Travelling to Infinity

by Jane Hawking

  5

  Universal Expansion

  A less dramatic crisis than Robert’s calamitous encounter with the medicines loomed over us as the 1960s drew to a close: Stephen’s Research Fellowship – which had already been renewed for a further term of two years in 1967 – was in 1969 about to expire. There was no mechanism for renewing it yet again, but because Stephen was unable to lecture, he could not follow the normal course of most other Research Fellows and apply for a university teaching post. Nor was there any point in expecting a full Fellowship, since College Fellowships, as opposed to Research Fellowships, are not salaried appointments but simply offer membership of an exclusive dining club, albeit a highly intellectual one, founded – it goes without saying – on the most estimable educational principles.

  In 1968 Stephen had become a member of the newly opened Institute of Astronomy, a long single-storeyed building, luxuriously fitted out and set among trees in green fields in the grounds of the Observatory, on the Madingley Road outside Cambridge. This accorded him an office, which he shared with Brandon, and a desk – but it did not provide him with a salary, and it was unlikely to do so for as long as Fred Hoyle remained its director, since he had never forgiven Stephen for his notorious intervention at the Royal Society lecture some years before. Unlike in America, paid research posts in Britain were few and far between.

  Such was the excitement generated by black-hole research over the past four years, however, that Stephen did not lack powerful advocates: Dennis Sciama willingly took up the challenge, as did Hermann Bondi, whose help my father enlisted on our behalf. It was rumoured that King’s College had a salaried Senior Research Fellowship, which the governing body were prepared to offer Stephen. The authorities of Gonville and Caius bridled at these rumours and stepped in with a special category of Fellowship, a six-year Fellowship for Distinction in Science, before King’s had a chance to make their offer.

  With a secure job and a steady income, it was time for us to review our living arrangements. Although we drove out to the villages at weekends prospecting for suitable properties, we constantly came up against the intractable problem of transport: if we bought a new house in a village, even the closest village, I should have to drive Stephen to work every morning and collect him every evening, and such pressure could become irksome, especially with two small children in tow. It was impossible to better our situation in Little St Mary’s Lane. With help, Stephen could still walk to work in the Department in the mornings, though occasionally he would get a lift out to the Institute in the afternoons for seminars and discussions with Brandon. For Robert there was a delightfully old-fashioned playgroup close at hand in the Quaker Meeting House, just across the fen, and the University Library – as and when I managed to find the time and the energy to work there – was within five minutes’ cycling distance. We were within a stone’s throw of the centre of the city, and the churchyard not only catered perfectly for Robert’s outdoor needs but also fulfilled my gardening aspirations. The only drawback was that the house was so small and decrepit, despite my attempts to redecorate it.

  Our enterprising friends, George and Sue Ellis, had bought and renovated a house at Cottenham, a fen village outside Cambridge, and Brandon and Lucette had done the same to their dream cottage out in the heart of the country soon after their marriage in 1969. Even in Little St Mary’s Lane, various neighbours had cleverly enlarged and renovated their previously ramshackle dwellings, making sizeable, attractive townhouses of them, and at number 5 the author and biographer of Rose Macaulay, Constance Babington-Smith, had imaginatively adapted the limited space in her narrow house to meet her bookish requirements. Having seen, with a tinge of envy, how versatile the houses could be, we realized that ours was no exception. However, we were caught in the proverbial catch-22 situation. We had saved enough money for a deposit on a mortgage for a new property, and council grants were available for the renovation of old properties, but because of its age our house did not qualify for a mortgage and, of course, the College on the advice of its land agent had dismissed the property as a bad investment.

