Travelling to Infinity

by Jane Hawking

  Abe Taub, the Head of the Relativity Group in Berkeley, secured a temporary appointment for Stephen in his department, and one evening he and Cice invited us to dinner in their house high up in the hills overlooking the bay. It was further away than we expected, and by the time we arrived the evening was already drawing in. Unable to see where to park, I drove into a gully by the side of the road. The wheels locked and the car was stuck. After trying unsuccessfully to heave the car out of the ditch on my own, I went to seek help from the Taubs and their distinguished guests, among them a highly sophisticated and influential Parisian mathematician, Professor Lichnerowicz. The men took off their smart jackets, rolled up their sleeves and set to the task with chivalrous gusto. When at last we were extricated from the ditch and shown into the house – embarrassingly late and very dishevelled – Robert started to whimper. He had played this trick on us once before in Seattle. Sleeping soundly until the very moment when his carrycot was put gently down in a darkened side-room, he would suddenly start to protest, as though sensing that there was a party elsewhere from which he was being excluded. The only remedy was to allow him to spend the evening on my knee at the table, alongside all the other guests. Cice Taub remained unflustered by so many disruptions to her genteel gathering and, perhaps taking pity on my haggard appearance, invited me to accompany her and Mme Lichnerowicz to the Berkeley Rose Garden the next day.

  The Rose Garden became my haven of peace and solitude in the frenzied environment of the Bay area, and a respite from the strenuous routine demanded by our living arrangements. It had a calming effect on Robert, who would lie in his pram under the pergolas watching the patterns of light on the roses and the leaves above his head. I sat by him in the shade, breathing in the perfume of the roses, immersed in my book, Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, and gazing out over the Bay from time to time. My thoughts were drawn to Spain – to the gardens of the Generalife above Granada where, only a few short years before, I had tried to imagine a future for myself with Stephen. That future had become a reality, and had exceeded our wildest hopes. I was tired but resilient, and my happiness far outweighed my tiredness. Stephen was already recognized and sought after in scientific circles for his intuitive grasp of complicated concepts, his ability to visualize mathematical structures in many dimensions and for his phenomenal powers of memory. The future stretched ahead of us, now physically embodied in the small, thriving person of our baby son.

  If the future had acquired a reassuring aura of certainty, the key to it lay in managing the present. Living each day as it came, rather than projecting some fanciful mirage on to the distant future, was becoming a way of life. From that perspective, the general outline of the future was fairly clear-cut: in the short term our star was in the ascendant. In the long term, the huge question mark that hung over the whole human race might well obliterate us all. The Vietnam war had escalated – to use the coinage then current – into the ugliest of conflicts in which the horrors of modern chemical science were being cynically unleashed on a simple peasant population, propelled by the uncontrolled military industrial complexes of both East and West. A mere spark somewhere else on our troubled planet could ignite a global conflagration.

  We lived for the present, but even that had an annoying way of tripping us up with unforeseen obstacles. For example, the Brazilian couple who had, with the best of intentions, found us the flat, offered to take us on a tour of the sights of San Francisco. For once, I looked forward to sitting back and enjoying a day out. They arrived early one Saturday morning, bringing with them a Brazilian friend who spoke no English. I helped Stephen down the stairs, expecting to install him in the Brazilians’ car first before going back up for Robert, who would travel on my knee. As we excitedly emerged into the street, we looked around for their car. Apart from our own Plymouth, there was only a decrepit grey Volkswagen parked in front of the house. “Where’s your car?” I asked our Brazilian host for the day. He looked at me in surprise. “No, no, we are no going in our car, it too small for all of us. We take your car.” With sinking heart I unlocked our car. Stephen sat in the back with the Brazilian ladies and our “host” settled himself in the passenger seat in the front, directing me, the chauffeur, while holding Robert on his knee. One look at him was enough to make Robert bawl as he never had before. He bawled all day – across the Oakland Bridge, all through the hours of torrid, nose-to-tail traffic jams in which we sat roasting, all through Haight-Ashbury, up and down all the steep streets of central San Francisco. I would gladly have bawled my head off too. Desperately wanting to comfort my frantic, hot, uncomfortable baby, there I was, trapped in the driving seat in a senseless situation, not of our own making.

