Mary Portas: When dad died, my stepmother got the house. I lived on a friend’s floor

Born in Hertfordshire in 1960, Mary Portas began her retail career as a Saturday girl at John Lewis before working as a window dresser at Harrods and Topshop. She made her name as creative director of Harvey Nichols, helping transform the department store into one of London’s most fashionable shopping destinations, before founding her own creative consultancy agency in 1997. In 2007, she became a television star with Mary Queen of Shops and later conducted a government-commissioned review of Britain’s high streets. Portas splits her time between homes in London and the Cotswolds and has two children, Mylo, 32, and Verity, 30, with her ex-husband Graham Portas, and Horatio, 14, with her ex-wife Melanie Rickey. Here she looks back on the moments that changed her perspective on work, love, family, money and health. I wasn’t excited about retail as a teenager. I had a few Saturday jobs, first in a bakers, then in Boots, then in John Lewis, but I wanted to be an actress. I got into RADA, then when I was 16 my mum died of meningitis and encephalitis, then my father went off the rails emotionally, completely broke down, and got remarried. When I was 19, he died of a heart attack. He’d only been married for nine months and he hadn’t changed his will, so this old trout of a stepmother got our family home. I couldn’t go to RADA because I was grief stricken for about five years. I had no home and had to look after my younger brother Lawrence – we were the youngest two of five – so we lived on the floor of a family friend’s. I bumbled around until my sister said I should do something creative in the design world, because I’d done Art A level and English. So I got onto a course for visual merchandising and store design, thinking it would fill in a bit of time.I was terrible at design and I hated every minute of it. I sat with my anger long enough and realised it was grief. I was just terribly lost, so I misbehaved. I was the last in, made no effort, never did the homework and wasn’t motivated. I also thought, “I’m better than this lot. I want to be an actress”, so my whole energy was completely wrong. At the end of the course, the tutor said to me, “You’ll have no future in retail”. I thought, “Thank f**k for that”. I had no money and no home. I was living on the floor of my family friend’s council house, who had four kids. They didn’t need that, bless them, and I felt uncomfortable, even though I loved them and I knew they loved me. So, I just had to get a job. I now believe we only grow through pain. A coursemate had got onto the Harrods training scheme, so I found out the name of the person who interviewed her and rang him about 30 times begging for an interview. Eventually he said “Come in”, and I got the job. It was great. I designed these crazy windows for the fashion department and got spotted by Malcolm McClaren. He knocked on the window one day. I started doing his windows on the King’s Road. Then, when I was 25, I got the job of display manager at Topshop in Oxford Circus, and it was like coming home. I had some incredible years there experimenting and producing some really theatrical work, before I got spotted by the chairman, Sir Ralph Halpern. Suddenly, all those years of just not caring or in grief became, “I am going to prove to this guy how good I am”. I never had any therapy or anyone to talk to, so I worked things through on my own. I had no fallback. I had no mother. I had no one who says, “Come home for Sunday lunch, darling”. I’ve made sure my kids have had the complete opposite life to that. Thank f**k Mohammad Al Fayed wasn’t there when I worked at Harrods. We used to hear the news when I was at Harvey Nichols; great people getting fired and then nobody would moan because he would plant stuff in their flats like they’d been stealing. It was so low rent. [There were repeated allegations of sexual harassment by Al Fayed to female staff. Some who complained were accused of theft and, on occasions, arrested by local police, with charges later dropped.] When my daughter came out of Oxford University, I said to her: “The construct of the world that we’ve come into, is completely wrong. The patriarchy has completely overset the systems of how we should live, and they are fundamentally not working. So don’t feel that you’re not good enough or you’re inferior, because they are wrong. You might decide you’ll play the game to get through – and you probably will have to – but no, it’s not you who’s wrong; it is them.” And it’s true. It’s fundamentally true. Horatio is more like me than my other two children – perhaps because my younger brother is the father. I’m sure I’ve parented him differently to my other two children, although they all say I’m quite strict. I’m strict but fair, and I know one thing; every night he’s with me – and we split the week in two – I am in that house when he comes home, and I wasn’t able to do that with Mylo and Verity all of the time. In my early forties, I woke up to the universe. I found myself in a very low place, then read Eckhart Tolle’s The New Earth and realised, “Of course, this is ridiculous, we’ve got this world so wrong”. And I went on a – not crazy – spiritual journey that’s been with me ever since. I changed how I saw the world, and I wish I’d done that years ago. I’m spiritual but not religious. I believe there is a universal love and energy, God, whatever you call it. In my soul and in the way I kind of connect daily, I wake up each morning and go: I am grateful. There have been times when I’ve been on the floor, and it’s been a pain that I didn’t ever think I’d get through, but I did. I’d love to do a version of what Oprah does in the US, over here. They are so ahead of us, really openly talking about love, spirituality, and thinking about how we can create a better future. I’m not saying I’d be an Oprah, but I’d love to do that – extending into that space, particularly around women, and saying, “How can we make change happen?” ‘I Shop, Therefore I Am: The 90s, Harvey Nicks and Me’ by Mary Portas is out now in paperback