  As we were mulling over this dilemma, a change of policy on the part of our building society removed the problem altogether, and mortgages – at a higher rate of interest – became available on older properties. An agreed mortgage from a building society had the added advantage that it would qualify us for an extra loan – at a low rate of interest – from the university. Quite suddenly, everything started to fall into place, though Stephen was sceptical. It seemed to me, as I pored with pencil and ruler over scraps of paper, that some of the ideas used by our neighbours along the lane could well be incorporated into our house to enlarge and renovate it. On the ground floor there could be an elegant through-room from front to back by making two rooms into one, with a new kitchen out at one side of the yard, while the first and second floors could be remodelled to provide a new bathroom, bedrooms and a roof garden. A retired surveyor, the aptly named Mr Thrift, who proved to be a true and also genial master of his profession, drew up detailed plans which enlarged the house seemingly beyond the bounds of probability, exploiting every inch of space.

  He and I investigated grants – both improvement grants and grants for the disabled – and as soon as we had our draft plans ready laid, we were able to apply to a building society for a mortgage. Unlike the odious college land agent, the building society surveyor cheerfully inspected the house and, glancing at the proposed plans, nodded. “It’ll be quite charming, won’t it?” he said, indicating that he would readily approve the property for a mortgage. We were now able to approach our landlady again with a more realistic offer for the house, and this time she accepted. It really seemed that all things were possible. But we had scant opportunity to enjoy being householders: shortly after we had signed the completion, all the furniture had to be stored away in the front bedrooms, and we ourselves had to move out to allow the builders to invade our property. Further loans, including a generous one from Stephen’s parents, and improvement grants were enabling us to embark on a major rebuilding programme.

  George and Sue Ellis, with Maggie and one-year-old Andy, had gone to spend six months in Chicago, the home of the highly respected Indian theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Professor Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and his wife, Lola. Chandrasekhar, though a Fellow of Trinity College, had been forced to seek a post in America after being humiliated by his close friend Arthur Eddington at the Royal Astronomical Society in 1933. Chandrasekhar had anticipated black-hole research by predicting the ultimate collapse of massive stars under their own weight, only to have his theory scathingly ridiculed by Eddington and the astronomy establishment. In Chicago, the Chandrasekhars lived in the sort of style which only a childless couple can maintain. Everything in their quietly secluded flat was as white as snow: a thick-piled white carpet, a white sofa and chairs, white curtains – all in all, a white nightmare for a visiting mother, like Sue, with very small children whose fingers were permanently smeared in sticky chocolate.

  Meanwhile, we gratefully took over the Ellises’ eminently practical, child-oriented, converted country cottage in Cottenham for the duration of the renovations to 6 Little St Mary’s Lane. It was only through living in the country that I fully understood the convenience of living in town. The house was delightful but the isolation was distressing, particularly because I felt sick all day throughout the pregnancy. Stephen had to be driven into Cambridge to the department each morning and collected in the evening, except on those occasions when he was ready in time to catch a lift with other Cottenham commuter neighbours. Robert was unsettled, missing both Inigo and his playgroup, while I sorely missed my friends in the lane, especially the Thatchers, and all attempts to work on my thesis were quite futile. My depression was not eased by the constant pounding of the news reports from the Middle East, which suggested that another confrontation between the Egyptians and the Israelis – and consequently between the superpowers – was imminent. Not only were the two c
ountries regularly raiding each other’s territory, but also a new aspect of war had reared its ugly head in the hijacking of civilian airliners. I became tense and irritable, and, I am ashamed to say, short-tempered with my nearest and dearest: with Stephen, with Robert and, to my lasting regret, with my dearly loved, but very slow-moving grandmother, who came from Norwich to stay with us for one very hot, enervating week.

