A few weeks ago if you went looking for Pauline Pearce you were most likely to be greeted with a blank stare and a shake of the head: “Pauline who?”
But that was then.
Today when people in Hackney, the East London suburb where she lives, see a television crew in the area they assume that it is headed for Pauline Pearce's flat; and nine times out of ten they are right. The doorbell, she says, never stops ringing.
“I'd be asleep and then the doorbell would ring, and it'd be Channel 4 news. And I'd be like, how did you know I was here?”, the woman hailed as the “heroine of Hackney” said in a newspaper interview.
Ms. Pearce can't step out of her house these days without being stopped and asked: “Aren't you the woman with the stick?”
So, how did this 45-year-old disabled “woman from nowhere”, as she describes herself, become famous overnight?
On August 8 when Hackney, like much of the rest of London, was in the midst of a rioting, Ms. Pearce was confronted by a burly rioter as she picked her way through the wreckage of burnt cars and walked past looted shops and smashed windows.
But rather than being intimidated, she gave him a tongue-lashing waving her stick at him. Unknown to her, someone filmed the incident and posted it on YouTube. Within minutes the video went viral and everyone was talking about the “woman with the stick”.
In an interview to The Guardian on Tuesday, she recalled that moment: “One man got physical with me, and that's why I started ranting. There was a burnt-out car, and I said: ‘What is the point of that? It's ridiculous, they're our neighbours' vehicles, and they're trying to make a living just like you.' And this big burly black man goes up against me, and really gives me intimidation. And I'm like, ‘Go for it, I'm ready to go, I'm at peace with the Lord.' And that's when I started to go off on one. I was ranting for a good 15 minutes before the clip started.”
The Jamaica-born single mother has had a difficult life — a cancer patient with a broken marriage and a victim of domestic violence — and understands what drives some young African-origin youth into violence. Even as she condemns their behaviour she calls for a more “compassionate” approach and warns that the post-riot “nervous calm” could explode again anytime. “The government needs to be careful. Otherwise, they're going to end up with another right little civil uprising,” she warns leaning on her famous stick.
