Early Life and Teenage Years
Born in Windsor, Berkshire, and originally from Taplow, Buckinghamshire, she and her older brother Martin "moved around a lot" until they reached Norfolk. She had an unconventional, hippie, nomadic upbringing in the rural environs of Norfolk, as well as different parts of the Midlands and the Southeast. By her own account, her family "thought we were getting a new-built home, but it wasn't ready, and my mother, being as practical as ever, said: 'Well, we are homeless, so we are travellers until we are housed'. I remember trees, bushes and grass and a toilet in a shed. There was this enormous chrome caravan with those sort of lacy doily things in the window, and my birthday party in a tent, playing pass the parcel in the pouring rain. Rain is still my favourite weather". As a girl, her dreams were to become a dancer and prime minister, because she "liked the idea of being in charge".
Baker travelled widely as a teenager spending three years visiting France, Corsica, Italy, Greece and Switzerland, before ending up on Cape Clear, an island off the southern tip of Ireland, "because there was a ferry leaving to go there". She trained as a dancer at Bush Davies ballet school and left with six O-levels, but later abandoned A-levels in Drama, English and History at Norwich City Tech for London.
Her initial career ambition was politics, inspired by her mother's environmental activism as well as her relationship with PR boss Matthew Freud, son of the ex-Liberal MP Sir Clement Freud, whom she met while working as a waitress in London. She said: "I got into it when I was 18. My boyfriend’s father was Clement Freud, and I used to help out. I loved it. Nicholas Parsons would be there stuffing envelopes, and I'd be out chatting to people.... It really suited me knocking on doors going "'Ello! How are you? How are things for you? Is your MP helpful? What could be better round here? Oh, I see what you mean ... Terrible state of the roads".
To supplement her modest income, Baker began glamour modeling as a Page Three girl at age 17 before she was discovered by noted erotic photographer Byron Newman. When asked about what influenced her decision, she answered, "I really didn't have any problems about my body. It wasn't ever an ambition. It was just one of those things—if you are a certain height with a certain look and a certain pneumatic silhouette—sooner or later in that sort of company it's a bit inevitable really". She claimed that her comfort with posing nude was due to the liberating influence of her mother, Margaret Ayrton, a Witch. She said "I suppose being brought up by hippies as parents, I had absolutely no problem being naked. The problems I had were actually wrestling with the whole sort of feminist thing. I tried to justify it to myself that there were loads of jobs that I thought were equally demeaning because they had such a low wage. When I waitressed, my take home pay was what I could earn in two hours modelling". She attributes her buxom figure to a combination of rigorous ballet-training and having Irish and Welsh ancestry.
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