Travelling to Infinity

by Jane Hawking

  The maple leaves that I had collected from Tolstoy’s garden proved to be an eloquent metaphor of the Moscow we saw in those weeks of our visit. It was with genuine relief that we joined in the cheers of the passengers when the London-bound plane took off in a swirling snowstorm in mid-September. Like the snow, the autumn leaves were harbingers of winter in a country where all those freedoms of speech, expression, thought, movement which we took for granted were permanently frozen. Yet their vivid colours sang of our irrepressible friends, those courageous people stranded in that political wasteland. As winter approached in Cambridge, we realized that together with the leaves and the souvenirs, the wooden dancing bears and hand-painted china, we had brought back with us an unwelcome legacy of Soviet oppression. For several weeks after our return, we were unable to communicate freely in our own home for fear that the walls might be listening to us. If this was a measure of the psychological pressure that our friends lived under all the time, our admiration for them could only increase. Thrilled as we were to be back with our children, such a realization was sobering. How, we asked, would we cope in those circumstances?

  At Christmas time that year, my mother and I took the children to see the London version of The Nutcracker ballet at the Festival Hall. Lucy was entranced by the spectacle and thereafter insisted on being called Clara, like the child heroine of the ballet. She spent every spare minute dancing to a well-worn record and devised her own version of the Cossack dance by running the length of the living room and kicking one small leg in the air before turning and racing back to the other end. Like father, like son, Robert was less enchanted by the performance and would have preferred his father’s favourite Christmas-time treat, the pantomime. He fidgeted his way through the first half of the ballet, and no sooner had the second half begun than he dragged his grandma out of the auditorium on the irrefutable pretext of having drunk too much orange squash in the interval. They were not allowed to return to their seats so my mother had to make do with a closed-circuit screening of the rest of the performance in the foyer, while Robert contentedly watched the barges plying up and down the Thames.

  10

  A Chill Wind

  That winter in Cambridge we faced our own set of pressures, though not of a political nature. The conference in Poland and the visit to Moscow, combined with the previous year’s discoveries at Les Houches, had opened up new possibilities and new problems for black-hole research. The secret aim of all physicists was to uncover the philosopher’s stone, the as yet unformulated unified field theory, which would unite all the branches of physics. It would reconcile the large-scale structure of the universe – about which Stephen and George Ellis had written a book – with the small-scale structures of quantum mechanics or elementary particle physics, and the theory of electromagnetism. Black holes held out the tantalizing prospect that they might be the key to the first stage of this particular quest – in the enigmatic resemblance between general relativity and thermodynamics contained in their laws.

  Such was the lure of this goal that not only was Stephen intent on following up his Moscow discussions with consultations worldwide at every available conference, he increasingly spent his every waking hour immersed in such deliberations. The question of travels abroad came up with disturbing regularity. I repeated the canon of my excuses, but it sounded feeble to claim that the strain of leaving the children was too great when the future of physics was at stake.

  At the same time, I was confused by Stephen’s tendency to spend quite so many hours in the evenings and at weekends, like Rodin’s Thinker with his head bent low resting on his right hand, transported to another dimension, lost to me and to the children playing around him. However compelling the intellectual challenge of black-hole physics, I could not fathom such depths of self-absorption. I would at first suppose that he was engrossed in a mathematical problem, so I would cheerfully ask him what was on his mind, but often he would not reply, and I would quickly become anxious. Perhaps he was uncomfortable in his wheelchair or not feeling well, I would enquire. Had I upset him perhaps by refusing to go to the next conference? As he still would not reply, or merely gave an unconvincing shake of the head, my imagination would run riot as I began to suspect that all these factors and many more, not least dejection at his deteriorating condition, were oppressing him unbearably. The position he adopted was, after all, one traditionally used by artists to depict depression.

  Undeniably his speech was becoming indistinct, necessitating boring sessions with a speech therapist to try and redress the slur. Some people, whom we preferred to think of as deaf or stupid, could not understand him at all. He required my help with the minutiae of every personal need, dressing and bathing, as well as with larger movements. He had to be lifted bodily in and out of the wheelchair, the car, the bath and the bed. Food had to be cut into small morsels so that he could eat with a spoon, and mealtimes were protracted. The stairs in our house were now a major obstacle. He could still pull himself up – that in itself was recommended exercise – but he needed to have someone standing behind him for reassurance. It was natural that when away from home, he wanted to have me with him all the time. Pent-up guilt at my own reluctance to take advantage of all those opportunities to travel the globe, and frustration at the lack of communication, would tie me in knots of anxiety and despair. I felt like that traveller who had fallen into a black hole: stretched, tugged and pulled like a piece of spaghetti by uncontrollable forces.

