by Jane Hawking
Stephen was not the only Cambridge scientist to be honoured that year, nor yet the only physicist from the Department. John Polkinghorne, the Professor of Particle Physics, was also being admitted to the Fellowship of the Royal Society on the same occasion. Having reached the apogee of his career in science, he was on the point of giving up physics to take up theology; that is to say, from being Professor Polkinghorne FRS, he was about to become an undergraduate again, embarking on the long haul of study for ordination, curacy and parish, with the particular motivation of healing the schism between science and religion which had originated with Galileo. In his opinion, science and religion were not in opposition but were two complementary aspects of one reality. This thesis would become the theme of his writings as a priest-scientist. Although we did not know him well, I admired his conviction and was greatly encouraged to find that atheism was not an essential prerequisite of science, and not all scientists were as atheistic as they seemed.
Part Three
1
Letter from America
“Oh, hi! My name is Mary Lou and I live in Sierra Madre. And who are you? Where are you from?” The speaker, a slight, tanned figure, invited our reply with a broad smile. As we had only just arrived at the party, hosted by some English expatriates, a week or so after landing in Los Angeles, we were not yet accustomed to such directness. There was a long pause while we overcame our surprise and realized that an equally spontaneous reply was expected. After all, it had taken the best part of ten years for us to be recognized at parties in Cambridge, and even then the approach was always tinged with a certain diffidence. Of late some of the senior Fellows – and more especially their wives – had regularly shown a benevolent interest in us, but over the years we had become used to sitting trapped at the ends of tables, or in corners on our own, never really expecting anyone to speak to us, always pleasantly surprised if during the course of the evening we happened to encounter a friendly face. Indeed one of the kitchen managers had once confided in me that it was difficult to place us at table at College feasts because no one really wanted to sit with us. Small wonder, then, that we were unprepared for Mary Lou’s initiative. Her exuberance was infectious and I attempted to convey our elation at all things Californian in my letters home to our families and friends, as for instance in my first letter to my parents, written in the days before regular phone contact was financially feasible:
535 South Wilson Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91106
USA
30th August, 1974
Dear Mum and Dad,
This is so exciting! The flight was very long, but very straightforward by comparison with the last time we flew over the Pole when Robert was a small baby. Like a born traveller retracing his steps, Robert was entranced by the scenery, black peaks growing out of snowfields, mountains rising out of a frozen sea where occasional waterholes glowed deep emerald in the ice, white specks of icebergs in Hudson Bay, then the deserts of America, the Salt Lake and finally the coastal mountains. In contrast, when we were high over the Atlantic, Lucy, quite unimpressed by the adventure, asked if we were on the ground yet…
We all revived on landing, although it was about 2 a.m. (your time), and were wide-eyed at the sight of so much that was new and unfamiliar – palm trees, huge cars, our own gleaming station wagon in which Kip came to meet us, freeways weaving in and out of the city in all directions, skyscrapers and, ultimately, the house with its white weatherboarding, looking much prettier than in the photos. It was dusk when we arrived and there was a light in every window – a Disney fantasy come true! It is as elegant inside as it is pretty out. And so comfortable! Huge sofas that you just sink into and bathrooms everywhere, all colour-coordinated, of course! Everything is brand new, all the imitation-antique furniture, the towels, the china, even the saucepans! These people must think that we are used to an astronomical standard of living. If only they knew! From the kitchen sink I can look out onto mountains, while Stephen is actually closer to his office than in Cambridge because the house is right opposite the campus. Like a small boy with a new toy, he is excitedly learning to manoeuvre his electric wheelchair, the same as the one he has at the Institute only much faster. It’s years since he has had such freedom of movement, though the chair has to be lifted over kerbs and steps, which is a bit of a problem since kerbs are very high here as no one ever walks out in the street and the frame is very heavy. The two solid gel batteries each weigh a ton, not to mention the occupant. We have had engineers here all day attending to the wheelchair and making adjustments to all the other appliances. Nothing it seems is too much trouble.
