My friend Lorraine Tabone, who has died aged 55 of bronchial pneumonia, was the founder and driving force behind the charityLola’s Homeless, a grassroots initiative providing practical support and advice to homeless people in the London borough of Newham.
I first met her in the scorching heat of August 2020, when the true impact of Covid was starting to hit home. I had contacted her through a Facebook page, searching for a charity helping local homeless people, and had no idea what to expect. Whatever I had imagined, the human hurricane outside a council estate garage was not it.
She sat on a fold-out chair, surrounded by piles of blankets, tins of soup, spare clothes, soaps and toothbrushes, and directed her swirling army of volunteers with an unapologetic, straight-talking charm. “Look, I don’t have much,” she told me, “but what I do have, I’ll share. The people we serve are my people. Someone’s got to look out for them.”
She had set up Lola’s Homeless after encountering a young girl named Chloe, shivering and curled up on a Stratford pavement, in November 2015. Two weeks later, the first giveaway took place in a Morrisons’ car park.
Frustrated by the cuts to frontline services, Lorraine rented a garage on her council estate and steadily built a network of volunteers. Together they offered food, clothing, tents and compassion. If you called her at 3am because someone was sleeping rough, Lorraine would be there. She made it her mission to know every face and every story of those she helped.
Lorraine was born in Forest Gate, eastLondon, to Pam Macaree and Edward Sullivan, and brought up by her mother and extended family after her parents divorced (her father died when she was 12). She was dyslexic and had ADHD (only diagnosed in later years) and left school at 14 with no qualifications, as no one “knew what to do with me”.
She worked in bars and restaurants, often undertaking multiple shifts a day, and spent time working in Malta, where she met Aaron Tabone; they married in 1991. After their divorce in 2000, Lorraine became homeless and lived for 18 months in Canning Town in a B&B infested with cockroaches. The experience scarred her.
In 2018 her efforts were recognised on national television when she was awarded a Caribbean cruise by Jane McDonald on the singer’s Channel 5 show Jane and Friends.
Lorraine’s work also found its way into the pages of two ofmy children’s books, the novelThe Night Bus Hero, with a portion of the royalties going back to the charity, and the non-fiction bookHope on the Horizon, in which Lorraine is painted exactly as she was: a real-life She-Ra, galvanising worlds to battle cruel forces.
Her legacy is not just in the stories we tell of her; it is in the people still standing because of her, the lives she changed.