Travelling to Infinity

by Jane Hawking

  After Christmas and the Pasadena Parade on New Year’s Day, we summoned the energy to take the family to Disneyland for a day. The queues were long and the children managed to ride on only two attractions each. We did have a good vantage point for the lavishly produced Disneyland parade though, but even that was a bit of a disaster because it was Lucy’s misfortune to be offered an apple by the Wicked Witch in the Snow White section. She was so terrified that she hid behind my skirts. Then early in the New Year we drove over to Death Valley, the desert park, 300 miles to the north-east. It was a great relief to have my parents with me to share the driving, to help with loading Stephen and the wheelchair – not to mention the batteries – into the car, and to keep the children entertained while I attended to Stephen. We were awed by the weird primeval landscape, a giants’ playground where the Valley floor is littered with sand dunes here, volcanic craters there, and scree and sand-coloured rock protuberances everywhere. Vast salt flats below sea level are all that remain of a deep ice-age lake. On all sides the Valley is enclosed by rugged snowcapped mountains, which in their many-hued stratifications bear witness to enormous geological upheavals in the dawn of time. In summer Death Valley is said to be the hottest desert in the world and is almost barren of vegetation: only cacti, desert holly and the creosote plant survive among its hostile rocks and stones, and only the tiny, prehistoric pupfish can withstand the extreme saltiness of its few shallow creeks. Constantly changing colour with the movement of the sun, the landscape is magnificent but not beautiful. The sorry tales of the pioneers who tried to cross the Valley in 1849 and the ghost-town remnants of the gold prospectors’ dreams, together with the sterility and silence of the place, invest it with a menacing and forbidding atmosphere. My mother remarked how dynamic, tough and persevering those pioneers must have been and added that we shouldn’t be surprised to find those same qualities in modern Californians, especially the women, the descendants of those pioneers.

  We came home to a nice surprise. We had already organized a small farewell party for my parents, so it was a happy coincidence that on the same occasion we could celebrate the award, to Stephen and Roger Penrose, of the Eddington Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society. It was all very prestigious but we were not really sure what it signified, as the announcement came as a complete surprise. Nevertheless, it did have the effect of reminding Stephen to pay his overdue subscription. Lucy was determined to go back to England with her grandparents and packed her suitcase specially. She was so indignant when the plane took off without her that we had to make a quick dash to the nearest Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet to calm her down.

  Martin Rees – now President of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, but back in 1975 simply one of our best, most unpretentious and kindest friends – had agreed to cast our votes that spring in the referendum on British entry to the Common Market. It was probably a complete waste of his time as Stephen’s vote most certainly cancelled out mine. (Stephen had a habit of doing this in elections.) To my way of thinking, from California Britain appeared as a small offshore European island, which would do well to settle down to its rightful place within the Common Market instead of dwelling on past glories and lost greatness. Fortunately this is just what happened, despite Stephen’s attempt to sabotage my vote.

  Stephen meanwhile was getting up to all sorts of mischief. As a sort of insurance policy, he bet Kip Thorne that the constellation Cygnus X-1 did not contain a black hole, because he felt he would need some consolation in the form of four years’ subscription to Private Eye if that actually proved to be the case. Kip for his part was content with just one year’s subscription to Penthouse magazine if, as seemed likely, Cygnus X-1 did contain a black hole. Otherwise, Stephen was making contacts with particle physicists, which meant that his interests were moving way beyond the event horizon into the heart of the black hole. He was attending lectures by two eminent particle physicists, Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, whose gentlemanly behaviour towards each other concealed an arch rivalry. Stephen was present when Feynman turned up at the first of a course of lectures by Gell-Mann. Noticing Feynman in the audience, Gell-Mann announced that he would be using his lecture series to conduct a survey of current research in particle physics and proceeded to read from his notes in a monotone. After ten minutes, Feynman got up and left. To Stephen’s great amusement, Gell-Mann then heaved a sigh and declared, “Ah, good, now we can get on with the real stuff!” and proceeded to talk about his own recent research at the cutting edge of particle physics.