  There was a lull when at last we reached Golden Gate Park. Distancing ourselves from our passengers, we joined a large hippy peace gathering and sat on the grass with the flower-power people, swaying to the beat of the music. Around the lawns were people of my own age, yet somehow I was already much older than them. Stephen and I shared their idealism and hatred of violence. We, too, had asserted a comparable freedom against a rigid society in our fight against bureaucracy and narrow-mindedness – yet, to maintain our difficult course, we were constrained to follow a routine as organized and as rigid as any imposed by the society against which they were rebelling. The Vietnam war, though we shared their antagonism to it, was not our main target. Our efforts were directed against illness and ignorance.

  After that day, I decided that never again would I depend on other people. However, putting that resolution into practice was easier said than done, for Stephen had already accepted a pressing invitation to spend time in Charlie Misner’s department at the University of Maryland. Washington DC was on the way home, we reasoned, so another few weeks would not make much difference. Indeed breaking the journey halfway would help us all, including Robert, to cope with the jet lag. We also looked forward to seeing Stephen’s sister Mary, now a qualified doctor, who was working on the East Coast, and to visiting Stephen’s old friend John McClenahan and his lively Spanish-speaking American wife and her family in Philadelphia.

  On the flight east, we sat in the same row as a middle-aged lady who sobbed for the whole journey. Since she occasionally cast longing glances at Robert, I passed him to her to cuddle for a while. A pale smile flickered across her face as he beguiled her with his tinkling laughter. Her companion leant across the aisle to tell me that she was returning home from Vietnam, where her only son had been killed. The hippies were right to protest at being used as cannon fodder when many of them had neither the right to vote, nor even the right to buy themselves a drink, since the age of majority was still twenty-one. Many of them were lucky in that, as students, their military call-up would be deferred and then their college professors would try to help the most able of them avoid the draft, while others would escape abroad, to Canada perhaps. The son of the mother on the plane had not been so fortunate.

  Our visit to the Misners in Maryland was evidently not best timed, because Susanne was engaged in a stressful daily battle with the school authorities who were rejecting Francis, their eldest son, on account of his mild autism. We saw Stephen’s sister, Mary, and spent a weekend with the McClenahans, but I was exhausted and depressed, especially because I had had to resort to feeding Robert with baby formula. I sat on the bed in the basement guest apartment of the Misners’ luxury home in Silver Spring tearful at the breaking of that first bond with my baby.

  If the recourse to bottles had unhappy psychological repercussions for me, it had even worse physical consequences for the Misners. One evening, Charlie and Susanne, who was beginning to relax a little from her daily struggle, put on a splendid dinner party to introduce us to some of their friends. All the children were asleep and we sat round the table eating and drinking, talking and laughing. Later we sank drowsily into comfortable armchairs while Charlie put on a slide show of charming family photos. In my semi-somnolent state of idle contentment, I suddenly became conscious of a very nasty sme
ll coming from the kitchen. The horrible truth was soon revealed when other people began to frown and cough, as they too detected the poisonous odour, and I realized that I was responsible for it. Before dinner I had put Robert’s plastic bottles and their rubber teats on the stove to boil, and in the convivial atmosphere I had forgotten all about them. The contents of the saucepan had evaporated completely, filling the kitchen with an evil black smoke which was quickly penetrating every corner of the spotlessly clean house. Utterly mortified, I would not have been surprised if we had been turned out into the street, baby and all, there and then. To Charlie and Susanne’s lasting credit, they did no such thing and the next day, summoning a prodigious degree of charity, they even managed somehow to make light of the shameful episode. They must have been heartily glad to see the back of us some days later when they cheerily waved us and our four-month-old baby goodbye. Their relief at seeing us go could not have been greater than mine at the prospect of going home.

