Bettie's Books

bookshelves: winter-20142015, published-2015, autobiography-memoir, watford, radio-4, snoozefest

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0536jp8

Description: Mary Portas reads her moving, funny account of growing up in a large Irish family in a small Watford semi in the 1970s.

Young Mary is always getting into trouble. When she isn't choking back fits of giggles at Holy Communion, or playing pranks on her teachers, she's gluing together cardboard boxes with her mum and dad to win youth club competitions dressed as a pack of Player's No. 6.

Mary's dad is a tea salesman and she loves tagging along on his sales calls to independent shops, selling everything from Chappie dog food and Heinz soups to Homepride flour and Kellogg's Corn Flakes. And even as a six-year-old, the girl who will one day be known as "Mary Queen of Shops" knows there is a world enclosed in the four tiny letters of the word 'shop'.

Read by Mary Portas

1/5 In Mary's house, money is scarce and space is tight. But these are good times and everything revolves around the force of nature that is her mum.

2/5 Her mum, a stickler for the rules when it comes to school and church, is happy to encourage her children's self-expression. But this world of chaotic creativity is blown apart when Mary's mother is taken seriously ill.

3/5 Her dad has crumpled and Mary knows she must be the one to stop everyone falling into the chasm which has opened in the family. So she juggles A-Levels and RADA auditions with cleaning and comforting her teenage brother.

4/5 Mary starts to see a future for herself and an outlet for her talents, the foundations of her life are pulled from beneath her when her father announces his intention to sell the family home and move in with Rebecca.

5/5 One night, her step mother turns up - with shocking news.