Page 40 - Great Elizabethans

Born into a hardworking Italian family, Anita Roddick took one tiny little shop in Brighton and turned it into the huge The Body Shop chain, sticking to her strong environmental values all the way! She changed the way many people thought about what they bought and how they did business.
A DRAMATIC ARRIVAL
In 1942, in the middle of the Second World War, Anita Perilli was born in a strange place – a bomb shelter in Littlehampton, Sussex! She was the third of four children in
her Italian family – there were very few immigrant families where she lived, which made her even more unusual. But Anita’s life would more than live up
to her extraordinary beginnings.
Anita’s mother, Gilda, ran the family café – careful and resourceful, she recycled
as much as she could, and taught her children to do the same. Anita worked there from a young age, carrying trays and running the coffee machine, and learning a lot
about hard work and running a business. She often had to get up before dawn to make breakfast for local fishermen! Despite the early hours and tiring work, Anita always looked up to her bold, brave mother: “Everything I am I can lay at the feet
of Gilda, the woman who went hot-air-ballooning in her eighties.”
When she left school, Anita first wanted to become an actor and then she trained as a teacher, but found that wasn’t her passion. Instead, she worked in France and Switzerland,
and then went travelling all around the world. She journeyed through Australia, Africa and Asia, learning about how people lived in other countries and also about the products they
used to care for their bodies.
When she came home to England, she fell in love with a man called Gordon Roddick,
who was just as adventurous and wild as she was herself. She got married to him in 1970, and they began running a small restaurant together. Six years later, when
they had two daughters, Gordon set off on a journey he’d wanted to make all his life – a horseback ride from Buenos Aires in Argentina,
all the way to New York City in the USA! Anita thought this crazy idea was brilliant. She sent him off cheerfully, knowing she
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wouldn’t see him for another two years.