  2

  Terra Firma

  That trip to Seattle – and beyond – changed our lives, in some ways for better, in others for worse. The money Stephen had earned in lecture fees during those long months across the Atlantic had a healthy effect on our bank balance. On the strength of it we were able to go out and buy a badly needed automatic washing machine and, in good American style, a tumbler-dryer as well. This would have been an extraordinary supply of consumer goods for any British household in the Sixties, but Stephen decided – after one searing exposure to domestic reality – that our lifestyle demanded even more electrical aids. That domestic reality arose one Friday evening later that winter of 1967, when we gave a large dinner party for an eminent Russian scientist, Vitaly Ginzburg, who had come to Cambridge from Moscow on a three-month visit. Not only was the length of his visit exceptional in the repressive climate of the Cold War, but he had also been allowed to bring his glamorous blonde wife with him. The amount of crockery and cutlery piled in the kitchen afterwards indicated the success of the dinner party. Leaning himself against the kitchen wall, Stephen picked up a tea towel, but so disgusted was he by the waste of time occasioned by so much washing-up that the following day he enlisted George Ellis’s help and went off into town to buy a dishwasher.

  There were other less tangible effects of the American trip. It was well established that the phenomenon that Stephen was researching had an inspired, easily identifiable name, the black hole, which was much less cumbersome than gravitational collapse of a massive star, the process predicted in the mathematics of the singularity theorems, and it lent unity to scientific research. It was, too, a name which caught the imagination of the media. As a result of the Seattle summer school Stephen had firmly consolidated his international position as a pioneer in this research, and we had widely enlarged our circle of friends. Stephen calculated that, by the time we returned to England in October, Robert had flown such a vast distance in relation to his age that, even in his sleep, he was in theory still moving. Luckily Robert himself did not appear to be disturbed by this particular consequence of his first visit to America. I too had travelled far, but unlike Robert I suffered long-lasting and tormenting results from these travels. They had sown the seeds of a paralysing fear of flying, which grew like a giant weed in my mind in the months and years after our return home. By comparison with my carefree attitude to flying as a student only two years previously, this fear was both frustrating and incomprehensible. It was not until some time later that the reason for the phobia emerged. When I reviewed the events of those four months in America, I realized that the problem lay not with flying – since we had flown in many different aeroplanes over vast distances without incident – but with the attendant circumstances, the stresses and strains of being wholly responsible, a mere seven weeks after giving birth, for two other fragile but very demanding lives. That onerous and exhausting responsibility slowly crystallized into a fear of flying for want of any other outlet. The simple fact of being able to rationalize the fear did not make dealing with it any easier, because I was ashamed to admit to such a weakness, especially when our lives were strictly governed by Stephen’s laudably brave maxim – that if there was physical illness in the home, there was no room for psychological problems as well.

  Despite Stephen’s excitement at the marked success of his research and his determination to avail himself of every conference, seminar or lecturing opportunity across the globe, the question of further travels luckily did not arise that winter, a winter which we spent in a comfortably stationary state, readjusting to the familiar routine of academic life. Stephen’s Research Fellowship had been renewed for a further two years, and now that Rob Donovan, his former best man, was also a Research Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Stephen could regularly count on his help for going into College to dine once a week. My routine was rather less predictable and consisted of a constant struggle to reconcile the needs of the baby with the demands of my thesis. When I played with Robert, my conscience told me that I ought to be working on the thesis. When I worked on the thesis, my natural instincts encouraged me to want to play with the baby. It was not a very satisfactory state of affairs – nevertheless it was the only way I could maintain my intellectual self-esteem in an environment where babies were disdained and regarded only as necessary facts of life. Theses, on the other hand, were respected. In the late Sixties, the university offered no crèche facilities – though, true to its male chauvinist instincts, it had for many years boasted a rifle range.

