Travelling to Infinity

by Jane Hawking

  During our absence, partition walls were erected on the staircase to screen the ground floor from the undergraduates upstairs; the newly created flat was redecorated throughout, and ramps were built at the front and at the garden doors. In directing these operations from California, I enlisted the support of a courageous young man, Toby Church, who as a student had been struck down by a paralysing illness which had deprived him of the power of speech and the use of his legs. Toby had employed his engineering expertise to adapt his environment to his needs so that he could look after himself – with a little help from nurses – and also to build his own invention, the Lightwriter, a small, laptop keyboard with a digital screen into which he could type his speech. Unfortunately, the invention was not of much help to Stephen since operating the keyboard required too much dexterity, and Toby was not particularly interested in electric wheelchairs since he was concerned to keep his arm muscles in good shape by propelling himself around under his own steam. But as my intermediary, Toby propelled himself round to West Road many times in the course of the summer of 1975. On our return from California, it was a pleasure to move into such lovely surroundings. For all the sixteen years of our occupancy, we were conscious of our good fortune in being able to live in that house. The rooms were vast and high-ceilinged, with decorative plaster cornices and delicately embossed central roses around the light fittings. The tall sash windows gave onto a true English lawn, framed with carefully chosen conifers and deciduous trees: dark, forbidding yew mingled with the light fronds of willow. A giant sequoia – a Californian redwood, evidently a sapling newly introduced to Europe when the house was built – towered above the tumbledown conservatory at one corner of the building, communing with its partner, a Thuja plicata or western red cedar of comparable height at the far end of the lawn. The gnarled old apple tree faithfully produced its blossoms and its crop with such abundance that every two years the ground beneath would be carpeted with an excess of cooking apples from October to December. “Not stewed apple again!” the children would chorus at the supper table while their father would grin in mischievous collusion. Eventually he decided that he was allergic to stewed fruit, but that was not an excuse that the children were allowed to get away with.

  In summer we would hang a hammock, swings and climbing ropes from the branches of the apple tree and listen to the twittering of the fledgling blackbirds inside its hollow trunk. To the left of the apple tree, in full view of the living-room window, lay the gracefully curving herbaceous border with its backdrop of flowering trees and bushes, lilac, almond and hawthorn. Even in the depths of the harshest winter, the beauty of the garden was still magical. Late one night after a persistent snowfall, I peered out through the heavy curtains and shivered in wonder at the transformation of the dank, brown winter garden outside. The full moon in a cloudless sky illuminated a glistening blanket of snow, covering lawn and trees with an enchanted, dazzling purity.

  In its prime, the garden must have been a splendid sight. Despite the rampant goosegrass and pervasive ground elder, it still conveyed hints of its former glory in its myriad collection of perennials. Like the trees, they must have been planted as part of an overall scheme, perhaps as much as a century ago when the house was built. I tried to supplement the efforts of the hard-pressed College gardeners with a little weeding and planting in an attempt to subdue the goosegrass. Jeremy Prynne, a colleague of Stephen’s in the Fellowship and College librarian, applauded my efforts and proposed that I should be elected to the College gardening committee since, as he remarked, many of its members could not distinguish a dandelion from a daffodil. However his proposal was rejected out-of-hand because it was inconceivable that a non-Fellow, let alone a wife, should be elected to a College committee.

  From the time of our arrival in the autumn of 1975, the house, like the garden, was to lend itself enthusiastically to countless parties. There were the family celebrations, the birthday parties and the Christmas dinners. There were also the duty occasions – fundraising events as I became drawn into charity work, coffee mornings and musical evenings, departmental parties, parties for the beginning and the end of the academic year, conference receptions and dinners. In summer, there were tea parties (again usually for conferences, mostly of visiting American and Russian scientists) on the lawn with cucumber sandwiches and croquet, and there were the folk-dance evenings, barbecue suppers and firework parties. Such occasions were fun and they were usually appreciated, but it was hard work since I did not receive any help with the catering until years later. It was scarcely surprising that sometimes the unofficial companions of the official guests, the hangers-on, mistook me in my working apron for a college servant, and condescendingly demanded another glass of wine or another sandwich with scant respect, not realizing that I was the hostess.

  We appeared to live in privileged surroundings, but there were disadvantages. Despite our occupancy, the house remained under threat of demolition. After the completion of the renovations carried out for our benefit, only minimal maintenance work was authorized. In winter, the central heating system, based on the original Victorian radiators, was scarcely adequate when the north wind blew snow through the gaps in the ill-fitting doors and windows. At one stage the gas fires, used to supplement the radiators, were found to be emitting more fumes into the rooms than they were sending up the chimneys. The wiring consisted of an eccentric combination of modern sockets fitted onto old wires of which no one knew the provenance.

  Much more alarmingly, ceilings tended to crash to the ground with disturbing regularity, even though my father, with his catastrophic history of provoking the gravitational collapse of many a ceiling, was nowhere in the vicinity. By the grace of God, the damage was never more than material. One July night in 1978 the living-room ceiling lost its key and descended with an almighty thud amid a cloud of grime and plaster dust, smashing the stereo system to smithereens in the room beneath and sending the chandelier into a spin. Fortunately we had just gone to bed and the children were sleeping safely in their rooms. Equally luckily, no one was in the bath when a little later the bathroom ceiling also came down.