  A couple of days later, Stephen would emerge from his isolation. With a triumphant smile, he would announce that he had solved yet another major problem in physics. It was only after the event that these episodes became a joke. As each new situation was marginally different from the previous one, I never learnt to recognize the symptoms. At the time I always worried that Stephen might really be feeling unwell. Each time I would compliment him on his success, but secretly I realized that the children and I had joined battle with that irresistible goddess, first encountered in America in 1965, the goddess of Physics, who deprived children of their fathers and wives of their husbands. After all, I remembered that Mrs Einstein had cited Physics as the third party in her divorce proceedings.

  For Stephen those periods of intense concentration may have been useful exercises in cultivating that silent, inner strength which would enable him to think in eleven dimensions. Unable to tell whether it was oblivion or indifference to my need to talk that sealed him off so hermetically, I found those periods sheer torture, especially when, as sometimes happened, they were accompanied by long sessions of Wagnerian opera, particularly The Ring Cycle, played at full volume on the radio or the record player. It was then, as I felt my own voice stifled and my own spontaneity suppressed inside me, that I grew to hate Wagner. The music was powerful, so powerful that I was irresistibly drawn into the sensual luxury of those hypnotizing chords and thrilling modulations, but my daily round did not allow me a single moment’s respite from the unending demands of shopping, cooking, housework, childcare and Stephencare. From the kitchen or the bathroom, or even the playroom on the top floor, I would be all too conscious of the inveigling power of the music, insinuating itself through enthralling harmonies and discords. I would try to disregard its beckoning, ambiguous strains, knowing it to be far too manipulative for my confused state of mind. The open clarity of Mediterranean culture was my touchstone, not the dark menace of northern myth, where all heroes were doomed to premature death and chaos and evil triumphed. Stephen might be as bewitched by this force as he was by physics – since both for him had become a religion – but I had to keep my feet on the ground. If I allowed myself to yield to the sombre tyranny of that music, the structure I had built around me would collapse and crumble to dust. Wagner came to represent an evil genius, the philosopher of the master race, the demon behind Auschwitz, and potentially an alienating force. I was simply too young to be able to cope with so much emotional pressure.

  Thankfully our diet of entertainment was not limited to Wagner,
but was vastly eclectic. It ranged from Wagner, inescapably, and Verdi and Mozart in the opera houses, through performances of the Elgar oratorios in King’s College Chapel and Monteverdi Vespers in St Albans Abbey, to Princess Ida at the Arts Theatre – since, truly broad in his tastes, Stephen was a Gilbert and Sullivan fan as well as a Wagnerian. Apart from Wagner, his favourite entertainments however were the Footlights, the university review in summer, and the pantomime in winter. For both of these he suspended his usually acerbic critical judgement. I often found the Footlights tedious, since the standard of humour never quite matched up to the unrealistic expectations aroused by the Beyond the Fringe generation, and as for the pantomime, the smutty jokes wore thin through constant sniggering repetition.

  To occupy those other solitary evenings at home when Stephen was immersed in thought but Wagner was mercifully suppressed, when the trappings of the day were cleared away and the children finally in bed, I bought a very compact piano on the pretext that Robert should start having lessons. In an environment where everyone was so naturally accomplished, it was embarrassing to admit that I really wanted to have lessons myself. I took some lessons with a retired schoolteacher who, sympathizing with my ambitions, sensitively refrained from telling me that I was too old to learn to play. Rising to the challenge, he trained me in the basics of theory and harmony and, to my satisfaction, allowed me to choose my own repertoire. Robert also had lessons – with a young teacher who drew pictures for him of fairies dancing in the treble clef and giants stomping about in the bass.

  Since he had started school, Robert, previously so happy and lively, was becoming much quieter and more reserved. He was only four and a quarter when, in line with local education policy, he was obliged to start school. I was convinced that this was too early. Some time later I read that the psychological difference between a four-year-old and a five-year-old is the same as the difference between a seven-year-old and an eleven-year-old, and that starting school at such a young age is actually damaging to a child’s development. Robert was a shy little boy and, when asked what he did in the lunch hour his reply, casually delivered, made me very sad. “Oh,” he said with a shrug, “I just sit on the steps.” His primary school had an excellent reputation for bringing out the best in fast-learning children from academic backgrounds, and was essentially a literary school where those children who could read quickly made rapid progress. Some years later Lucy, bubbling with creative and literary talent, flourished there. Robert however had great difficulty in reading. I feared that this might be a delayed effect of the medicine-swallowing episode, but my mother-in-law’s comments were comforting. It was obvious that Robert was just a chip off the old block, she said, because Stephen had not learnt to read until he was seven or eight years old. I then fully understood why the winter spent by the Hawkings with the Graves family in Majorca had left such an unhappy impression on Stephen. If at the age of nine he had only just learnt to read, the daily sessions spent analysing the Book of Genesis under the eagle eye of Robert Graves must have been grim. Stephen wisely maintained that it did not matter what Robert read so long as he learnt to read, whereupon we plied Robert with the Beano and every imaginable joke book, so that each mealtime was accompanied with interminable jokes of the “Knock, knock”, “Who’s there?” variety and Robert’s reading improved dramatically.

