by Jane Hawking
In Lucy Cavendish, I had just one friend, Hanna Scolnicov, with whom I felt at ease. Hanna, an Elizabethan scholar from Jerusalem, was enjoying the respite which she found in Cambridge from the tensions of her war-torn homeland. Hanna and I discovered that we had much in common. Although our circumstances were inevitably disparate, we were both trying to live normal lives and bring up our three-year-olds, Robert and Anat, against a background of tension and uncertainty. When we met, I had just given birth to Lucy and Hanna was expecting her second child. By the time Ariel was born the following summer, we had become friends for life. Moreover, in Hanna’s husband, Shmuel, a classical philosopher, Stephen had found an intellectual sparring partner. Both Hanna and Shmuel were so much more intuitive and perceptive than many people who had known us longer and supposedly better. When Shmuel’s sabbatical year came to an end and they nervously returned to Israel with their young family, there was even less incentive for me to attend Lucy Cavendish, and I became even more isolated and out of touch.
It did not matter much. Stephen’s career was so obviously more important than mine. He was bound to make a big splash in the pond of physics, whereas I would be lucky to make the smallest ripple on the surface of language studies. And, as I reminded myself often, I did have the consolation of the children, both of them lively and funny, loving and adorable. Many people who might well have stared cruelly at Stephen, absorbed by the freakishness of disability – the same people who would have called him a cripple – were visibly nonplussed by the sight of a seriously handicapped father with such strikingly beautiful children, each one a miracle of lucid perfection. Stephen gained confidence through his pride in them. He could confound those doubting onlookers by announcing, “These are my children.” The acute joy that we shared in their purity and innocence, their quaint sayings and their sense of wonder, gave us in turn moments of profound tenderness. In those moments, the bond between us strengthened till it embraced not just ourselves but our home and our family, reaching out to include all those people we valued most. The family, our family, had become my raison d’être.
I comforted myself that no amount of academic recognition could have equalled the creative fulfilment I derived from my family. If sometimes the long hours of childcare and baby talk seemed unremitting, I was well compensated by the privilege of rediscovering the world, its wonders and inconsistencies, through the eyes of small children. Happily my parents also delighted in this pleasure. Never were grandparents so keen to enjoy their grandchildren, and never were grandchildren so indulged by their grandparents. The children brought my parents some light relief from their own anxieties, which were focused on my grandmother, whose health and memory were failing fast. When eventually she moved to St Albans from her home in Norwich, it was too late for her to settle with confidence anywhere else, and all too soon, in her disorientation, she fell and broke an arm. I already knew when I waved goodbye to her one Sunday afternoon in early December 1973, that I should never see her again. I wept all week for that brave, gentle spirit whom I loved so much. It came as a great sorrow but no surprise when my mother rang the following Friday, 7th December, to tell me that she had died in her sleep.
11
Balancing Act
The gradual disappearance of close friends from our social scene did nothing to alleviate my flagging spirits. My school friends and college friends I saw rarely; either they had gone abroad or were raising families in other cities. The friends of the past few years were branching out, leaving Cambridge to climb the career ladder wherever the jobs happened to be. Rob Donovan, who had been Stephen’s best man at our wedding, had with his wife Marian and their little daughter Jane left Cambridge for Edinburgh. Thereafter our contact with them was sporadic, though when we were able to meet, the strength of our friendship resumed in as lively and stimulating a manner as ever. We stayed with them outside Edinburgh in the summer of 1973, just before the planned trip to Moscow. As always in the company of old friends, our conversations ranged far and wide, recalling those Sunday afternoon visits soon after our marriage. We would gossip about the Cambridge scene, the latest convulsions in Gonville and Caius, developments in science, the complexity of grant applications and friends dispersed across the globe.
When we spoke of the Moscow trip, Rob insisted that we should not be lulled by lack of media coverage into supposing that in the post-Cuban Missile Crisis era the arms race had disappeared into the attic of history. Surreptitiously, both superpowers were developing a huge array of ever more sophisticated weaponry. Although the threat of nuclear warfare still hung over us all each time the superpowers, like snarling dragons, caught a whiff of each other’s presence in some contested corner of the world, the fact that they were actually enlarging and refining their already enormous nuclear arsenals was not widely publicized. Rob’s remarks worried and angered me. Now that we had children it was not enough to say that there would be consolation in all being blown up together. I was not prepared to stand back and let that monstrous apocalypse destroy the lives of my precious offspring. But what could I – or we – do? There was little use in appealing to the scientists who had developed these weapons in the Forties and Fifties – many of whom were known to us on both sides of the Iron Curtain – because the decisions were now in the hands of untrustworthy politicians, the devious Nixon in the United States and the inscrutable Brezhnev in the Soviet Union. It was almost harder to digest these unpalatable truths against the pristine background of Scotland’s purple-headed mountains, where the honey-laden air sang of biblical simplicity, than in any man-made urban setting.
