In this autobiography, Mary Portas doesn’t dip into the fabled store of her talents by giving an account of her countrywide progress as monarch and oracle of retail, but conjures a nostalgic cornucopia of the mid- 20th-century brands and frankly cheesy TV personalities (she often dressed up as Jimmy Savile) that dazzled her youthful Hertfordshire eyes. These were rapturously set on future journeys, of which we get only one — her great leap forward from North Watford to Knightsbridge, where her undoubted brilliance as a window-dresser eventually blossomed at Harvey Nichols.
While credited with making that store a destination experience — though possibly its acquisition by the Hong Kong magnate Dixon Poon had a bit to do with that — Portas certainly put the cat among the cushions, but it always had a certain cachet. In the late 1950s, Woollands, as it was then, was a Saturday morning pilgrimage for the fashion elite, advertising moguls and photographers, from the established John French and Richard Dormer to the upstarts Bailey, Donovan and Duffy, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at panoramas of hitherto-unseen continental chic.
Mary’s family, the Newtons — Brylcreemed dad, mum with a whisp of Goya’s Coral lipstick, brothers, the altar boy Joe, police cadet-to-be Lawrence, Man-U obsessed Michael, future-nurse sister Tish — were the very model of that long-lost quality, civilised respectability.
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