by Jane Hawking
By the age of seven months, this inventive child had found out how to dismantle his cot so that all the joins, catches and hinges had to be tightly tied together with string to stop him falling out. Nevertheless, no sooner had Stephen and I turned our backs each evening and crept away downstairs, yawning and fondly trusting that repetitive readings of Thomas the Tank Engine had at last softly lulled our audience into the realms of sleep, than we would hear the tiny feet coming busily down the stairs to join us for our supper and whatever concert we might be listening to on the radio. Since he could no longer dismantle his cot, Robert learnt to vault over the bar and then drop onto the floor beneath. At about eleven o’clock we would all fall into bed together.
Even before he had perfected that degree of agility, Robert’s dynamism had given us a quite a scare. In the spring of 1968, my parents took us to Cornwall once again with my brother Chris. Happily Robert was prepared to sit quite contentedly in the car, strapped in his seat, no matter how long the journey – but when at last in the early evening we adults sank drowsily into the comfortable armchairs in our rented cottage, Robert, already able at ten months old to walk nimbly round the furniture, set off on a tour of the ground floor. A sudden high-pitched scream from behind my back roused us precipitately. To steady himself, Robert had placed one small hand, his right, against an electric storage heater, which, unbeknown to us, was turned to its maximum setting, and the heat had seared off the skin of his palm. Thanks to my brother’s medical training, Robert was pacified with a fraction of an aspirin – the only painkiller available – the hand gently treated and bandaged in a clean handkerchief, and we all, though shocked, managed to get a good night’s sleep. Robert, Chris and I spent the best part of the next day searching out a doctor, because overnight the infant hand had swollen into one huge blister. The doctor, impressed at the quality of the first aid administered by a mere dental student, simply provided a pediatric painkilling prescription and more substantial dressings and thereafter commissioned Chris to continue to care for his small patient.
In the summer of that same year, the year of Robert’s first birthday, How Ghee and Peck Ang with their small daughters left the house at number 11 to return home to Singapore. In true Little St Mary’s Lane style, the Thatchers gave an informal farewell party for them, to which we and Inigo and his parents were invited, together with half a dozen or so other guests. Inigo and Robert were by this stage completely at home in the Thatcher household. They adored Thelma, and she reciprocated with a grandmotherly affection. They would call on her every morning, peering through her letter box, calling “Tatch, Tatch!” in the hope of being invited in to play with the collection of bright marbles on her solitaire table. They were frequent teatime visitors, sitting at her elegant Regency table on her elegant Regency chairs – though as a precautionary measure she did apologetically cover the yellow-striped damask seats with plastic sheeting. At the Angs’ party no one took much notice of the small boys who were happily amusing themselves, until Thelma called for a toast to the Angs – How Ghee, Peck, Susan and demure little Ming – and their future happiness. We all turned to pick up our glasses of champagne from the occasional tables only to find that they were all drained dry. From upstairs, there came the sound of running water, of much flushing and splashing and peals of laughter. Two rather tipsy one-year-olds were having their own, much more entertaining party well out of sight in the Thatchers’ bathroom.
Later that summer Stephen and I took Robert on his first bucket-and-spade holiday to the north Norfolk coast, where I encountered the unforeseen dilemma of needing to be in two places at once. As Stephen’s speed of movement slowed down, so Robert’s accelerated. Stephen found it difficult to walk across the soft, yielding sand, and so did I, as I supported him on one arm and carried bags, bucket and spade, towels and a folding chair on the other. Robert, in the meantime, would be racing away, heading for the open sea. Luckily, on that coast, the tide goes out as far as the eye can see, and that week was a week of low tides by day, so we managed to avoid undue mishap.
On the final morning I went upstairs to pack our bags, leaving Stephen and Robert downstairs in the main room at the front of the house. At the back, a sun room with an open mezzanine half-loft approached by a rickety ladder had been added to the cottage. For obvious reasons we did not use this room and kept the door to it firmly closed. After half an hour of packing I came downstairs to find Stephen sitting alone in the front room. “Where’s Robert?” I asked in bewilderment. Stephen gestured towards the back room. “He opened that door,” he said, “went through it and closed it behind him. There was nothing I could do, and you didn’t hear when I tried to call you.”
Momentarily I glanced at the door in horror, then burst into the room. There was no sign of Robert. My eyes travelled upwards, and there, to my astonishment, was my little son in his blue T-shirt and checked trousers, sitting at the top of the ladder on the open mezzanine floor, cross-legged like an infant Buddha, blissfully unconcerned by the drop beneath. I raced up the ladder and grabbed him before he had time to move.
If on that first visit to the coast, Robert did not succeed in hurling himself into the sea, it was only because his legs were too short for him to get to the water’s edge before I caught up with him. After depositing his father on the folding chair on the firmer sand midway between the dunes and the shore, I would sprint over the beach at speeds which could well have won me an Olympic medal. Over the course of the next two or three years, Robert regularly threw himself headlong into any available stretch of water, be it sea, pond or swimming pool, as soon as my eye was distracted for a second. On a later visit to Norfolk with the Ellises and their little daughter – dark-haired, blue-eyed Maggie – Sue plunged into the sea like lightning to rescue Robert, who had run straight into the water and disappeared. When we visited the Cleghorns – the parents of Stephen’s school friend Bill – out in the country, Robert made a beeline for their pond and fell in, amongst the weed, the mud and the frogs. And in the summer of 1969, when we spent the month of July at the University of Warwick at a summer school appropriately enough on Catastrophe Theory, Robert excelled himself by jumping into the deep end of the nearby swimming pool at every opportunity. Happily on those occasions, as his father was in lectures and not dependent on my supporting arm, Robert had the full benefit of my undivided attention.
That summer school coincided with that “great leap for mankind”, the Moonwalk, which we watched on television in the student Common Room. Giant leaps, small steps and all-too-real catastrophes narrowly averted, these sonorous terms seemed to sum up the essence of our day-to-day lives. Giant leaps were needed to keep up with Robert’s mercurial movements, while Stephen’s steps were becoming smaller, slower and more unsteady. Each morning I would drive Stephen from the student hostel where we were lodging to the lecture hall on the other side of the new campus. At Stephen’s pace, the lecture hall was some five minutes’ walk away from the car park, across courtyards and through a maze of passages. Robert, just two years old, would shoot out of the car as soon as it came to a standstill, and hare away ahead of his father and me. The only consolation was that he had an unerring sense of direction which led him through the tortuous route to the lecture hall, where he would install himself in the front row. It became a standing joke among the other delegates that Robert’s appearance in the early morning always heralded Stephen’s arrival five minutes later. The lecturer would then adjust the order of his lecture notes, deferring any important results until Stephen arrived.
At home, we had to barricade the house to prevent Robert from escaping and throwing himself in the river. On our afternoon walks I was hard-pressed to find a means of expending all his energy without exhausting myself, especially as he would never turn round to go back home until he was on the point of collapse, and then he had to be carried or taken in the pushchair. Generally I left the pushchair at home, because on our outward journeys, when speed of reflex was all-important, it tended to interfere w
ith the swiftness of my reactions. “Put reins on him,” my parents urged sensibly, worried by my haggard appearance. “You don’t understand, he won’t walk with reins on,” I insisted, to their disbelief. “Nonsense,” they said, thinking that this was just another example of my crackpot theories about personal freedoms. “All right, you try,” I replied defiantly, handing them back the set of pale-blue, leather reins they had just given me. They picked up their cherubic, blond, blue-eyed grandson, and carried him and the reins down to the broad path along the river bank, away from the traffic. In no time at all, they were back at the house asking for the pushchair. “You were right,” my mother sighed, “when we put the reins on him, he sat down and refused to move. When Dad tried tugging on the reins, he kept his legs firmly crossed and when Dad lifted the reins, he just left the ground, and there he was, dangling in mid-air on the end of the strap!”