  Dyslexia was not a condition that was recognized in educational circles in the early Seventies. Nowadays it is claimed that both Leonardo da Vinci and Einstein were probably dyslexic. We suspected that Stephen was dyslexic and were fairly sure that Robert was too, but, apart from a remedial reading class, there was no specific help for dyslexics in the state system. They were classed at best as lazy, at worst as backward, slow learners, already at the age of five, consigned to a second-rate future. I knew that Robert was not backward: this was the child who at the age of four, when we were gardening one afternoon, had asked quite seriously, “Mummy, who was God born inside?” This was the child who, at five, had sat down at the piano to explain the concept of minus numbers to me. “Look, Mummy,” he said, “all these notes going up from middle C are plus numbers and all the ones going down from middle C are minus numbers.”

  I was sure that the emphasis that the school placed on literary rather than numerical skills was wrong for Robert. A new teacher who came to the school when he was just six announced that she was going to start an advanced maths group. I pleaded with her to let him join the group. She clearly found it hard to not to laugh. “But he can’t read!” she remonstrated, “How can he possibly do maths?” I persevered, “Please just let him try.” With the greatest scepticism, she agreed to let him join the class for three weeks. During those three weeks Robert did not appear to be having any trouble with the advanced maths and he seemed much less tense. At the end of the three weeks, he brought a message home from the new teacher, saying that she would like to talk to me after school. She came out to meet me at the school gate. “Mrs Hawking, I owe you an apology,” she began fulsomely, “I really didn’t think that Robert would be able to cope with the advanced maths when you asked me to let him come into the class, but I really must apologize because I was so wrong. He is extraordinarily good at maths, and is way ahead of all the others.” But the maths class came to an untimely end after only two terms when the teacher left to have a baby, and then Robert was back at square one. As Stephen and I had blithely assumed that, in accordance with our socialist principles, our children would be educated in state schools, we were now presented with a resounding clash of loyalties because the needs of our child were not compatible with our political principles. The state system had not served Robert well so far. He needed to be praised for the subjects he could do well, particularly maths, and he needed encouragement, not castigation, in those he found difficult, particularly reading and writing. Only in the private sector could we be sure that the classes would be small enough for him to receive proper attention. The sonorously entitled Fellowship for Distinction in Science did not pay a large enough salary for us to be able to afford private education, nor did the Research Assistantships to which Stephen was subsequently appointed – at the Institute of Astronomy in 1972 after Fred Hoyle’s departure, and also at the Department of Applied Mathematics in 1973. But by another of those ironic twists of fate, the finance became available – in a way that we regretted.

  In 1970, shortly after Lucy’s birth, Stephen’s lonely Aunt Muriel had died. Instead of enjoying her new-found freedom after her mother’s death, she had simply wasted away. The money she might have spent on herself, by going off on a round-the-world trip for instance, she saved cautiously to provide for the uncertainties of the future. The future never came and the money was left to some of her great-nephews and nieces, among them Robert on whom she particularly doted. Of itself, the inheritance was not sufficient to finance long years of education, but when set to work with an equal share from Stephen’s father, it amounted to enough to buy a small house which could be let out quite profitably. Half the rent went to Stephen’s parents while the other half contributed substantially to Robert’s school fees. Cambridge was a good place for such a venture, because properties were still fairly cheap and the floating population of visiting scholars meant that there was a constant demand for rented properties. With my experience of renovating our own house, I was put in charge of the project. Buying and renovating another house and then letting it became an additional burden when my hands and my time were already full. The insight it gave me into the squalor of other people’s lives was disheartening, but since I was all too conscious of the need to save money for the ever-mounting school fees, I had no option but to take up the paintbrush for an intensive week of solo decorating once or twice a year. Sometimes this exercise had to be carried out even more frequently to satisfy summer visitors.

  Such taxing activity and wearing preoccupations left less and less time and energy for the thesis. I had succeeded in assembling material for the first chapter and had come up with a few origi
nal ideas of my own. I traced some close verbal reminiscences between the kharjas and the Song of Solomon, and I detected striking similarities between the kharjas and the Mozarabic hymns, the hymns of the native Christian populace under Moorish domination. With luck, all other things being equal, I might be able to snatch an hour for the thesis in the morning, while Lucy was at nursery school after I had taken Stephen to the Department. Keeping up with my own research stretched me to the limit. There was no longer any chance of broadening my grasp of other areas of medieval research, let alone investigating the other fields and topics which came up for discussion at the Lucy Cavendish dinners. I was out of touch with the political and international scene and had scant time for reading. I had little to offer and little to gain, other than a depressing awareness of my own inadequacy, from either Lucy Cavendish or the Dronkes’ medieval seminars. When I did attend one or the other, I had to bluff my way through discussions and conversations or else maintain a dull silence. It was an uncomfortable situation in which I felt a fraud, and my attendance at both lapsed.