  Winter was scarcely noticeable, though it rained hard, sometimes for two or three days at a time. Then the sun would shine again in an azure sky and the clouds would clear from the mountains, revealing the splendour of the peaks sparkling with fresh snow. The rain suddenly brought spring to the canyons which, so brown when we first arrived, were now green and lush, while the roadsides and cliffs by the beach rippled with wild flowers: orange poppies, blue lupines, sunflowers and daisies. We did not let the rain interfere with our activities. On George Washington’s birthday in February, we went out for a drive and came back several hours later having driven 350 miles, the longest distance I have ever driven in one day. We climbed up through the swirling icy mists of Palomar Mountain to the world’s largest telescope, and then crossed the scorching dryness of the Anza-Borrego Desert, where masses of flowers were coming into bloom. When Stephen’s mother and his Aunt Janet came to stay in March, we piled into the car and went off to the Joshua Tree National Park, a high desert area above 3000 feet, where the Joshua Tree produces its lily-like flowers. At a lower elevation, there is a forest of cacti appropriately called “jumping chollas”. One of them jumped at me, implanting its barbs in my leg, a rather mean thing to do on my birthday I thought, especially as the children had already sat on my birthday cake in the back of the car. Aunt Janet’s medical expertise came to the rescue – of my leg, not the cake.

  In April, Stephen received the Pope Pius XI Gold Medal for science at a full session of the Pontifical Academy. It seemed that the notion of the Big Bang as the point of creation appealed to the Vatican, and at last Galileo had found a champion when Stephen in his address to the assembly made a special plea for the rehabilitation of Galileo’s memory – three hundred and thirty three years after his death.

  While Stephen was away in Europe, the children, Annie Dicke and I took the boat across a very choppy sea to Catalina Island. In those days the island was a gem, unspoilt and free of traffic, but what impressed us most was the trip we took in a glass-bottomed boat. The sight of the tranquil, gleaming world of the seabed, where seaweed grew to a height of twenty feet and fish, unaware of our presence, darted with a quicksilver grace between its branches, held us spellbound. I wondered how we could be so ignorant of the silent beauty and mystery of that other world which was literally at our feet and on our shores. When I revisited Catalina Island in 1996, the island had lost its pristine beauty and was as polluted under the surface of the ocean as it was on land. That change was to be a potent image of the way our lives had changed in the interim.

  As that year in California drew to a close, I sensed that although it had been positive and exhilarating in so many ways, it had begun to define a widening fault line between our shining public image and our darkening private face. It also brought me sharply up against my own limitations. At three years old, Lucy might have been a backward swimmer, but apparently I was a really retarded mother. In America in the early days of women’s lib, a woman who did not have a job by the time her child was two was regarded as a miserable failure, inevitably lacking in “personal fulfilment”. So I threw myself headlong into a crazy round of activity. The endless stream of visitors, the frantic socializing, books from the library and, of course, the children, kept me more or less occupied, distracting my mind from the dispiriting effect that life on the edge of the Caltech vortex had on anyone who was not an international scientific genius. Caltech, the temple where devotees came to worship at th
e altar of science, particularly physics, excluded all else. The Wives’ Club struggled valiantly to entertain spouses with trips to places like the J. Paul Getty Museum and the occasional concert or play in the theatre, but there were quite a lot of unhappy, disaffected wives, demoralized by their husbands’ total obsession with science.

