Tina's tree: a tiny story of generosity and defiance in London's East End

A few weeks ago, in a different time, I went on a mini-break to Tower Hamlets.

My friend Tina was taking four of us to see her childhood home. The plan is for each of us to show the others the place that first formed us. This means adventures in Reading, St Albans and Kericho, Kenya are one day hopefully to come.

So we peered through the dusty windows of the flat Tina shared with her mum and brother. We went to Whitechapel Art Gallery, once the library where she spent her Saturday afternoons, hungry for books, to the bomb-damaged church where her Brownie pack met, and past the pub where the gangsters used to gather.

Her tour then took us to Cable Street, surely as significant a British battle site as any in Hastings or Edge Hill. It’s the place where Oswald Mosley’s fascists were met and turned back by the courage and conviction (and chair legs and chamber pots) of the people of the East End – dockers, trade unionists, labourers and skivvies.

Then, after stops for cake and coffee, Tina took us to a tree in a bland concrete square and told us how, as a little girl, she’d noticed a broken sapling fit to be snapped off or pulled up.

So she made a splint to straighten it and watched as it grew. 

The five of us stood looking up into its branches, stretching high above us into the cloudless sky. 

The girl may have been small and the act unseen, but the tree Tina made safe has released oxygen into the air of the East End for decades. 

Despite the roar of the city around her, her focus was unfragmented and her response generous, defiant, and fully alive. I haven't been able to forget it.

Jo Mitchell is a freelance writer. This post first appeared at www.nightingale.ink.