TRICKY DICK'S COFFEE HOUSE: 17) BRONCO, REDUX
A Throwback Thursday Memoir of Living in London in the 1970s
To our collective surprise, Bronco John, our most regular customer, finally found a real girlfriend.
He called her “Puff” but her her name was Michelle, a homeless waif who'd gone mental (a customer told me) after getting pregnant at age 15, dumped by her boyfriend and forced by her parents to submit to an abortion.
Bronco and Michelle became a regular pair, a novelty around Tricky Dick's.
You couldn't talk to Michelle; she was in a world of her own; autism, maybe, or elective mutism. Only Bronco seemed to connect with her on some extraordinary wavelength.
She was more clinically crazy than our usual clientele (some of them nonetheless certifiable) because at least they could communicate.
Michelle sometimes took off her clothes; Bronco couldn't control her and he'd get embarrassed.
We'd order them both out, and Michelle would stand on the street, disrobing, and poor Bronco would wring his hands and pace, not knowing what else to do. He'd walk away, walk back, help her on with her clothes.
Michelle took Bronco home once and introduced him to her parents.
"I don't think they liked me," Bronco told me later. "I'm a dosser, you know."
Michelle's parents apparently did not think Bronco a suitable squire for their daughter. They snatched her as she and Bronco pounded a Hampstead pavement on their nightly search for tea and french fries, and plunked her into a mental hospital.
For weeks afterward, Bronco talked only of mounting a rescue attempt, wild west style.
"Why don't you go visit her?" I asked him.
"Are you nuts?" Bronco replied. "They'd snatch me too!"
Instead, Bronco consoled himself writing poetry.
Bronco was one of the most genuine, most innocent and authentic characters I’ve ever known.
I never had a superficial conversation with him. Ask Bronco a common question and you received a thoughtful, true answer (although he deflected personal questions such as Where do you live? with “Ah!”).
Bronco’s funeral, in January 2005 at Golders Green Crematorium, was one of very few I have attended.
You do not realize how important some people are/have been in your life until it is too late to thank them for the lessons they imparted.
I wish I could serve Bronco one final cup of tea and a slice of cake.
From The Guardian (19 March 2005):
Super tramp
He was a ghost from a forgotten world, a gentleman of the road who took tea with Peter Cook and dinner with Peter Sellers. But when he passed away last Christmas, well-heeled Hampstead village in north London lost its most enigmatic star.
On 27 January, before a large gathering of locals and celebrities, the funeral took place of Bronco, the tramp who for more than 30 years had shuffled homelessly around the centre of Hampstead, village of beauty, legends, myths, money and poetry, in perpetual pursuit of small pleasures. Here, in this elevated enclave in north London, Bronco scavenged, sought charity, panhandled, drank tea (30 or 40 cups a day), chain-smoked, challenged and ranted, while wearing a dirty, grim brown mac, trousers and floppy hat, lugging two carrier bags and often reeking of weeks of sweat.
Bronco had sometimes slept by Constable's tomb in the churchyard of St John-at-Hampstead, and the parish vicar led his service, noting: 'We know almost nothing of his background, his family, the things that went into the making of the man we knew, with his giftedness as a musician, his tea drinking, eccentric conversation, his flaws and his woundedness.'
Bronco, who'd exclaimed in the high street that he wanted to bomb Hampstead and its people with tea bags, had died with no known birth certificate, tax or national-insurance number, job record, electoral registration, history of dole, previous doctor, hospital or dental records.
After his death, the man so often seen fumbling with a few coins in his tobacco tin, who to many epitomised neediness, was found to have been carrying more than £5,000 in one of his wretched carrier bags.
He would sit on street benches, philosophically, in between shuffling, with his bags, around the High Street and Heath Street and their linking and adjacent passages and nooks; hunched over, his neck and eyes moving like a crow's. Then he would suddenly appear beside someone: 'You're looking well, you're looking well... Pin-striped wankers!... Can you help?... A mattress is too comfortable... Why don't you say something good, like: "Here's £10"?... It's funny how things turn out... I like you, I like you. Buy me a tea... I sit there... They've ruined old England... Everything un-happens... I'm not a tramp, I'm a hippy... They won't move the prams... Cup of tea? Cup of tea?... I've seen you with a woman and I'd thought you were sensible... I feel I've been walking for 1,000 years... Tea!'
One time down at the betting office a person came in collecting for the homeless and Bronco was the only one to give money. Then he followed the collector outside and said, "I've given you money, but I'm homeless. So what are you going to do about it?"'
On 21 November, a young social worker for the homeless took Bronco to the Royal Free Hospital and had him admitted with 'chronic depression'. He was sectioned then or soon after and refused to eat, although he continued drinking tea. (His visitors) variously saw him agitated (saying he was being poisoned), acting normally (asking for chocolates and then saying they were the wrong ones), scrubbed up nicely, or stripped of his character, pacified with drugs.
Bronco John died of pneumonia on Boxing Day, at the Royal Free.