  The fact that I was able to persevere with my research at all was largely thanks to my mother and to the succession of nannies employed to care for Inigo Shaffer, the baby son of neighbours in the lane. My mother would often come over to Cambridge by train early on a Friday, arriving just as I was taking Stephen to work, and would look after Robert so that I could spend the best part of the day in the University Library collecting books and other material to study at home during the next week. Sometimes Inigo’s nanny would take Robert over for an hour or so, or – as the boys grew older – invite him to play with Inigo for an afternoon, leaving me free to return to the Library. This system also allowed me occasionally to attend and give seminars in London, confident that Robert was being well looked after and that Stephen, helped by George Ellis, was able to have lunch with the rest of the Relativity Group in the newly opened University Centre.

  Thus I was able to pursue my project, an investigation of the linguistic and thematic similarities and discrepancies of the three main periods and areas of popular love poetry in medieval Spain. While Stephen mentally roamed the universe, I travelled in time – back to the kharjas, the earliest flowering of popular poetry in the Romance languages. I began my research by documenting the Mozarabic vocabulary – an early dialect of Spanish from Muslim Spain – used in the kharjas, which consisted of little more than poetic fragments incorporated as refrains in longer Hebrew and classical Arabic odes and elegies. I intended then to extend the exercise to the Galician-Portuguese Cantigas de Amigo of the thirteenth century, and finally to the fifteenth-century Castilian popular lyrics or villancicos. These three areas of lyric flowering, disparate in time as well as in place, shared many common features: the love songs were all sung by a girl, either looking forward to meeting her lover at dawn or lamenting his absence or illness. Often the girl would confide her joy or her grief spontaneously to her mother or her sisters, yet in many instances the imagery of these seemingly fresh and unsophisticated lyrics was derived from the language of the Christian religious background.

  There were many conflicting theories, not to say contentions, attendant upon the provenance and interpretation of the poetry, especially of the kharjas, and it was through this maze that I had to find my way as a novice research student in the University Library. My time was spent scanning the huge green-jacketed catalogue volumes, pursuing arcane articles in unfamiliar journals, seeking out cryptic references in footnotes and searching the stacks and the shelves for the numerous works of literary criticism o
n which I would write notes at home during the course of the following week. Just occasionally I actually came into contact with original medieval manuscripts, an unforgettable experience, but not one which advanced my research very efficiently, because the temptation to marvel over the beauties of the illustrated initials and the precision of the script was far too distracting.

  Though the prospect of having to plough my way through reams of critical material was daunting, I relished those hours in the Library. I loved the curiously deferential effect that that shrine of erudition produced on its worshippers as, like shadows, they flitted through its vast silent halls. Each student, whether young or old, was wrapped in his own small capsule of scholarship, assured of the freedom of being able to read and write without interruption. An even greater compensation for the tedium which some aspects of the research entailed was to be found in the poetry itself, particularly in the kharjas. The kharjas had first been interpreted, edited and published by Samuel Stern, an Oxford Scholar who in 1948, in Cairo, had discovered their bare bones, written in apparently nonsensical Arabic or Hebrew script. He found that by transcribing the fragments into Roman script and then adding vowels, the enigmatic Arabic and Hebrew texts could be made to spring into being as tiny snatches of Romance love poetry, breathing a pulsating life. For example, Stern had transcribed one group of Hebrew letters into Roman consonants thus: gryd bs ’y yrmnl’s km kntnyr ’mw m’ly sn ’lhbyb nn bbr’ yw ’dbl’ry dmnd’ry. With the addition of vowels, the text reads as follows: Garid vos ay yermanellas com contenir a meu male Sin al-habib non vivireyu advolarey demandare. Apart from one archaic form, and one Arabic expression, al-habib, the poem is now perfectly intelligible, even to a modern Spanish speaker: