Travelling to Infinity

by Jane Hawking

  The joy the baby brought was intoxicating. Within minutes of his birth he was lodged in the crook of my arm, looking slightly purple but observing his surroundings with consummate lack of concern as if he had seen it all before. “A future professor” was my mother-in-law’s predictable verdict on her first grandchild. When he was next brought to me, he had recovered from the birthing experience and had gained a healthy colour. His eyes were of the deepest, brightest blue, set in a neat elfin face with rosy cheeks and pointed ears. He had no hair, only an incipient blond down in a whorl on the crown of his head and on the tips of his ears. The minute fingers, each equipped with its own tiny nail, clasped my own outstretched finger.

  This beautiful little creature, the miraculous embodiment of perfection, had come into a painfully imperfect world. In the week after his birth, the Six Day War erupted in the Middle East with violent consequences which were to last throughout the decades of the child’s upbringing and long into his adulthood. In my simple, post-natal frame of mind, I was convinced that if the world were to be run by the mothers of newborn babies rather than hardened old men inciting brash youths to violence, wars would cease overnight.

  Gradually in the days following Robert’s birth we acclimatized to a new reality. Grandparents helped out for a couple of weeks, and then we were on our own, evolving a dramatically changed lifestyle. Henceforth expeditions – to the Department or into town – involved three people plus a pram and a walking stick. Luckily George Ellis came to the rescue. Not only did he bring Stephen home at lunchtime, he also collected him after lunch and brought him home in the evening. One afternoon, after a couple of weeks, when we had begun to achieve some faint semblance of normality, I considered that the time had come to return to my books and my growing card index of the language of the medieval love poetry of the Iberian Peninsula. The baby was fed and changed and placed in his pram out in the backyard under the blue sky. He looked comfortable and drowsy in the warm afternoon air. I expected him to sleep for at least an hour. Stifling my own tendency to yawn, I crept upstairs to my books and cards in the attic and spread them out on the table. No sooner had I found my place than a raucous cry came from below. I hurried down to Robert, picked him up, fed him and changed his nappy again. He did not really appear to be very hungry. I laid him down gently in his carrycot-pram and went back upstairs, only to be followed by the same cry. This little scene was re-enacted many times that afternoon until finally I realized that this tiny baby was neither hungry nor sleepy: he just wanted to be sociable. So at the age of one month he started work on a PhD thesis, helping me by wriggling on my knee and gurgling while I tried to write. That single afternoon completely destroyed whatever illusions I might have held about combining motherhood with some sort of intellectual occupation. Nor did I have any notion of the demands on the body of the birth process. I fully counted on being up and about my normal business within a week, little realizing that the nine-month gestation and the trauma of the long birth would take their toll of my strength. I had no idea that feeding the baby would be such an exhausting and time-consuming commitment which, combined with the topsy-turvy schedule of infant demands, day and night, would mean that I would often slip into a doze when eventually he went to sleep.

  As July approached, I began to have severe qualms about the Seattle trip, especially as the arrangements were becoming more and more complicated. Charlie Misner, an American visitor to the Department who had become Robert’s godfather at the christening in Caius Chapel in June, wanted Stephen to visit him at the University of Maryland after the Seattle summer school, to talk about singularities. Both he and his Danish wife, Susanne, assured us that we would be welcome to stay with them and their four young children in their large house in the suburbs of Washington DC. I could not allow myself to appear half-hearted, but I was not sure how we were going to get to Seattle in one piece, let alone further afield. The tiredness I felt as I tried to pack for Stephen, myself and our six-week-old baby was devastating. I had not expected anything like this, nor had I expected that my own body, previously so utterly reliable, would let me down so catastrophically.

