One day, the name Gracie Fields suddenly popped into my head for no apparent reason. Fields was an extremely popular British singer and actor who lived from 1898 to 1979 and was considered the highest paid film star in the world in 1937. But all that was before my time. My only memory of her was that as a little boy in England, one night I was watching the popular TV variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium, which was must-watch TV in the UK those days, and she was the headliner for that week’s show.
The British had the endearing practice of taking some beloved performers to their bosom and still enjoying them long after their prime (I do not know if that practice still endures) and ‘Our Gracie’ (as she was fondly referred to) was considered a national treasure and could do no wrong in their eyes. Anyway, I remember as a little boy watching her sing and being intrigued by this great affection for an elderly performer. (In looking up her age now, around that time she must have been just about sixty, but to a little child, anyone over forty seems ancient.) That is my only memory of her. So it was strange indeed for that memory of her singing on TV to not only survive for so long but to suddenly pop into my head a few weeks ago after decades of being submerged in my deep unconscious.
Stranger still was that I was reading Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock and the very next day after my memory of Fields surfaced, Greene mentions her name in passing in the book. This was an extraordinary coincidence. But I am well aware that coincidences, even highly improbable ones, happen all the time and so attach no deep meaning to them. But it did make me curious as to why that one brief childhood memory of Fields had surfaced in my mind the previous day, before its appearance in the book.
In my teaching of physics, I had become aware of how the connections that one’s brain makes in one’s mind are such powerful influences in what one learns and the meanings one assigns to them. Hence I am now highly curious as to the way they come about and am always exploring those connections in my daily life. In conversations with people, it is amusing to me to trace what causes the topics to shift from one subject to another. Very often, a stray word will evoke a memory in someone who mentions it and the conversation will veer off in that direction. As another example, I dream a lot each night and when I wake up, I spend some time in bed thinking of the dreams I had (though many are highly elusive and disappear rapidly upon waking), trying to figure out what events in my life may have triggered them. Some causal chains are retrievable, traceable to events that happened recently or to things that I have been thinking about a lot. (The enigmatic 2001 David Lynch film Mulholland Drive explores this connection between dreams, hallucinations, and reality.) But others seem purely random, suggesting that the connections between them and my waking life are too deep for my conscious mind to fathom.
But my sudden and highly improbable memory of Fields, coupled with the Greene coincidence, intrigued me and made me look deeper and I tried to think what may have prompted it. It suddenly came to me. The streaming service Kanopy that I subscribe to sends me regular emails telling me what they have added to their menu of offerings and I remembered that just a couple of days earlier it had added, among a list of films, the 1956 film Around the World in 80 Days. That bit of information must have lodged in my memory and then later connected it to the theme music from the film that won an Academy Award for best music score that year. Words were later added to the music and it was this very popular song Around the World, covered by a huge number of people, that was famously associated with Fields, that I saw Fields sing that night on TV. Hence I was able to successfully follow the line of connections that led to my sudden memory of Fields.
I find it endlessly fascinating the way that the human mind stores and retrieves information and makes connections between them. In this case, my subconscious mind seemed to think it worthwhile to go from a passing glimpse of an old film title to the music from the film to a song written for that music and finally to a very old childhood memory of someone singing it, and then bring that long-forgotten memory to the surface.
around the head in two days
hard to resist a half-assed quip, don’t want to sound dismissive actually. this was an interesting trip, and i’ve had similar. plus, props for referencing mulholland drive.
I once had a surprising coincidence looking up a word in the dictionary when I happened on another I didn’t know. It caught my curious eye while I was also turning on the TV set, and waiting for it to warm up. As I was reading the definition, I could hear the voice of Porky Pig on the tele, admonishing a terrified Sylvester the cat*. “You eb, eb, pol-troon of a chicken cat, you!’ “Poltroon” was the very word before me!
*’Claws for Alarm’ (1954)
Another less and less convoluted chain of links might be that the book mentioned Gracie earlier than the mention you recall, but you attached no significance to it until later; then the memory of her singing resurfaced without memory of that earlier mention, then the book mentioned it again and the recognition this time was conscious. Not having read the book, I don’t know how plausible this is -- perhaps her name is mentioned only the once, making that chain impossible. Still, seems plausible to me from a distance.
I had a brain storage/retrieval quirk happen in one of my first jobs out of college; I had a coworker named Penny, and I kept calling her Sherry. I was home for a family holiday hen the topic of forgetting people’s names popped up, and my spouse mentioned how I was always calling my coworker by the wrong name.
Turns out when I was in preschool, my classmates included twins named Penny and Sherry. Penny was the obnoxious one and Sherry was the nice one, and apparently I preferred to associate with Sherry. My coworker was friendly, so apparently somewhere deep inside my brain, I decided she couldn’t be Penny, but Sherry. My brain had kept the memory without me consciously being aware of it. Once my mother reminded me of the twins, I remember them, but if you had asked me independent of this episode if I’d ever had a Penny or Sherry in my classes, I would have said no.
Recommended reading: Stanislaw Lem’s novel “A Chain Of Chance”.
Holms @#5,
Interesting idea but does not work here. The mention of Fields is early on in the book (p.60) and is incidental, is in a song couplet that is quoted as:
“Gracie Fields funning
The gangsters gunning”
“[T]he 1956 film Around the World in 80 Days.”
That film is a favorite of mine. No one has made a better adaptation of the book than that one, and they probably never will be able to. While the book is fun for me to read, it is such a one-note plot that it can quickly become tedious, especially for a modern audience. The many cameo appearances in the film provide so many Easter eggs that the audience is never allowed to be bored. Unfortunately, so many of the cameo stars were already well past their peak of fame even in 1956, so most people today wouldn’t even understand these are cameo stars.
Haven’t read the book Brighton Rock, but really enjoyed the 1948 film, starring Dickie Attenborough as Pinky Brown.
“The British had the endearing practice of taking some beloved performers to their bosom and still enjoying them long after their prime (I do not know if that practice still endures)”
Bruce Forsyth (1928-2017) was such a character. We tend not to do it as much any more because they so often turn out to be prolific sex criminals.
Also, nowadays they usually retire, having made more money than Fields could have imagined and not been imbued with her work ethic.
I still miss Barry Cryer.
crivitz @#10,
I did not know about the 1948 film and may try to find it. Attenborough would have been 25 years old when he played the 17-year old Brown of the book. In the book, Brown was a wannabe gangster who was utterly clueless about pretty much everything except how to use violence to solve his immediate problems. In particular, he was a Catholic plagued by vague feelings of being a sinner and a virgin who had no knowledge of women and sex