The Carters, Brandon and Lucette, with whom we also used to spend so many weekend afternoons, had moved to France with their baby daughter, Catherine. Brandon had taken up a research post at the Observatoire de Paris at Meudon. The Observatoire was set in the grounds of a château, rather like its Cambridge counterpart, and commanded magnificent views over Paris. I missed Lucette greatly for many reasons, quite apart from the fact that she was the only person I knew in Cambridge with whom I could speak French. A respected mathematician, she was clever and articulate without ever being pretentious. Her sincere interest in people and her enthusiastic sense of family were not typical of the Cambridge academics with whom she had mixed. She was musical, imaginative and blessed with a delicate sense of poetry. It was Lucette who through her rhapsodic delight in the trees and flowers, colours and perfumes of the churchyard, introduced me to Proust.
The greatest shock came with the loss of the Ellises. Their departure was especially distressing because they were not leaving Cambridge simply to go to another job, but because their marriage had ended. We identified so closely with them that when George and Sue separated, our own family seemed to be under threat. Our two families, each with two small children, had shared so much that we had become part of each other’s support system. Sue was Lucy’s godmother. We had bought and renovated our houses, had our babies, gone on holiday and attended conferences, almost in tandem. On the one hand, George and Stephen had written a book together, The Large-Scale Structure of Space-Time, and on the other, Sue and I had conferred and confided in each other over many of the crises of motherhood and the struggle to compete with the goddess Physics. George and Stephen were alike in that they could cut themselves off from the basic realities of the outside world, plunging out of the reach of their families deep into the realms of the theoretical universe. The many shared and parallel experiences had built an interdependence into our marriages, and when theirs failed, the solidity of ours was shaken.
All those friendships with couples who had now left Cambridge had been formed in special circumstances. They were the product of Stephen’s contacts in the Department or in one or other of the colleges. He had shared interests, usually scientific, with the husbands while I discovered common interests with their wives. On the departure of the Ellises, our very close, foursome friendships petered out. Although we were on good terms with many of the younger Fellows of Caius and their wives
and had made new friends among the more recent postgraduates in the Department, a subtle change occurred. I made many female friends through the children, but the husbands and fathers of those families did not necessarily have much in common with Stephen, and they were understandably deterred by the difficulties of communication. Moreover I tended to make friends among people with whom there was a perceptible bond of sympathy. They either had cause for sorrow in their own lives or they had some special knowledge of the needs of the disabled. Of all those several valuable friendships, two in particular, the most loyal and the most lasting, had very relevant points of contact with Stephen.
Among Constance Willis’s team of assistants – “Daddy’s exercisers” as Robert called them – there was a slim, fair-haired girl of about my own age, Caroline Chamberlain. In the summer of 1970 Caroline ceased to practise as a physiotherapist because she was expecting a baby at the same time as I was expecting Lucy. As she lived nearby in the Leys School – the local boys’ public school where her husband taught geography – we kept in touch and were brought into closer friendship after our daughters were born. My mind was focused ever more intensely on the problems of disability, for it sometimes seemed that a trap was closing over all of us, over the children and me as well as over Stephen. Information was pretty well non-existent and I began to depend on Caroline’s fund of professional knowledge for guidance. At once practical and cheerful yet very sensitive, she was well aware of the array of difficulties we faced at every turn and, despite all the pressures of being a housemaster’s wife, would do her best to come up with an answer, be it a more comfortable posture, an item of equipment – such as a wheelchair cushion or a caliper – or the address of some useful pioneering organization.
At the school gate, that traditional meeting place for mothers, I found another stalwart friend in Joy Cadbury, whose children, Thomas and Lucy, were the same age as Robert and our Lucy. Joy’s retiring gentleness confounded my perceived image of an Oxford graduate. Far from vaunting her intellectual prowess at the expense of others, she played it down as if it were of absolutely no relevance to her present lifestyle. The daughter of a Devon doctor, she had fulfilled her real ambition – to become a pediatric nurse – after graduating from Oxford. Joy took our situation deeply to heart, always ready to take the children off my hands in times of crisis, always ready to give an unobtrusive hand when the strain was overwhelming. She was not unfamiliar with motor-neuron disease, the incurable degenerative illness about which so little was known, because two hundred and fifty miles away her own elderly father was suffering its terminal stages.
In Devon, not far from Joy’s family home, I had other allies in my brother and his wife Penelope. After Chris’s first temporary job in Brighton, they had moved to Devon when Chris joined a dental practice in Tiverton. Artistic by nature and interested in character and relationships, Penelope understood my need to talk about personalities, influences and emotions and the ways people communicated with each other – subjects which in the Hawking family were virtually proscribed. In Chris and his wife I found a deep well of understanding and support; the drawback was that they lived so far away.
Not all new acquaintances could afford to bring me the encouragement which I found in Caroline, Joy and my relations. Some of my new friends were as marginalized as I was, though in different ways. Often they themselves needed support and turned to me for help. From the vantage point of the physical illness which dominated our lives and which was so immediately obvious and clearly defined, I had only occasionally in the past glimpsed other tragedies. With greater maturity I began to awaken to the many causes and complications of suffering. Some people were struggling with their emotions and with poverty after a traumatic divorce, others were alienated from their families, others were simply a long way from home. These situations and many others I could regard with a certain objectivity, and I tried to give some sort of sensible encouragement to the people experiencing them. Ironically the situations which were closer to my own were much harder to deal with.
