Retail guru Mary Portas is heading for Oxford to talk about her memoir and will soon be a more regular visitor. Jaine Blackman reports

Oxford retailers stand ready... Mary Portas is on the way. But for once the no-nonsense red-headed Queen of Shops and Secret Shopper won’t be sweeping in to stores and telling shopkeepers in no uncertain terms what they need to do to turn their businesses around.

The Watford-girl-made-good, who worked her way up from window dressing in Harrods to helping transform Harvey Nichols and advising David Cameron on the much-needed rejuvenation of the high street, will be in the city to talk about her memoir Shop Girl at the Oxford Literary Festival later this month.

What does she think of Oxfords shops?

“I don’t know them well enough to judge,” she says.

That may change as her daughter Verity, currently travelling in India, will be taking up a university place in the city, so she’s likely to become a more frequent visitor.

For now, she will be talking about the memoir charting her happy childhood as Mary Newton, one of five siblings growing up in a big, noisy Irish household in an end-of-terrace in north Watford.

The book charts the mischief she got up to against a backdrop of Seventies culture: her memories of Crackerjack, introduction to Vesta curry, Chopper bikes, and later the Sex Pistols and Pernod and black, are all relayed with wonderful humour.

But her childhood and adolescence came to an abrupt halt when her mother (also called Mary), the strong, loving linchpin of the family, died suddenly from meningitis when Mary was 16.

Writing the book was very emotional for Mary, 54. “I can still feel it so vividly,”Mary says. “The family unit unravelled the minute she died. It was the end of my childhood, the end of freedom to be the one having fun, pushing boundaries. There was no structure left. It was a very bleak time.”

Her father, Sam Newton, a bus conductor-turned-sales manager for Brooke Bond, couldn’t cope, leaving Mary and her 14-year-old brother Lawrence, as the youngest siblings, to fend for themselves. He rarely gave Mary enough housekeeping money to feed the family.

When he left the family home for another woman soon after, Mary was left alone to look after Lawrence.

The book is in many ways a homage to her mother, but writing it has been massively therapeutic for Mary. She was prompted to confront the pain of her past when Kirstie Young interviewed her on Desert Island Discs.

“She asked me about my childhood and I realised that there was still this pain deep down inside of me. I’d picked all these pieces of music that were heightened times of my life, but when it came to expressing them, I had to tell the story.

“I started to feel this pain and anger towards my father and all the stuff that had happened.”

She had therapy for six months after the programme, which helped enormously, she reflects.

After her mother died, Mary gave up a place at RADA – she had always wanted to be an actress – to look after Lawrence. A family friend took her in when her father announced he was selling up and getting married, while Lawrence was pushed into the police cadets, primarily to give him a roof over his head.

Her father died just two years after her mother, leaving everything to his new wife Rebecca. The siblings asked for their mother’s possessions back - photos, trinkets, a quilt with Scottie dogs on it - but never received anything.

The dramatic change in her life made her resilient, thrifty and forced her into being in control of the situation.

She went to a local art college, gaining some work experience at Harvey Nichols. But on leaving college, she badgered Harrods personnel department for an interview, even though no job had been advertised, ringing every day for weeks until she was finally granted one - and got a window dresser’s job.

Oxford Mail:
Mary Portas and her wife Melanie Rickey attend the Royal College of Art Fashion Gala in London last year

She went on to marry chemical engineer Graham Portas in 1990 and they had two children, Mylo and Verity. The couple divorced in 2003, but remain good friends.

Today, she lives in a £6 million house in London with her wife, fashion journalist Melanie Rickey. They married in December, becoming one of the first couples to convert their civil partnership into a same-sex marriage after the law was changed.

“Mel’s made a huge difference to my life, she’s wonderful,” Mary says.

“She was the one who proposed to me when we had a civil partnership. Then the person who did our civil partnership rang and said ‘Do you want to be the first (to convert it to same-sex marriage)?’”

Melanie had IVF treatment and gave birth to their son Horatio in 2012. Mary recently announced that her brother, Lawrence, is the biological father.

“We’ve just had the nicest time. Horatio has Mummy (Melanie) and Mama (Mary) and he knows that Daddy is Lawrence. We wanted a child that was genetically linked to part of the family. He was a wonderful little gift.

“I know that I’m not going to have any more. It’s exhausting. But I’m very clever on my timing. I never work weekends. I work from home on a Monday and a Friday if I’m not filming.

“At the start of last year, I decided just to do stuff that makes my heart sing and if it doesn’t make my heart sing, then I don’t want to do it.”

The entrepreneur has her own agency, Portas, is the global retail ambassador for Save the Children and remains a great supporter of communities and small businesses. There’s a lot that makes her heart sing.

The book ends as she quits her job at Harrods for a bigger, wider world. She’s not sure if she’ll write a sequel but she should, because her life beyond this first chapter has been a brilliantly colourful one.

Shop Girl by Mary Portas is published by Doubleday, priced £16.99

‘I really had to Hunker down’

As a self-confessed “mad” Gemini, who loves to “flit from one thing to another”, Mary found the discipline of writing difficult.

She spent 18-months on Shop Girl, working in a cabin in her garden, following a writer friend's advice to keep regular hours.

“I really had to hunker down,” she says.

Mary will be appearing at Oxford Martin School Lecture Theatre on Saturday March 28 at 10am to talk about her book. 
Tickets are £12; see oxfordliteraryfestival.org for more details.