Never in all the long years of my education and, unsurprisingly, nowhere in all those reams of medieval literature, had I encountered one jot of advice on bringing up children. Apparently through the ages, children had just happened, and it had never been thought necessary to teach their parents how to look after them. If this was an example of the workings of the geneticists’ selfish gene, the selfish gene was intent on self-destruction. From six o’clock in the morning till eleven at night, Robert was full of golden smiles – cheerful, loving and utterly adorable – but his boundless energy brought me to my knees. I thumbed through my only guide, the already well-worn pages of Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care, searching for help and reassurance. Comfortingly, Dr Spock seemed to recognize the problem, but his solution – putting a netting over the cot – was not one that I could bring myself to adopt for fear that Robert might strangle himself. Then I turned to my doctor, Dr Wilson, who sympathetically recommended a glass of sherry – for me – in the evening “at about six o’clock, when Robert has gone to bed”, and also prescribed a tonic.
Early one morning in the September of 1969, I was aroused from my slumbers not by a sound or by a light but by a smell – a sweet sticky smell which subconsciously I knew to be wrong. I opened my eyes to find Robert standing by my side of the bed with a broad grin all over his face and a viscous, pinkish liquid dribbling down the front of his blue sleeping suit. I jumped out of bed and stumbled down the stairs to the kitchen. A chair stood by the fridge and the floor was littered with empty bottles, all of them medicine bottles. One of the bottles had contained the sweet, syrupy antihistamine which the doctor had prescribed for Robert for a recent cold and earache, and which had a conveniently soporific effect; another had contained the stimulant which I had been taking to pep me up. At two years of age, Robert had pushed a chair into the kitchen, climbed up onto the fridge and reached up to the shelf where, for want of a medicine cupboard, the bottles were stored. He had swigged the lot.
Leaving Stephen to fend for himself as best he could, I dressed in haste and ran with Robert in his pushchair to the doctor’s surgery. The surgery, only a couple of hundred yards away, was just opening, and we were given priority. As Robert was already starting to show signs of drowsiness, Dr Wilson sent us immediately to hospital, half a mile away in the other direction, by taxi. There the nightmare really began, as the seriousness of the situation became evident. Robert, his arms and legs jerking and flailing out in all directions, was taken from me and held down while his stomach was pumped out. At first, the nurses were terse, only asking what medicines he had taken, then, when they had tried all the interventionary methods at their disposal to rid the child’s system of the poisonous cocktail, one of them turned to me and said: “He is extremely ill, you realize – there is nothing more we can do, we shall just have to wait and see what happens.”
Only once before had Robert’s health given cause for anxiety. The previous winter we had gone with the Ellises to Majorca for a week’s holiday over the New Year. We had barely arrived when Robert fell seriously ill with a virulent strain of Spanish tummy which confined us to the hotel room for the whole duration of the stay. Unable to digest even plain water he wasted away before our eyes like the innocent child victims of the Biafran war in Nigeria, while the local doctor debated whether to take him into hospital or send us back home in advance of the rest of the party. As soon as the plane touched down at Gatwick, Robert began to make a miraculous recovery. By the time we reached my parents’ house in St Albans, he was ready to play his favourite game of emptying all the tins from the cupboard and rolling them across the kitchen floor. That episode had been harrowing but this was far worse; the worst agony imaginable, the agony of watching one’s child die.
They tied Robert down in a cot in a partitioned room on the children’s ward and beckoned me to a chair in a corner. He tossed violently under the restraints placed across the cot to prevent him hurting himself. Mechanically I sat down, too numbed to speak or think or weep. Life drained away from my own body as our beautiful, darling child, our most precious possession, sank into a deep coma. This child had astounded everyone with his beauty, his happy nature and his liveliness. He was the living personification of all that was good and positive in our world and our relationship. I, and Stephen too, loved him more than anything else. We had created him out of love, I had given birth to him and we had nurtured him with passionate love and care. Now we seemed to be losing him through a combination of circumstances – my tiredness, his energy and the inadequacy of the precautions that we had taken for his safety. If he died, I should die too. My brain was capable of formulating only a single thought expressed in half a dozen words. They revolved round and round in my head, stuck in a single groove, to the exclusion of all else: “Please God, don’t let him die. Please God, don’t let him die. Please God...”
Every so often a nurse would come in to check Robert’s breathing and his pulse. Pursing her lips, she would tiptoe away again while I, blankly staring into cold, empty space, stayed in my corner clinging to my formula, repeating it over and over again. Some hours later, the Ward Sister came in. She went through the customary procedures and then, instead of tiptoeing away, pronounced that Robert was in a relatively stable though still critical condition. His state was not hopeful, all that could be said was that it was not deteriorating further. Coming to my senses at this slightest of changes, I was shocked to remember that I had left Stephen alone in the house, scarcely able to look after himself. Where was I most needed – here in the hospital with my comatose infant son, or at home with my disabled husband who, without my help, might fall or hurt himself or choke? I must have mumbled a few intelligible words to the sister because she sent me out to check up on Stephen. I ran down the road through the fine grey drizzle to look for him.
Thankfully George had come in to help him get up and had taken him to work. By this stage he was having lunch in the University Centre, desperate for news but not knowing where to find us. I sat with him for a short while. There was nothing we could say to comfort each other, because there was no comfort to be had in our situation, except that we both shared the same sense of utter, bleak devastation, enveloped in an unremitting pall of greyness. I watched as Stephen ate his lunch. I could not even bring myself to drink a glass of water. It seemed pointless to try. There was no reason to stay alive. How could I live with such grief? We were crossing the threshold into that dark chasm where all hope is abandoned.
Scarcely daring to return to the hospital, I left Stephen in George’s care. I entered the ward fearful of what I might find. All was silent. A young nurse followed me as I tiptoed into Robert’s room. He was there in the cot, still alive. He was asleep, lying quietly on his back, as beatific as a Bellini cherub. To my surprise the nurse’s face lit up with a smile as she pointed to the sleeping child. “Look, he’s breathing normally now. He’s sleeping it off, and soon he’ll come out of the coma, he’s past the worse,” she said. Only tears, not words, could describe my feelings, tears of gratitude and relief. “You’ll be able to take him home when he wakes up,” the nurse continued – in a matte
r of fact fashion, as if this was just one more crisis in her busy routine, now thankfully resolved. I rang Stephen to tell him the good news, and at half-past three Robert began to wake up. “You can take him home now,” they said. Within ten minutes he was discharged and we stepped out into the vivid reality of our everyday lives. Once back home, we sent word to our neighbours to come and join us for a celebration. They all came and we watched silently as if in a trance while Robert and Inigo pushed their toy cars round the floor, unconcerned and totally unaware of the day’s drama.
That day Robert survived, but a little bit of me died. Some, though not all, of that extravagant youthful optimism which had fired me with so much enthusiasm now lay buried beneath a heavy burden of anxiety, that dull care in its ravelled sleave, which once it infects the mind is never banished. I had come so dangerously close to the worst catastrophe that a mother can bear – the loss of her child – that I became neurotically protective, often perhaps irritating Robert and his siblings by my concern for their safety.
Luckily the experience seemed to have left Robert unscathed. Nor did it reduce in any way his fund of energy, as our visit to a conference in Switzerland the following spring aptly demonstrated. While Stephen spent his days plunged into the murky past of the universe in the conference centre at Gwatt on the shores of Lake Thun, Robert and I went walking. This was where Robert discovered his passion for the mountains, the true outlet for his climbing instincts. When, later that week, we and the Ellises spent a few days in the family hotel at Hohfluh, high above the Aare valley where I used to stay with my parents, Robert was in his element. More than once, at less than three years old, he insisted on scrambling up as far as the snowline while I, several months pregnant again, plodded along behind.