  At last, against all expectation, the house, which for months had looked like a bomb site, while what was left of it was held up by a solitary metal pole, was in a sufficiently habitable state for us to return to it in mid-October. It was not yet finished and each day brought a succession of different craftsmen, plumbers, plasterers, painters, electricians, all uncomfortably aware of the protruding deadline – or rather lifeline – to which they had to conform. Once back at home, Stephen and Robert could resume their normal routines and I could get on with scrubbing floors, rearranging furniture, hanging curtains and preparing the new back bedroom for the baby. This bedroom and a minuscule new bathroom alongside it occupied the space of the old sloping bathroom on the first floor. They overlooked a roof garden above the kitchen, which had been built out as planned into the yard at the side of the house. The area of the old kitchen was now the dining area of the through-room which extended from front to back, supported in the middle by a solid girder, mysteriously referred to as an RSJ. In the rear wall, constructed of mottled pink, black and yellow old Cambridge bricks, Mr Thrift had reinstated the John Clark’s eighteenth-century plaque.

  At the top of the house on the third floor behind Robert’s attic, there was a new room which on the plans had to be labelled a storeroom, because the ceiling was a few inches below the statutory height for a habitable room, on account of a side window in the neighbouring property. However when the building inspector made his final survey, he cast his eyes round the room and impassively commented, “This could be quite a nice bedroom, couldn’t it?” I hastened to point out to him, in no uncertain terms, that the room was full of boxes and suitcases in recognition of its expressed purpose. Soon afterwards, the so-called storeroom found its true function as a magnificent playroom – safe, out of sight, out of earshot and out of mind.

  A fortnight later, on 31st October, when the workmen had left, we gave a party and invited forty of our friends to squeeze into our house – a happy combination of old at the front and brand new at the back. The excitement and the effort of putting on the party produced positive results, and the next day found me languishing in a state of some discomfort on the chaise longue which I had just finished upholstering. That night I went into hospital, having decided that I would never again put myself and a new baby at the mercy of the crabby old midwives in the nursing home, and insisting that this birth should take place attended by our serene, ever-smiling local midwife, in the maternity hospital.

  In an unprecedented display of early-morning activity, I gave birth to a daughter, Lucy, at 8 a.m. on Monday 2nd November. Our midwife gave me all proper attention and then, naturally enough after being on duty all night, went home, leaving the baby and me in the care of the hospital nurses. But 8 a.m. on a Monday morning was an unfortunate time to be born. As soon as the nurses in attendance at the birth had washed and dressed the baby, they went off duty, leaving me stranded on the delivery table while the poor little creature – in the cot beside me but just out of my reach – screamed until her face turned bright red. I longed to comfort her, but I had been instructed not to move and, in any case, in my postnatal daze, I feared I might drop her. I lay cold and helpless on the hard table, distressed that the tiny red-faced infant in the cot was receiving such a rude introduction to life.

  After two days in hospital I was ready and longing to go home – so ready that I had put my coat on and had wrapped my pretty little pink-faced doll, now much calmer, in warm lacy shawls – when a doctor appeared and ordered me back into bed, explaining that he was going to attach me to a drip containing iron rations to replenish my own failing supplies before letting me go home. Regretfully I obeyed and, instead of returning home to Stephen and Robert, I sadly took refuge in my book, Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann’s saga of a Prussian family at the end of the nineteenth century. My patience in the maternity hospital was rewarded the next day when Lucy and I went home, probably in much better shape thanks to the iron supplements that had been pumped into me. It was good to be back in the lane, where in early November the last roses, sweeter and more intense than any roses in summer, were coming into bloom in the garden. Robert arrived home from nursery school with Inigo, soon after midday. He flapped at the letter box, peering through it in excitement, and then rushed into the house, demanding, “Where’s the baby, where’s the baby?” As soon as he saw his tiny sister lying on a rug on the floor, he went straight over to her and gave her a kiss. Thereafter, although Lucy, once she had acquired the power of speech, hardly allowed him to get a word in edgeways, this fraternal relationship was one area where Dr Spock’s good advice was never called for as Robert showed not the least sign of sibling rivalry.

  Although Stephen’s father and brother, Edward, had gone to Louisiana for the academic year in the cause of tropical medicine, his mother had stayed in England to be in Cambridge over the immediate period of Lucy’s birth, because Stephen was beginning to need much more help with his daily needs. He could still pull himself up the stairs, but his walking was so slow and unsteady that he had recently, with the greatest distaste, at last taken to a wheelchair. In the four days of my absence in hospital, my substitute on the home front needed to be someone with patience, understanding and stamina, whom Stephen could trust implicitly. George was his stalwart helper in the Department, but he had his own young family to go home to in the evenings, so naturally Stephen preferred to have his mother look after him when I was out of action. She stayed on for a few days after my return home and was kind, good-humoured and energetic, if detached. The routine was exacting: the shopping and the washing had to be done, the house cleaned, meals prepared and Robert and Stephen looked after single-handedly. The days since that one occasion when Stephen had picked up a tea towel to help with the washing-up were long gone. His illness made it impossible for him to help with the running of the house, because there was nothing of a practical nature that he could do. The advantage for him of this practical inability was that it allowed him unlimited time to indulge his driving passion for physics, which I accepted, because I knew that he would never have willingly been distracted from it by the mundane considerations of cookery, housework and nappies, whatever his circumstances.

  After my return home, my own mother took over from Isobel to enable her to join her family in America, where her restraining presence was urgently needed. In his detestation of reptiles, Stephen’s father had disobeyed all local advice and had tackled a deadly cottonmouth snake with a broom handle in a fight to the death. Stephen was to visit his family in Louisiana in December on his way to a conference in Texas, six weeks after Lucy’s birth, but it was agreed to my immense relief that he should go with George, and I should stay at home with the two children.

  When all the grandparents had left, our routine changed again, revolving around the baby and Stephen, with a great deal of willing help from three-year-old Robert, Inigo’s nanny and Thelma Thatcher. I felt myself very blessed in my two thriving children. Stephen, however, was worried about Lucy. She slept for long periods during the day and, at night, was positively angelic, so much so that he was convinced that there was something wrong with her. He expected all babies to be like Robert, active and energetic at all hours of the day and the night. I did not share this anxiety. I thoroughly revelled in the blissfully quiet period after her birth which was one of the most stable, contented periods in our lives, especially welcome after the activity of the rebuilding work.

  The house was a delight in its brightly painted cleanliness and comparative spaciousness, and the baby a source of great joy; she was so tiny that I could hold her in the palm of one hand, and so quiet t
hat when the health visitor came to call, she did not even notice her lying beside me on the bed. Little Lucy observed conventional bedtimes, allowing me to run a fairly well-ordered household, care for Stephen and Robert and sleep regular hours. At night I was also able to resume reading novels while Stephen was getting ready for bed. We agreed tacitly – since all reference to his illness was offensive to him – that it was important for him to continue to do as much for himself as he could, even if that took time. He could undress himself once I had loosened his shoelaces and undone his buttons, and then he would struggle out of his clothes and into his pyjamas while I lay reading, a precious luxury at the end of each long day. Stephen’s night-time routine was a slow one, not only because of the physical constraints but also because his concentration was always directed elsewhere, usually onto a relativistic problem. One evening, he took even longer than usual to get into bed, but it was not until the next morning that I found out why. That night, while putting his pyjamas on and visualizing the geometry of black holes in his head, he had solved one of the major problems in black-hole research. The solution stated that if two black holes collide and form one, the surface area of the two combined cannot be smaller, and must nearly always be larger, than the sum of the two initial black holes – or more concisely, whatever happens to a black hole, its surface area can never decrease in size. This solution was to make Stephen, at the age of twenty-eight, the dominant figure in black-hole theory. As black holes had become a topic of general conversation, it was also to make him a recognized figure of some fascination to the population at large. In Seattle we had been orbiting the newly named phenomenon, the black hole; now we had definitely crossed its event horizon, that boundary from which there is no escape. The theory predicted that, once sucked across the event horizon, the unlucky traveller would be stretched and elongated like a piece of spaghetti, never to have any hope of emerging or of leaving any indications as to his fate.