  Somehow, assisted by a posse of anxious parents, none more so than my mother, we managed to check in at London Airport on time on the morning of 17th July, 1967. Our goodbyes were hasty, because the airline promptly provided a wheelchair for Stephen, who found himself obliged to sit in it and be wheeled directly through customs and passport control to the departure lounge. Laden with Robert and with assorted bags of provisions for the flight, I hurried along behind. The ventilation system at Terminal Three had broken down that day, the hottest day of the summer, with the result that hot air was being sucked into the building but none was being let out, making a veritable inferno of the departure lounge. We had just reached the lounge when the loudspeaker announced that our flight was delayed.

  While we sat waiting in the stifling heat, Robert eagerly gulped down the entire contents of the bottle of diluted rose-hip syrup which was supposed to last him all the way to Seattle. The first announcement was soon followed by another, inviting Pan American passengers to collect complimentary refreshments from the bar. I deposited Robert on Stephen’s knee and went over to join the queue for our free sandwiches. When I returned, I froze in absolute horror at the sight that met my eyes. Robert was still safely sitting on his father’s knee, smiling beatifically and leaning comfortably back against Stephen’s chest, with Stephen’s arm around him. Stephen’s face wore an agonized expression. Down his new trousers there flowed a vast yellow river. He sat helplessly trapped as the yellow tide streamed into his shoes. For the only time in my life, I screamed – I dropped the sandwiches and screamed.

  Screaming sounds a pretty irrational reaction, but surprisingly it was the most sensible in the circumstances. My screams summoned much-needed help with amazing alacrity. A portly, green-clad nurse appeared from nowhere and took charge. One severely critical glance at me was enough to convince her, quite rightly, that I was hopelessly unequal to the situation. She commandeered the wheelchair and pushed it and its occupants, father and son, back through passport and customs, disregarding the officials in our path, to a nursery where she cleaned up the baby, leaving me the task of rubbing Stephen down. While we were in the nursery, the last call for our flight was announced over the tannoy. Unmoved, the nurse rang through to central control and told them that the flight would have to wait for us. Thus at the age of seven weeks, Robert acquired the distinction of having delayed the departure of an international flight.

  Stephen had to sit in those trousers for the whole nine-hour length of that spectacular flight. He sat in them over Iceland, which was etched in the sea like a jewel in a satin case, over the ice floes of the North Atlantic, over Greenland’s snow-capped mountains and glistening glaciers, over the frozen waters of Hudson Bay and the arid wastes of northern Canada. Then at last, signalling the end of Stephen’s ordeal, Mount Rainier loomed on the horizon as we came in to land at Tacoma airport. A day or two later, I took the trousers to the dry-cleaner’s, but Stephen refused to wear them ever again.

  Part Two

  1

  Sleepless in Seattle

  The provisions made for us in Seattle in 1967 by the Battelle Memorial Institute were very generous. As well as a spacious single-storey house, lavishly equipped with all mod cons – including a dishwasher and a tumbler-dryer – and an enormous car with automatic controls, they provided a twice-weekly deposit of clean nappies and the corresponding collection of the dirty ones by that singularly American institution, the diaper service. If such arrangements did not altogether fill me with confidence, it was not because I was unappreciative, but that I was overwhelmed by being washed-up on an alien shore, albeit in luxurious isolation, deprived so soon after giving birth of the support and help of my mother, family and friends at home. Here I was solely responsible both for my ailing husband and for my new baby, and there was no George Ellis to give Stephen a helping hand round the corner to work.
/>   The Battelle Institute, the secretary assured me, was very close at hand, only two miles or so away – but two miles or twenty, it did not make much difference: Stephen had to be taken there by car, and to take Stephen by car, I also had to take Robert. This meant helping Stephen dress and eat in the early morning, and then feeding and bathing Robert – in that order or in reverse – depending on whose needs were the most pressing. Then the monstrous car – a Ford Mercury Comet – had to be backed round to the front of the house, and my two charges, tiny but voracious Robert in his carrycot, and then Stephen on my arm, taken one by one down the steps of the long path and settled, the one on the backseat and the other in the front. Methodically carried out, this routine could have been tolerable. As it was, although we tried our hardest to minimize the number of morning sessions that Stephen missed, the system was reduced to breaking point – our darling baby, who had just learnt to sleep through the night in England, was now, in Seattle with an eight-hour time change, sleeping soundly all day and wide-awake and full of sociable intentions all night. In addition Seattle was enjoying – or suffering – its most intense heatwave ever.

  For some time, in a spirit of nervous self-preservation, I restricted my excursions only to the Battelle Institute and the corner stores – notably, of course, the dry-cleaner’s. I drove the massive car with such trepidation that eventually, despite the heat, I decided to do what no American mother would have dreamt of doing: I walked down to the stores pushing my carrycot-pram and loaded the shopping into it beside the baby.

  With the jubilation of a shipwrecked sailor sighting a rescue boat, I greeted the arrival of the Penrose family. Eric, the latest addition to the family, was somewhat more mobile than Robert, but frequently recumbent. When the two prams stood side by side, or the two babies were placed down together on a rug, Joan would remark that they were continuing the Hawking-Penrose dialogue. Thanks to Joan, my social scene brightened considerably. She introduced me to some of the other wives of the delegates and took me on various excursions to downtown Seattle, where I browsed in the department stores and bought baby clothes. Under her influence, my confidence grew as I began to find my way up and down the north-south axis of the freeway through the centre of Seattle, even managing to locate an old childhood playmate from Norwich, who had married a Boeing engineer.

  Then one Sunday, even more adventurously, Stephen’s map-reading guided us to a ferry port, and we crossed Puget Sound to the Olympic Peninsula, where I took Robert down to the water’s edge and dipped his toes in the shimmering but icy waters of the Pacific Ocean. Another weekend, with Robert propped up between us asleep on the bench-seat in the front of the car, we drove the hundred and fifty miles north, across the border to Vancouver, to visit our Australian friends from Cambridge, the Youngs, who had come to rest in the University of British Columbia. Vancouver was as cold and misty as Seattle was hot and dry, and had the Canadian charm of being more relaxed than its American neighbour.

  Back in Seattle, we assembled with the rest of the group one hot Saturday morning down on the Waterfront for one of the few excursions organized by the Battelle Institute – a ferry ride to the Indian reservation on Blake Island. While waiting for the ferry, Jeannette Wheeler, the wife of a leading American physicist, came up to introduce herself. That very year, in a flash of inspiration worthy of Archimedes, John Wheeler had lighted upon the name black hole for the phenomenon that Stephen and many others were studying, while he was having a bath. Down on the Seattle Waterfront, Jeannette – a regal, grey-haired lady who, by all accounts, was a member of that select group, the Daughters of the American Revolution – took charge of Robert’s pram while Stephen leant on my arm. Two little old ladies peered lovingly into the pram, and one of them reached out to tickle the toes of the sleeping infant, uncovered in the heat of the day. Horrified, Jeannette Wheeler barked at her not to disturb the sleeping baby. The poor little lady jumped out of her skin and, with her companion, edged away nervously into the crowd. Personally, I thought a bit of tickling of Robert’s toes to wake him up during the day might be a very good idea. Then I might get some sleep at night. As it was, he slept for most of that day, waking only to gaze angelically into the weather-beaten face of the elderly Indian squaw who rocked him on her knee while I ate dinner at the long communal table in a big old-fashioned barn.

  At least on this particular excursion, my only responsibility, apart from attending to the baby’s needs, was to push the pram with one hand and support Stephen with the other. The other interesting excursions where I had to drive long distances left me so tired and so strained that I was on my knees with exhaustion by the time Gillian, my school friend, came over to Seattle from Vancouver Island, where her husband Geoffrey, an engineer, had a two-year appointment. Gillian – and Geoffrey, who was able only to spend a weekend with us – were my salvation. Geoffrey took over the driving, taking us on long journeys – not least a day trip to Mount Rainier – collected shopping and helped Stephen in and out of the car, while Gill willingly gave a hand in the running of the kitchen. For one week, I could relax a little.