The garden is rather bare and is tended by a team of gardeners, who came with shears, brooms and a vacuum cleaner. They cut back, tidy up and hoover the lawn, but would never recognize a weed if it stared them in the face. The grass needs a great deal of water, which comes up from an underground irrigation system – no need for hosepipes or watering cans. It’s all so exotic! The first morning we stepped out onto the patio to find a hummingbird hovering by a weird-looking plant, with spiky orange and blue flowers. All around the house are camellia bushes the size of trees and by the patio there is a huge Californian dry oak, just waiting to be climbed. Round the edge of the garden we have an orange tree in bloom and in fruit at one and the same time, two avocados, a fir tree and a small palm. So far, as it is so hot, we have eaten all our meals on the patio – just as well since the dining room is so beautiful with its plush red carpet and its mahogany table, we hardly dare step inside the door, let alone eat there.
The children and I went for a bathe in the Caltech pool this afternoon. Lucy fell in and did not like it at all. She is regarded as terribly backward since at three she cannot swim, but Robert will be swimming within the week; at present he swims underwater. We are all so dazed with healthy, happy tiredness that Lucy has gone to sleep in front of the television, (novelty though it is, we hardly ever watch it because of the interminable adverts) and even Robert shows signs of dozing off. I think I may be asleep before him even so.
Much love, Jane
My father was due to retire from the Ministry of Agriculture on his sixtieth birthday in December 1974 after a long and dedicated career, and he and my mother planned to celebrate his retirement by coming out to stay with us in California. In the meantime we had a constant stream of visitors, some of whom stayed for a weekend or so while others, like Peter De’Ath, Stephen’s PhD student, took up residence and helped Bernard with Stephen’s care, until he found his own accommodation. I grew more confident at driving and did not find shopping for so many visitors a strain, because all the purchases were neatly packed into brown paper (not plastic) sacks and carried out to the car for me by smiling assistants. Moreover Robert – aged seven – was a brilliant navigator: he seemed to carry the freeway map in his head and, unlike his father, told me where to turn off well in advance.
On the children’s first morning at the Pasadena Town and Country School, I delivered them somewhat apprehensively to the school gate, then at noon I returned to pick up Lucy from the nursery department and joined the car queue of waiting mothers, sidling round the block in their automobiles. As I edged to the school gate, I gave her name to the teacher standing guard on the pavement and he hailed her over the loudspeaker:“Loossee Hokking, Loossee Hokking!” he bellowed. No one came forwards and there was no sign of Loossee Hokking among the crowd of small children waiting patiently inside. A great commotion ensued. Could Loossee Hokking have been kidnapped – the worst fear of the school – on her first day? The place was in chaos. I parked the car and went in. The Principal came running out of her office and a bevy of middle-aged ladies scattered in all directions in frantic search of the lost infant. Loossee Hokking was not hard to find. She had liked school so much that she had taken herself off to lunch and was intending to stay until two-thirty. Thereafter she came out of school, sometimes temperamentally, a bit the worse for wear, as it was a long day for a three-year-old.
Th
e children found a new friend in Shu, the eight-year-old son of our Japanese neighbours, Ken and Hiroko Naka, who had lived for some time in Cambridge before moving to the United States. Ken was a biologist, specializing in catfish eyes, some sort of scientific oddity closely resembling the human eye. The Nakas not only took Robert and Lucy to school every morning after that first day, they also planned all sorts of expeditions to fun parks and beaches for the three children. As I found out when I collected the children from school in the afternoon, Shu’s conversation was peppered with computer jargon. While Lucy babbled on irrepressibly, Shu conducted his own monologue at which Robert nodded knowingly; doubtless attracted by this, his first introduction to information technology, the science that would eventually become his career. Delighting in his new-found independence, Stephen also secretly rejoiced in being the star of the campus – where he sat in an air-conditioned office all day. Ramps appeared everywhere on campus as well as in the driveway to the house. He had his own secretary, Polly Grandmontagne, and a regular physiotherapist, Sylvie Teschke, whose husband, a Swiss watchmaker, was anxiously anticipating the end of his livelihood with the advent of quartz watches. Bernard Carr, Stephen’s student, began to settle into the routine of our household, unfailingly cheerful despite his somewhat erratic regime, which consisted of helping me put Stephen to bed at night then going out to parties, after which he would sit up till the early hours watching horror movies on account, he said, of his insomnia – and then he would sleep till lunchtime. Once I went upstairs to rouse him in the middle of the morning and found him sleeping soundly with his body in the bed and his head on the floor!