  I managed to avoid being swallowed up by the Caltech abyss, but nevertheless it caused me to question my own situation. One weekend in Santa Barbara, while Stephen was engaged in endless discussions with his colleague Jim Hartle, I sat on the beach, wrapped up against the icy wind, gazing out to sea while the children played. As I ran the loose sand through my fingers, I asked myself where my life was going. What did I have to show for my thirty years? I had the children, “my blessings” as dear Thelma Thatcher would say, and Stephen. Certainly proud of his extraordinary achievements, I didn’t really feel that I shared in his success – yet everything that happened to him was crucial to me, whether an honour, sparkling with fame and glory, or one of those life-threatening choking fits seizing him unawares. I loved him for his courage, his wit, his sense of the ridiculous and the absurd, and that wicked charisma which enabled him – and still enables him – to twist most people, including me, round his little finger. So I was achieving what I set out to do – to devote myself to Stephen, giving him the chance of fulfilling his genius. But in the process I was beginning to lose my own identity. I could no longer count myself a Hispanist or even a linguist, and I felt that I did not command respect anywhere, in California or in Cambridge. Perhaps all the frenzied socializing and entertaining was really just my Freudian way of saying, “Please notice me too!”

  It was in California that for the first time ever we met a family in similar circumstances to our own. The Irelands, David, Joyce and John, lived over in Arcadia, only a few miles from Pasadena. Like Stephen, David was a scientist by training. He studied and taught maths. Confined to a wheelchair, he was also severely disabled with a neurological illness and could do little for himself. Very positive in attitude, Joyce was an organized, energetic person and had married David in the full knowledge of his illness. Stephen was very nervous about meeting the Irelands and I felt for him in his anxiety, wanting to protect him – but though he was clearly shaken by David’s condition, he managed to put on a cheerful smile and together we kept up the bright façade of normality. I wondered what the Irelands thought of us. They may have admired our determination but the façade would not have fooled them. They knew too much about the battles and the struggles.

  In many respects their battles mirrored ours, but there was a fundamental difference between us. The difference was that their approach to David’s illness was quite open – open with themselves and open to the outside world, not concealing the difficulties and the pain behind a brave smile. David consigned that spirit of frankness to a book, written to introduce himself to his son, John, in case he died before John was born or before John was old enough to know him. Letters to an Unborn Child is a very honest self-portrait and a moving account of the battles that David and Joyce underwent. It also recounts a journey in self-awareness, as David’s confronts his major failing, the concealment of his true self behind a popular, jovial exterior. Through his eventual work as a counsellor, David discovered an enhanced faith in the love of God, a personal, unconditional love, outside the realms of time and space, and through this he could face the future without fear or bitterness. David’s book taught me that my tearful frustrations, even the bouts of anger I felt at thoughtlessness and lack of consideration, usually when I was tired beyond endurance, were all valid emotions since, in David’s words, “they release the poisons which sicken or kill us”. Conversely, according to David, imperturbable self-control, bottling up powerful emotions and suppressing the emotions of others, is unhealthy and dangerous. I was struck by the irony of discovering these truths through the words of someone who was, if anything, even more disabled than Stephen, someone who, through his own suffering, had learnt to reach out and help other people.

  One person who also reached out to other people was Ruth Hughes, the voluntary organiser at Caltech of the visitors’ pound of toys and children’s bikes. A refugee from the Nazis, Ruth was remarkably perceptive and concerned for me as well as for the children. She astounded me when I was introduced to her by saying that she had first seen Stephen in the Athenaeum, the Caltech Faculty Club, and while everyone else was praising his courage and brilliance – in a land where success is adored and failure deplored – she had said to herself that there must be someone equally courageous behind him or he simply would not be there. Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before and it quite threw me off my stride. Later when Stephen was awarded the Papal medal, Ruth presented me with a pearl brooch because, she said, I should be given something too.

  2

  Establishments

  Before we left Cambridge for California in the summer of 1974, I knew that we would not return to 6 Little St Mary’s Lane because the house was too small for our growing family and the stairs too perilous for Stephen. But Cambridge has very few residential properties within easy reach of the town centre, so the question of where we might move to was not easily resolved. Although our house might fetch a very reasonable price on the open market, we would never be able to afford to buy a larger, more suitable house anywhere near the Department, certainly not in the Grange Road area, where, before our marriage, Stephen had lodgings. This time however I had no qualms about approaching Gonville and Caius College, which was lapping up the reflected glory of Stephen’s repeated successes and would be unlikely to treat us with the same harsh indifference that it had shown in the Sixties when we were young, unknown and struggling to make ends meet.

