A lifelong troublemaker

In Baggage, Janet Street-Porter's acid memoir of her childhood, she describes herself as a " self-centred junior troublemaker", which just goes to show a leopard never changes its spots.

In fact, Street-Porter appears not to have undergone any kind of maturation whatsoever. Time does not appear to have mellowed her ambition or her self-involvement, nor, to judge by this book, has it delivered anything much in the way of hindsight.

She even still looks exactly the same as the determined little girl who meets your gaze on the front cover of her book.

Street-Porter's childhood was one long (19 years long, to be precise) jail break, and Baggage is, more than anything else, a record of how the girl, then plain old Janet Bull, grew into a woman and finally got away.

The daughter of a Fulham electrician and a junior civil servant from the Welsh hills, Street-Porter rapidly developed into the family black sheep. Her earliest memories are of being the outsider.

She was too tall, too clever and too imaginative to be able to accommodate her drab and lowly background and this left her with little choice, really, but to rebel. So rebel Janet did.

As it turned out, there were a great many things to rebel against; the provincial leekishness of her Welshspeaking mother, the tyranny of her father, a series of awful, dank Welsh family holidays, her forced removal from gritty, central-ish Fulham to suburban Perivale, to mention but a few.

Baggage is a tremendously well-researched book. As a portrait of lower-middle-class life in London in the 1950s or of the glamorous arterati of the London of the 1960s and early 1970s it is second to none.

It is also a pretty extraordinary tale of a ferocious ambition and the lengths to which one had to be prepared to go in order to clamber a little way up the greasy pole of the English class system before Thatcherism arrived and changed all that.

And there are some hilarious moments, intentional and otherwise. Here's Street-Porter relating her childish penchant for frogspawn, which was later put to great effect in her glittering media career.