That autumn Mary Thatcher came on a tour of the United States, to lecture on her newly released film archive of the lives of the British in India. Like all our visitors we took her to the local attraction, the Huntington Gardens and Gallery, founded by Mr Huntington who had made his money on the railways and married his aunt to keep it in the family. Her portrait suggests that he paid a rather heavy price for the privilege, but the accumulation of wealth enabled him to purchase Constable’s View on the Stour, various Chaucerian manuscripts and the Gutenberg Bible among other notable works for his Gallery, as well as establishing a beautiful garden. The garden was divided into fascinating specialized geographical and botanical areas: a viciously prickly desert-cactus garden, an Australian area with eucalyptus trees but no kangaroos, a jungle area, row upon row of camellias, a Shakespearean knot garden, a classical Japanese garden complete with bridge, tea house, and gongs, and a mysteriously philosophical Zen garden – mostly raked gravel dotted about with a few significantly sited rocks. In fact some of the best of European art was to be found within easy reach. If it were not in the Huntington Gallery, it would be in the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum at Malibu, or Hearst Castle on the way up to San Francisco. Sometimes I felt quite sentimental if not a little homesick on seeing European art, particular the Constable, in the brash brightness of California. There was little room for those subtleties of life that we knew so well, the grey skies, the respectable shabbiness, the crumbling buildings, the diffidence, the snobbery. The Californian skies, the colours, the landscape, the people, their behaviour and their use of language I found starkly well-defined, honest and devoid of nuance. As for the food, it was gargantuan, but so stuffed with additives that we were glad to be able to grow some of our own fruit. Fifty-two avocado pears fell off the tree one weekend in October when we were away in Santa Barbara. We hurriedly picked them all up on our return and stored them in the bottom of the fridge to save them from the weekly cleansing operation by the gardeners.
That November I wrote to warn Mum and Dad what to expect.
Dear Mum and Dad,
We are so much looking forward to seeing you in just a couple of weeks but I hope you will be able to stand the pace here. Don’t come to California for a rest! We live in a constant social whirl. As our house is the largest and closest to the campus, it has become the venue for the Relativity Group’s entertaining this year. Kip and Linda have a lovely old Spanish-style villa up in Altadena but that is some way out of town and the area around them is so thick with thieves that as soon as they buy anything new, it disappears. The same goes for any cars parked in the street. So we have some of the parties here instead, cocktail parties, dinner parties, evening drinks parties – not to mention Lucy’s birthday party to which she insisted on inviting the whole class plus teachers… Soon we shall be cooking a turkey for Thanksgiving. I don’t know how many people will be coming but I’m leaving the traditional trimmings like pumpkin pie to the Americans who know how to do those things. There’s no accounting for some of their tastes anyhow. Some people came to dinner last week and I served them a beef casserole. To my amazement they added autumn strawberries from a bowl on the table to their plates of stew!
You will meet our new friends too, especially the other Fairchild Fellows in Stephen’s field, the Dickes and the Israels. Bob and Annie Dicke from Princeton are very much like you. He is intellectual and an excellent pianist, and she is warm and grandmotherly. The children and I often go to tea with her and swim in the pool at their block of flats, grandly known here as “condominiums”. Did you meet the Israels from Edmonton when they came to Cambridge with their ten-year-old son Mark in 1971? They are very cosmopolitan in outlook but gentle, humorous and immensely knowledgeable, without a trace of affectation.
A special message for Chris: Robert developed toothache last week, although I had taken him to the school dentist just before we came out here, so on Thursday we went to see a dentist. California style. Potted plants, plush carpets, soft sofas and piped music greeted us. The dentist came out to talk to me after he had inspected Robert’s teeth. “Well, Mrs Hokking,” he began, then paused for his words to take effect, “this will be quite an investment… those young molars need remedial dentistry, stainless-steel crowns… around one hundred and eighty dollars, I would estimate…” I can imagine Chris’s reaction but what choice do I have except to pay up?!