Some well-intentioned friends promised to introduce me to a nurse whose husband was suffering from multiple sclerosis. I looked forward to this meeting, hoping that we might be able to bring each other the consolation of shared experience. It was hard even to mention the problems – the crushing responsibility, the emotional strain, the aching fatigue of bringing up two small children unaided at the same time as caring for a seriously disabled person who was wasting away before one’s very eyes – without pangs of disloyalty. Stephen never talked about the illness, but nor did he ever complain. His heroic stoicism increased my sense of guilt at even giving voice to the slightest misgivings. But it was the very lack of communication that was hardest to bear, sometimes harder than all the physical stresses and strains combined. Whereas I had originally hoped that there would be fulfilment in unity of purpose, in fighting together against the odds stacked so heavily against us, it seemed that now I was little more than a drudge, effectively reduced to that role which in Cambridge academic circles epitomized a woman’s place. Fundamentally I knew that I needed help – physical help and emotional support – in keeping my beloved family going.
Just once I summoned the courage to broach my woes – with the utmost caution – to Thelma Thatcher. Her response, if not a rebuff, was decisive in its severity. “Jane,” she said, “I say to you what I always say when things cannot be altered: count your blessings.” Her answer was honest and she was right. I had much to be thankful for – not least, my family and Stephen’s dedicated hard work and courage. I was not destitute and I had no alternative but to accept my chosen lot, keep faith, work hard and make the best of it – as, I found out, Thelma herself had to do on losing her two infant sons. After all I was not unhappy: I derived intense happiness from the two most beautiful and enchanting children anybody could wish for – Robert with his silvery blond hair, neat round face and wide enquiring eyes, and Lucy, auburn-haired with a pink and white skin as soft as swansdown. I was just tired, exhausted from broken nights, backbreaking physical strain and the constant nagging sense of worry and responsibility. I was ashamed at having even attempted to unburden myself, and slunk away to count my blessings.
Practical as ever, Thelma called by the next day. “I’ve been thinking, dear, you must have more help. I’m just going to call on Constance Babington-Smith, shall I ask her to send her cleaning woman along to you?” Constance Babington-Smith’s cleaning lady, bustling Mrs Teversham, was a treasure of the first order, as was her successor a year or so later, tall, angular Winnie Brown. Once a week, cleanliness and order were restored to our household. However, the housework was but a part of the problem. I still needed a sympathetic listener, someone who would patiently listen to my intimate anxieties with understanding and without reprimand. I was not expecting the flourish of a magic wand suddenly to put everything to rights, but I did cherish the hope that perhaps the new contact, the woman with the disabled husband, would be the person who would listen and respond with more understanding than anyone else, and possibly might be able to suggest ways of dealing with some of the practical difficulties of caring more or less single-handedly with severe disability. It was not to be. By the time we met she was on the point of departure for the USA with a new partner, leaving her husband in a home for the disabled.
Thelma Thatcher’s stark philosophy of counting one’s blessings was the only valid course open to me. I had pledged myself to Stephen. In so doing I had committed myself to trying to provide him with a normal life. It was beginning to appear that that pledge meant keeping up a façade of normality, however abnormal life might become for the rest of us in the process. I had no intention of reneging on my pledge, but isolated glimpses into the lives of others – such as the one I had just experienced – served to emphasize rather than alleviate my consuming isolation. Long ago we had discovered that there was no organization, no medical authority to whom we could turn for enlightened advice and assistance. Now, since there was no one to wh
om I could turn for personal support in finding a path through the maze of problems, I resolved to trust my own counsel, steering well clear of unsettling people and situations, pretending more than ever that ours was just a normal family, beset with a difficulty which was best kept confined to the background.
12
Event Horizons
One dark, windy evening – 14th February 1974 – I drove Stephen over to Oxford to a conference at the Rutherford Laboratory on the site of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. We stayed in the Cozener’s House at Abingdon, an old country house on the banks of the Thames, which that winter was in flood. The rain pouring from heavy skies did not dampen our spirits, for Stephen and I – and a handful of his students – were tense with excitement, anticipating a momentous occasion: Stephen was about to produce a new theory. At last he had reached a resolution of the black-hole mechanics versus thermodynamics paradox which had been troubling him since the summer school at Les Houches. He had been spurred into obsessive calculation by the vexatious doubts cast on his earlier conclusions by a Princeton student of John Wheeler’s – who had been so struck by the similarity between the laws of thermodynamics and Stephen’s 1971 black-hole result that he claimed that the laws of thermodynamics and the laws governing black holes were actually the same laws. In Stephen’s opinion, this claim was absurd, since to obey the laws of thermodynamics, black holes would have to have a finite temperature and would have to radiate; that is to say, the two sets of laws would have to coincide in all aspects, not just one. In his resolution of the question, Stephen’s elaboration was innovative beyond all expectation.