  While Gill was still with us, an incident occurred which we both still remember with distaste. The token monument which Seattle retained from the World Fair of 1962 was the Space Needle, a concrete pylon some three hundred feet high, topped by a viewing platform in the shape of a flying saucer. On Gill’s last Saturday with us, we went up the Space Needle in the express lift and admired the views – over the sparkling green waters of Puget Sound and the white crests of the Olympic Peninsula to the west, the rugged Cascade range of mountains to the east, and to the south Mount Rainier, the massive dormant volcano. The views were majestic, but with Gill carrying Robert and Stephen leaning on my arm we soon wilted in the sweltering sun and returned to the lift to join the queue for the descent. Near us there stood a couple of girls, teenagers perhaps, but not so very much younger than Gill and me. They watched us, nudging each other; then, as we were all standing together in the lift, they started making spiteful, rude remarks about Stephen’s appearance, as he leant languidly against the wall, in temperatures that were enough to make anyone look bedraggled. As they laughed and giggled, my anguish grew. I wanted to slap their faces and make them apologize. I wanted to shout at them that this was my courageous, dearly loved husband and the father of the beautiful baby, and a great scientist, but in my English reticence I neither did nor said any of these things: I simply looked away, busying myself with Robert, trying to pretend that they were not there. Never did an express lift, travelling at four feet per second, take so long to reach the ground. As we emerged from the lift, one of the girls glanced over Gill’s shoulder at Robert. “Is that your baby?” she asked me in perplexed admiration. “Of course!” I snapped. She and her companion hurried away, I hoped in shame. Gill remarked, “What strange people!” understating what she and I both felt. Fortunately Gill and I had stationed ourselves between Stephen and those girls, so he was unaware of what had happened.

  After this episode I was ready to go home forthwith. Nonetheless, one evening towards the end of the summer school, at the Battelle cocktail hour, Stephen was offered the tantalizing possibility of a two-week stay at the University of California in Berkeley, and immediately a Brazilian participant in the Battelle summer school offered us the empty flat of an absent friend. The offer was attractive in financial terms and, since we had already come so far, another two weeks on the West Coast, in California of all places, did not seem a great hardship. I had not entirely lost the spirit of adventure which had taken me round southern Spain in my student days, and this would be our opportunity to discover for ourselves that Utopia with which Abe and Cice Taub had tempted us in Cornell in 1965.

  Encumbered by masses of paraphernalia – the pram and inordinate amounts of luggage – we flew down to San Francisco, where I was required to master yet another enormous car and negotiate yet another maze of freeways. Fortunately Stephen was a better navigator than he had been a driver – except on those
occasions when he would spot an exit at the last minute and yell at me to cross four lanes immediately. After swerving a few times and bumping over a few kerbs in good Keystone-Cop style, we at last found the address of our absent landlords, a homely two-room flat in an old wooden house with a distant view, through the haze and the mist, of the Golden Gate bridge. The accommodation, though much more in keeping with our style and age than the sumptuous middle-class, middle-aged house in Seattle, posed a fearsome logistical problem as it was on the top floor of the house, on the second storey. The routine which we had hoped to leave behind in Seattle had to come into play again, except that every outing now required not two but three trips up and down – not one but two flights of stairs. Robert, at fourteen weeks, was too heavy to be carried in the carrycot, so that had to be taken down to the car first, then Stephen – leaving Robert on a rug on the floor – then Robert himself. In compensation for all this inconvenience, we maximized the use of the car and often, of an evening or exceptionally of a late afternoon, we would drive up into the parched hills behind Berkeley, or sometimes, more adventurously, north along the San Andreas Fault – a deserted, marshy area where the cracks in the road testified to the tremendous natural forces lying beneath the surface. Once we drove down to a desolate cove on a coastline not unlike Cornwall, where, defying the American way of life, hippies lived free of the constraints of a materialistic society in shacks on the beach.