The children and I have joined the local library. Robert took out a book on the British Empire, which struck me as rather excessively patriotic, but not bad for a child who only a year ago was accused of being backward. I also have an addictive new interest thanks to another Caltech wife, Tricia Holmes. Tricia, who is Irish, has introduced me to the evening choral class at Pasadena City College. Once a week we sight-sing our way through a major choral work. I’m not a good sight-singer but it is very exciting. Last week it was Brahms’s German Requiem, this week the Mozart Requiem and so on. Later in the year we shall be doing the St Matthew Passion over two weeks. The approach reminds me of the way Americans travel in Europe, a day in Paris, a day in London, two days in Venice, perhaps.
Lucy also has a special activity thanks also to Tricia Holmes, whose little girl, Lizzie, is more or less Lucy’s age. Lizzie and Lucy go to ballet together, so the ballet shoes are in use again, and this time it’s the real thing, no messing around with nursery rhymes and free expression, but no tears either. The teacher is young and rather seriously American. Her reservation is that she might be teaching Lucy by the wrong method… Since I last wrote we have taken in another migrant to fill up some of the space in this house. Anna Zytkov, a young Polish astrophysicist, has moved in until she can find somewhere to rent. No sooner had she arrived than I suggested a game of tennis, although I have not played in years. We had just begun to play when Anna fell over, and broke her ankle. Since then, in her immobilized state, she has built the most beautiful, fully furnished doll’s house out of a large cardboard box for Lucy for her birthday. It is a real work of art, so delicately and imaginatively crafted that it makes the garish plastic artefacts that one sees in the shops look monstrously vulgar and clumsy.
We shall have a full house at Christmas. I think Anna will have left by then, but in addition to the six of us plus Bernard, George Ellis will be coming to stay for a couple of days when he and Stephen return from a conference in Dal
las on the 21st, and on the 23rd, Philippa Hawking will be coming over from New York where she is working at present. We will be at the airport at 5 a.m. on the 16th to meet you! Be prepared for all the usual end-of-term activities at the school – Robert is reciting from the Battle of Bunker Hill – and for a huge party here on the 21st.
Much love till 16th
December, Jane
In early December, Stephen went off with his entourage to the conference in Dallas. While the children and I were alone in the house, I awoke one night to find the bed and the floor shaking beneath me. Our instructions were that we should run to the porch in the event of an earthquake, but I was too terrified to move, literally petrified. When finally I recovered my senses, I ran upstairs to see if the children were all right and was astonished to find them both sound asleep. I went back to bed, turned out the light and then it happened again. Even the aftershock was tremendous, quite unlike the little tremors that rattled windows regularly each afternoon. However, had there been earthquakes at Christmas, we probably should not have noticed them (just as Stephen failed to notice a major earthquake in Persia in 1962 because he was travelling cross-country on a bus at the time and was suffering from dysentery). Mum and Dad, George Ellis and Stephen on their return from Dallas, and Stephen’s sister Philippa arrived in the middle of consecutive nights, and then we gave a party for forty or so friends and colleagues, who enjoyed themselves so much that they stayed till after 2 a.m. To prove it, we have a photo of a very distinguished elderly physicist, Willy Fowler, practising yoga on the living-room floor at 2 a.m. precisely!
Sixteen people came to Christmas dinner, which meant that the children had a ready-made audience for their conjuring show. Robert was given a conjuring set and he, with his ebullient assistant, regaled us with a winningly innocent first attempt at sleight of hand – a change from the constant diet of riddles and jokes which bemused us and kept the children in ecstasies of laughter. The contrast between his quasi-professional opening gambit – “If you want to ask questions, please ask them after the show and not before it” – and the disarray in his box of tricks, his pleasure when a trick actually worked and his suppressed irritation at his show-stealing assistant, not to mention his gaping toothless smile, were very endearing.
