soon everyone will be doing the same thing, and the area will become congested. I am sorry, sir, no more dancing, and that’s final.’

The girls looked disappointed. The day had been going so well for all of us, and now it was ruined. However, by the time they’d changed out of their costumes, I had come up with a solution. ‘Don’t worry, girls,’ I told them. ‘Next Saturday you can perform in our windows!’

The following Saturday, I removed a mannequin from each window and Gina dressed the girls in two of our latest styles instead of their boiler suits. Once they had put the black stockings over their faces and the gloves on their hands, they looked just like the real mannequins in the window.

They were brilliant. They stood completely motionless in the window until somebody walked past or stopped to have a look, then they would make a small movement, scaring the life out of whoever was looking. It was hilarious watching people’s reactions and listening to their screams of surprise. No one had ever done anything like this before. Within a very short time, a large crowd had gathered, and soon the tills were ringing non-stop as people started coming inside to spend their money. My idea had worked – I had got the customers through the door, and when they got there they loved what was on offer.

But then the bizzies appeared once more – in fact, it was the very same one as the week before. ‘Sir, I don’t know what it is you are doing, but whatever it is, you have to stop,’ he said. ‘You are causing an obstruction on the pavement outside.’

The penny dropped – but I had to smile at his blindness. Even this sharp-eyed cop had missed the obvious – my window was the stage for two living dolls!

‘You can’t be serious!’ I protested. ‘Last week you told me that I couldn’t promote my business outside, and now you’re telling me that I can’t promote it from inside? How do you expect me to do it then?’ I was irritated now. How could he be so narrow-minded?

‘I don’t know, sir. But I can’t allow you to cause an obstruction.’

I muttered a few angry words under my breath as he left. This was too much – I was trying to make my business busy but the bizzies wouldn’t let me!

As the weeks passed by, Girls Talk started to established itself, although the pressure was still there to do a lot better. If I was really going to compete with the big boys, I had to start thinking like them.

Now that we had shop premises, many more doors were opened to us. I started driving to London once a week to buy the latest styles from the larger fashion houses. The only drawback was that they were expensive, and I hated selling them at a similar price to my competitors. My aim was to sell cheaper than anyone else so, every trip to London, I spent hours searching for small factories.

Labour costs were low at these factories so I could keep my own prices down, and they worked really fast. If a buyer handed over a winning style on a Monday, it could be manufactured, delivered to the high street and on sale in the department stores by Saturday. The speed with which they produced finished garments was amazing.

My job was to find ‘cabbage’, an old trade term for leftover fabric or cloth. Most of the big fashion houses would design a garment, source and pay for the cloth, and then give the design and cloth to a known manufacturer on a cut-make-trim basis (CMT). They would pay the factory owner as little as they could get away with, but if he was clever, he would cut the cloth very carefully, allowing no wastage – hence the expression, ‘Cutting your cloth according to your means’. It was accepted that any leftover fabric belonged to the factory owner, and he could often save between 10 and 15 per cent of the fabric, which on the basis of an order for 1,000 blouses, say, would leave you enough for somewhere in the region of 100–150 over-makes. Then, because the cloth was free, the over-makes or ‘cabbage’ could be sold at a very low price, which meant I could sell up-to-the-minute garments for much lower prices than the competition. ‘Cabbage’ was one of the fundamental reasons for Girls Talk’s success.

One day I was in the stock room when I heard a shout from upstairs: ‘Jeff, quick!’ I ran to the sales floor, and found the customers and my sales staff standing immobilized, mouths hanging open in disbelief. ‘Jeff, quick,’ one of the girls shouted, ‘Quick, he’s taken it!’

‘Taken what?’

‘The till,’ she replied.

‘Which way did he go?’ I demanded.

‘That way,’ someone said, and everyone suddenly came to life.

Dashing out of the shop, I found myself among the crowds, but I caught a glimpse of a man two hundred yards away who kept glancing over his shoulder, and ducking and diving his way through the shoppers. Racing after him, I shouted, ‘Stop! Thief! Stop him!’

As the gap between us shortened and he realized I was closing in on him, he suddenly hurled my cash register backwards over his head, sending it crashing to the ground and spilling the money everywhere.

For a split second I wasn’t sure what to do – continue my pursuit or retrieve the till. I decided to carry on after him and leapt over the shattered machine. There was only one thing on my mind: to get my hands on this guy! But glancing backwards, I saw a crowd of people picking my money off the pavement. This brought me to a sharp halt and, turning around, I retraced my steps. People had taken fistfuls of notes.

‘That’s my money, leave it alone,’ I shouted, snatching as much as I could from their clutches and stuffing it into my pockets. I then picked up the remains of the till and returned to the shop.

Apparently, the thief had just casually strolled into the shop, made his way to the cash register, picked it up off the counter and run out! Everyone who saw it had been stunned by his sheer audacity and had been frozen to the spot. Later, on contacting the insurance company, I was informed that, if any of the staff had been hurt by the thief, it would have counted as robbery with violence and they would have replaced the till and the missing £160. But as this had not happened, it was classified as simple shoplifting, which my insurance policy did not cover.