  It transpired that the Bursar no longer dealt with the letting of College property. Luckily it had been taken over by the Revd John Sturdy, who had been appointed Dean shortly before Stephen’s induction as a Research Fellow in October 1965, and who with his wife had befriended us from that time onwards, always supportive, always concerned for the children, always deeply caring. John, a studious, other-worldly Hebrew scholar of saintly appearance, was well complemented by his bustling, intensely practical wife Jill. In those early years, the Sturdys already had two children and were expecting their third baby at the same time as I was expecting Robert. Over the next fifteen years they adopted nine more from all backgrounds, colours and creeds. Jill took a degree in English, did a teacher-training course and then founded her own school to support and educate her family. At Christmas the Sturdys instituted a party in the College for the children of all members and employees, whether Fellows, kitchen staff or cleaners. John Sturdy or their eldest son, John Christian, would dress up as Father Christmas and the children had a fine time boisterously playing musical chairs round High Table.

  I was sure that I could count on John’s sympathy. Even so, his speed of response was surprising. “Have you thought about where you would like to live?” he asked – as if the range of choice was unlimited – when we met to discuss the prospects in June 1974. Thinking my request to be rather hopeless, I sighed, “Somewhere in the Grange Road area, I suppose.” “Well,” he replied calmly, “let’s go and look at the properties in that area and see if there is anything suitable for you.” We looked at half-a-dozen houses, formerly family homes that now belonged to the College, on the west side of Cambridge, on the fringes of the Victorian village of Newnham. Some were too distant from the Department for Stephen, some were too close to noisy main roads and others were not spacious enough on the ground floor for a wheelchair. There was one house however, in West Road just off the Backs, which immediately caught my attention. Solid and extensive, with a Victorian self-assurance, it stood in large gardens next door to Harvey Court, the monstrous development which had featured in Cambridge New Architecture way back in the Sixties. We were already well acquainted with those gardens since they had been the venue every summer for Robert’s birthday parties. My mother would arrive bearing a lavishly
decorated birthday cake – sometimes in the shape of a train, sometimes a car, sometimes a fort – and my father and I would organize enough games and entertainments to keep upwards of a dozen small children amused for two hours, the most taxing two hours of the entire social calendar, apart from those dedicated to Lucy’s birthday party, which being in the winter was, if anything, even more challenging.

  With a few modifications, the ground floor at 5 West Road could be made very suitable for us, especially because it consisted of a sufficient number of large, well-lit rooms to accommodate the whole family, plus all the other necessary facilities, still leaving space to spare for parties for all ages. It was further from the Department than Little St Mary’s Lane, but not inconveniently far, and was about the same distance from the primary school that Lucy would be attending. The gardens offered scope for parties and games of all descriptions – particularly cricket, practised with the greatest reluctance at St Albans High School, but now vital to the proper upbringing of my son. The house had been vaguely threatened with demolition in the early Seventies, I remembered, when the land on which it stood had been earmarked as the possible location for a new college, Robinson College. However, the site was too small and the house was spared. And only five years or so previously 5 West Road had been a thriving family hotel, the West House Hotel, but when its lease ran out the College had taken it over for use as undergraduate accommodation. The students had been given free rein to choose their own colour schemes, and the once fine Victorian dining room now had a black ceiling and scarlet walls. This did not upset me unduly as paint was superficial and easily changed. I was much more impressed by the dimensions of the house, so at the end of our tour I opted for the West House without hesitation – and, incidentally, effectively silenced the faction in the College which wanted to demolish any building, including that house, which had been built before 1960. Negotiations proceeded without a hitch and it was agreed that, on our return from California in 1975, we would occupy the ground floor. In part exchange for the rent, the College would have the use of our own house in Little St Mary’s Lane for Fellows, since the College had relaxed its rules to allow Fellows to rent accommodation.