Lily.
I’m sitting at my computer with my earphones on listening to Die Fledermaus Overture by, Johann Strauss Junior. It’s a paradox, I’ve lost a friend, and I’m sad, and yet I feel happy for having known her. And why, Strauss? I’ll come to that.
Lily Falk, died last week after a long battle with cancer. She was the mother of one of my oldest friends, Erika, but she was more than that. Lily has been my friend ever since I was old enough to know that parents also have dreams and aspirations.
Lily was Polish, one of the many who found their way to England after being displaced by the Second World War. She never told me about that part of her life, and I never asked, I guess some things are difficult to talk about.
She was a small lady with a big character. She was profound, something of a mystic and an oracle. In a more opportune time, she would probably have followed a path into Philosophy or the Humanities. Like most parents of that era in Brogborough, those opportunities fell to the kids.
On a few occasions, she said. “Bernard, I see you in a Rolls Royce one day.”
She was close, I certainly did do some work for their aero-engine division, but I never got the car.
There was something esoteric about Lily, a search for spirituality. I guess the fortune-telling, went out the window later when she became a Jehovah’s Witness.
Lily spoke good English with a soft, pleasant Polish accent. She had a slightly lopsided smile, and I liked the way she called me, Bernard, it was special.
She was always genuinely happy to see me, even one winters night when I arrived at her door clasping a bottle of Spanish Fundador brandy. I’d come from Mallorca to decorate my mum and Wally’s kitchen when they lived in a pensioners’ bungalow in Lidlington. I needed to get out of the house. Through nostalgia, and being in want of conversation, I ended up walking the two and a half miles to Highfield Crescent, Brogborough. There, I discovered Jehovah’s Witnesses are allowed to drink alcohol in moderation. We opened the brandy and talked and talked. I left Lily’s house, at about one in the morning, and walked back to Lidlington.
Now, back to Strauss because music has the power to take you back to another place and time.
One Saturday, in late summer of 1968, I hitched a lift along the A5 to Bletchley after working overtime at Headley’s Engineering in Dunstable.
I’d arranged to meet Erika at the Studio Cinema to see the Stanley Kubrick movie, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. The film stuck exactly to the physics. Because sound doesn’t travel in the vacuum of space, Kubrick used the ‘Blue Danube’ music to fill the silence of the scene where the Earth shuttle manoeuvres to dock with the rotating space wheel. The waltz between those two objects was so powerful, we ended up getting an LP and spent hours, with Lily in her house listening to Strauss on the family record player.
One day at Headley’s, I walked into the foreman’s office, whistling, to get some more work.
Roe Wilson asked, “Do you know that tune?”
“It’s Die Fledermaus by Strauss” I replied. He was impressed.
“I’m a member of the Dunstable Amateur Operatic Society.” he said “We’re performing that at the end of the month in the Civic Hall. Would you like some tickets?” Not sure if that was a request or an order, but intrigued to see my shop foreman as an opera singer, I said yes.
At the end of the month, Erika, Lily and I got dressed up for a night at the opera.
I can still remember the subdued chatter and the magic sound of the instruments tuning up as we took our seats. The impact as the orchestra burst into the overture, live in an acoustic hall, was something far beyond a recording. It was a special night.
Now, listening to Strauss, I’m thinking of Lily, Christmas Eves in Brogborough, smokey coal fires, Polish cherry vodka, kielbasa garlic sausage, and seeing my old foreman dressed as a footman in knee-length breeches wearing a period wig. For all that, I’m thankful. And that my friends, makes me happy.
God bless you, Lily.
Hasta luego mi amiga. Vaya con Dios.
Postscript:
I don’t believe in this sort of stuff, but at one-thirty this morning while I was putting the final touches to this story and writing a little eulogy for Lily, a fledermaus flew into mine and Sandy’s bedroom. We couldn’t get it to leave, it just kept flying around the room. Eventually, it settled between the beams above our bed, so we put the lights out and went to sleep. In the morning, it had gone. Make of that what you will.
Vienna New Years Concert 2010, Die Fledermaus Overture, Johann Strauss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QROR4LioU-8