Goulden died in February By a miracle of the kind she believed in, the Anita Goulden Trust this year celebrates its 21st anniversary. Fascinated to learn how Goulden's legacy is flourishing without her, I flew back to Piura, landing on a blazing-hot day in May. The first town in South America to be founded by the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, Piura is a nondescript series of gridded streets where you can taste the sand in your food. It has grown tremendously since my first visit in , with a population today of more than , There are new districts, new streets, even a Parque Anita Goulden.
At the centre of the park is the bust of a person many regard as an angel.
Anita Goulden: the angel of Piura - Telegraph
The open-faced woman who meets me at the airport is likewise called Anita. The two Anitas became friends in Piura in Anita Goulden was a middle-aged milliner from Manchester. After a brief marriage in to John Goulden, she went into business and was running two hat shops in the Midlands when she went on holiday to Peru to visit her brother, an engineer in Lima. She was planning a return trip via America when she arrived in Piura.
There was a bank strike. Waiting for it to end, she walked through the Castilla district — and found her first abandoned children. They were suffering from tuberculosis and meningitis, and lying by the roadside. The appalling poverty; the indifference of those around.
I can only liken it to visiting a store and finding all the goods priced wrongly. Aged 38, Goulden decided to stay. With money she earned from teaching English and translation work, she would help those unable to express or assist themselves. She had one aim: The daughter of a Swiss businessman and Peruvian mother, Mollet had studied English in the Isle of Wight and haute couture in Zurich before returning to her native Piura to work as a volunteer in a children's hospital.
She and Goulden were brought together as translators during the visit to Piura of doctors from the hospital ship Hope. When Goulden needed a place to stay, Mollet opened her door. Even after she was no longer living with us, she came once a month for a dry sherry and to unwind. In Goulden left Mollet's haven to rent a basic house in Calle Junin. She had started to look after disabled children and was anxious to live with them. Many of the children were blind.
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Goulden's refusal to accept no as an answer was evident from the outset, Mollet recalls. She crusaded for a blind girl, Fedi, who wanted to study teaching. Anita was determined to change the law. She went to Lima, dressed in her everyday clothes, to the presidential palace, and asked for President Belaunde, but they wouldn't let her in.
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So she climbed through the window and found him. I'd not heard this story, but it brought back the formidable woman I'd encountered in , dressed in a green cardigan, her short grey hair secured by a white bandanna, speaking to everyone in deplorable Spanish, sometimes leading her children in a glass-cracking chorus of Old Macdonald. This was somebody undeterred by human or natural impediments, who was prepared to dynamite her way through blocked roads to reach remote villages with no access to a hospital. I came to wonder if there was anyone or anything Anita Goulden feared, except lack of funds.
Once I went with her to the local hospital to visit a boy who had been operated on for a club-foot. The lift door opened on a notice warning us not to enter during earth tremors. Goulden strode in, laughing. Eventually, up to 20 disabled or abandoned children were to live with Goulden in Calle Junin, and later in a former fire-station in Avenida Grau. The majority came from mountain villages where no one could afford medical treatment.
Every three months she travelled to the sierra, to scour for them and sometimes to take a lorry loaded with supplies for the hungry, sick and destitute. On entering a village, she would first search the pigsties, where physically and mentally disabled babies were often consigned. She once found a boy crawling in the desert at two in morning, his mouth filled with sand. His father denied him. These children are a punishment from God, a curse. They don't exist…' People in the sierra called Goulden Madre , as if addressing a saint.
As is often the case with saints, she was not an easy character. Over what, I asked. What made her effective at bustling through closed doors or red tape could make her maddening to deal with. Goulden used her Englishness to make things happen, but she needed a Peruvian fixer. Pali dealt with the bureaucracy and picked up the pieces, until she became indispensable to Goulden, and the person Goulden chose to be her successor.
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Although she was to die without apparently leaving a will, Goulden had none the less written down her ambition for the home's future on a single sheet, dated November 22 I would like her to be supported by a British volunteer who could be in charge of finances. Mollet tells me about the years following Goulden's death from cancer in , after Pali moved with her husband and children into the home. Probably the lowest point came in August when two unsupervised boys, one from the home and one the son of a laundrywoman who worked at the home, died after they saw a lizard disappear down a hole.
The story goes that they dug a huge ditch after it, which collapsed on top of them and they suffocated. Pali was arrested and charged with negligence, but later released. In the light of this and other concerns about the treatment and care of the residents, and the difficulty of receiving properly prepared, transparent accounts, the trustees felt they had no choice but to support a move to take the children away and begin afresh in a new location.
In December the 21 children and 18 staff were moved to a two-storey house in Calle los Fresnos, a quiet tree-lined street in the centre of Piura. Soon after, the trustees invited Mollet to take charge of the local operation. Mollet says, as we go out into the street to find a taxi to take us to Calle los Fresnos, 'It's my nature that when I begin a thing I stay till I finish. But this one has not ended. My hope, is that for as long as I have, I will do it.
Mollet leads me into a courtyard decorated with a wall painting of Goulden. The first faces I recognise beneath it, grinning and making hand gestures, belong to Vicki and Chavela. Now in their thirties, they were year-old girls when I last saw them. I have a vivid memory of the pair tied to their wheelchairs, uncommunicative, while Goulden spoon-fed them.
Roaring with laughter, they rock between them a pram containing the home's newest inmate, Milagros, a treacherously frail girl with thin legs that peter out into a pair of gigantic-looking black boots.
Her friend Pam Hogg says it better though. It arguably defined a whole new genre of louche, creative dressing. It was like she personified all the happiness and satisfaction that music could give you.
Listening to records made you feel lit up and happy and then there she was looking completely amazing and original. H er reputation as a fashion inspiration firmly cemented, Pallenberg became more intrinsically involved in the industry. She completed a fashion and textiles degree in and went on to make some select catwalk appearances, as well as rocking up to parties in looks which were just as effortlessly eclectic as those she wore back in her 60s and 70s heyday. She used to pop in out of nowhere, it was always great to work with her. She modelled in our shows, once in a beautiful silver dress that suited her no end.
L ast year, Freud even created a t-shirt and knit dedicated to her friend, a gesture acknowledging her influence. When I told her it was gold she was like an excited kid asking if she could wear her gold Elvis sunglasses and walking stick. As a surprise the next day she arrived at the venue an hour before showtime wearing a gold fringed fake leopard coat she'd bought from my shop in the 80s. She was awesome, completely stole the show with a standing ovation and screams that could have taken the roof right off. T hat joyful moment is now imbued with extra meaning for Hogg.
It was an honour to be her friend.