After that incident, the new cash register I purchased was firmly bolted to the counter!

At this time, Gina was blooming. At eight months pregnant, she was in full sail and needed lots of encouraging to stay at home and rest. But being obstinate, she wouldn’t listen and insisted on continuing to work in the shop. This particular Saturday morning, while I was at the market, she was serving a customer when two women in their mid-twenties entered and threw a carrier bag down on the counter. One of them, a blonde, demanded her money back. Gina picked up the bag and handed it back, saying, ‘Do you mind? I’m serving someone at the moment, but I’ll be with you in a minute.’ Once she had finished, she turned to the young women who had been waiting. ‘Now, how may I help you?’

Pointing to the bag, the blonde woman stated, ‘I bought this last week, and it has already fallen to bits. I want my money back now!’ Opening the bag, Gina was hit by a strong smell of alcohol, and on closer inspection, she found a stained blouse with its collar hanging off.

‘How did it get in this condition?’ she asked.

‘That’s none of your business,’ she was told. ‘It’s faulty, so just give me my money back.’

Gina put the blouse back into the bag and handed it back to the customer. ‘This is my business, and I’m sorry, but I am not prepared to refund your money, particularly as it looks as if someone has tried to rip the collar off.’

But the young woman was not going to give up. ‘I’m taking this to the Citizens Advice Bureau, and we’ll see what they have to say.’

‘Please do,’ said Gina, and the two of them stormed out of the shop.

Half an hour later, the phone rang, and Gina answered. ‘This is the Citizens Advice Bureau here. We have just had a woman come in with a blouse that she bought from you; we advise you to give her the money back.’

Before Gina could say anything, the line went dead. She thought there was something strange about it and when she mentioned it to one of the staff, she was told that the Citizens Advice Bureau was not open on a Saturday. She called to check, and just as she was putting the phone down on the recorded message, she noticed the two troublemakers walking back through the door.

Throwing the bag down on the counter again, the blonde arrogantly informed Gina that she should have had a call from the Citizens Advice Bureau. ‘They told us that they have spoken to you,’ she whined, ‘and that you have to give me my money back.’

Looking her in the eye, Gina replied. ‘I don’t know which of your friends I spoke to, but it certainly wasn’t the Citizens Advice Bureau, as they are closed all day Saturday.’

At that, both women began loudly cursing at her, angry at having been caught out. Gina came out from behind the counter and towards the door, to encourage them to leave the shop. Seeing her standing there in a well-filled maternity dress, the blonde leaned towards her and hissed, ‘I’ll put you and that baby through that window, you cow!’, and her friend spat in Gina’s face. Two of the staff ran over to assist Gina, and after much arguing, eventually managed to steer the two women out of the shop.

When I arrived at the shop at five o’clock that afternoon, Gina was in a terrible state. The staff told me what had happened and where they thought the women had gone. Taking one of the staff with me to identify them, I headed to a pub around the corner. We quickly spotted them sitting at a large table with some other men and women, all making a lot of noise. The pub was poorly lit and full of smoke, the loud atmosphere telling me that everyone there was well into a Saturday drinking session. Furious at what had happened, I didn’t stop to think and stormed straight over. Putting my hands firmly down on the table, I leaned in close, eyeballing the pair.

‘If you two come anywhere near my wife or my shop ever again, I’ll put you through every window in this place.’ My voice was so loud that the whole pub must have heard me, and the place fell quiet. ‘Do you understand?’ Thank God, no one said a word or did anything in retaliation!

In the early hours of the following morning, Gina woke me to tell me that her waters had broken and she was going into labour. I carefully drove her to the Oxford Street Hospital, where she remained in labour for a further thirteen hours before finally delivering our daughter. I was present when she was born. Four weeks premature and only weighing 5lbs 10oz, she spent the first week of her life in an incubator in intensive care. We found the whole thing terrifying. We had come so close to losing our baby girl. And all because of the distress caused by those vile women.

We named our precious little girl Katie May, the middle name after Elsie May, my mother. In the early months of Katie’s life, Gina took her into work and breastfed her there. There was no alternative, as we couldn’t afford any more staff.

Once Katie arrived, our luck seemed to change for the better. Over the next twelve months, our business went from strength to strength, and for the first time we began to enjoy the financial rewards of all our hard work. By the end of the year, we had saved enough money to pay back Gina’s parents and move to a bigger house. To be honest, it wasn’t so much a bigger house as more space outside we needed, to accommodate the large market trailer, the vans and Gina’s car.

After looking for some time, we came across a Victorian house set in half an acre of land. It was a mansion compared to our last house, with six bedrooms and three bathrooms. Although structurally sound, it needed a lot of updating. It had been built in the late 1800s for Lord Latham, the then owner of most of the land in Huyton, and his coat of arms still remained above the front door. It seemed that Gina and I were the only ones mad enough to buy it, and in March 1981 we moved in. It was rather spooky at first, with its dark cellars and large staircase, which led up to an even larger landing. There were eight tall doors at the top of the stairs and, with its high ceilings and large windows, it seemed huge for two young people and a tiny baby. Even with Carla and Ranger, our two German Shepherds, we still all rattled around.