  Outside, the roof regularly shed its tiles. This latter hazard was rectified thanks to a timely visit by His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, who came to pay Stephen a private visit in June 1982. So afraid were we that a tile might crash onto the royal pate as His Highness entered the front door that I asked for a protective screen of netting to be put round the guttering. The point was taken and, some months later, the building was reroofed. Thanks to the royal visit we also acquired new bathroom fittings.

  We were not the sole residents of the house since we occupied only the ground floor. Students, who had a separate entrance, lived on the upper floors, and mice lived in the dark depths of the cellar among the equipment belonging to the University Caving Club. The mice kept their distance after Lucy acquired a predatory cat, but it was less easy to attain a satisfactory modus vivendi with the students. As individuals they were as delightfully a friendly bunch as one could hope to meet, as we discovered on those occasions when we invited them in for a drink, or met them on the lawn in the middle of the night when the intermittent fault in the fire alarm roused the whole house for no good reason. But inevitably, the students’ lifestyle, their routine and their habits were often at odds with ours. At times their presence made itself felt in a more tangible form than just loud noises and bumps in the night. About once a year someone would leave the bathwater running in the student bathroom upstairs, just above our kitchen. The last time this happened, I arrived home at lunchtime with a quarter of an hour to spare before the expected arrival of some cousins of Stephen’s from New Zealand. I could hear the rush of flowing water the moment I turned my key in the door and smelt a musty dankness as I crossed the hall to the kitchen. The floor was already under a layer of water and the best plates and bowls, put out ready on the worktop, were collecting dirty puddles. The cheese, tomatoes, lettuce and
bread swam in warm, grey pools, as more water poured through the ceiling and trickled down the light fitting…

  Such drawbacks had not yet come to our notice however when, in September 1975, my mother and I cleaned out 6 Little St Mary’s Lane before handing it over to the College, and I arranged the removal of our possessions to 5 West Road. Post-California our circumstances changed dramatically. We had come back to England to living quarters which were more akin to a mini-stately home, or a Master’s Lodge, and Stephen was assured of his first official post in the University, a Readership, since while we were away a rumour had circulated in Cambridge that we were considering staying in California for good. Immediately the old biblical adage about a prophet being without honour in his own country proved itself and the Readership, later to be superseded by a personal Chair, materialized. Far from wanting Stephen to go, as had been predicted once by a senior don, the University had actually been impatient for his return.

  The Readership brought with it the much-needed services of a secretary – in the form of Judy Fella, who introduced a fresh vitality and an unaccustomed glamour to the drab realms of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. Judy worked for Stephen for many years with tireless loyalty and efficiency. At last there was someone to take over the administration of his official life in England, just as Polly Grandmontagne had done in California. She typed his papers, including the hieroglyphs, dealt with his correspondence, organized his conferences, arranged his travels and applied for his visas, all of which amounted to a full-time occupation since he was now much in demand with celebrity status.

  America was not unique in its adulation of success. In a more discreet fashion, cloaked in a diffident respectability, the same attitude prevailed in Britain. Afraid of being outdone in the scramble to acknowledge the brilliant scientific star blazing across their horizons, successive scientific institutions took their lead from each other and awarded Stephen their most prestigious medals. On many an occasion over the course of the next few years, my parents would come over to Cambridge in time to meet the children from school while I picked Stephen up from the Department, loaded him and the wheelchair into the car, and then set off for some smart London hotel – the Savoy, the Dorchester or the Grosvenor – where the evening’s presentation dinner was to take place. Sometimes we were given overnight accommodation and that eased the strain on me since I was chauffeur, nurse, valet, cup-bearer and interpreter, as well as companion-wife, all at once. When finally all the intervening hurdles between the customary tenor of life in Cambridge and the glitzy London social scene had been surmounted, we would appear, always late, decked out in evening dress – complete with the hand-tied bow tie on which Stephen insisted – in a sparkling ballroom or dining room to be greeted by the assembled ranks of the scientific intelligentsia, peers of the realm and assorted dignitaries. They were all very charming and their wives were often kindly, but to me they all seemed so old, older than my parents: they were not the sort of people I was likely to meet in the street or at the school gate where my real friends were. The same people, along with the most affected members of London’s glitterati, also turned up at other notable social occasions in the scientific calendar, particularly the Conversazioni, the evening gatherings in summer at the Royal Society, where the rich and famous mercilessly elbowed each other out of the way in the scrum for drinks and canapés, while the exhibitors, guarding their carefully prepared displays, patiently waited for the chattering assembly to show some interest in their painstaking research.

  The artificial glamour of these occasions was simultaneously entertaining and irritating. While I enjoyed myself, I was inevitably aware of the hours ahead. There would be no coachman to drive us home from London after midnight or to help get Stephen ready for bed, and the next morning we would be back in our routine. I would be dressing Stephen, feeding him his breakfast, his pills and his tea, then I would clean the house and put two or three loads of washing into the machine before peeling the onions and potatoes for the next meal. Across the road, the tower of the University Library would loom accusingly, a silent but eloquent reminder of my neglected thesis. There would be no glass slipper either, even though there might be a glistening gold medal, set on a bed of satin and velvet, to remind us that the previous evening had not been just a passing dream. Even the medals disappeared from view after a day or two. Since the house was subject to occasional, opportunistic petty theft – handbags stolen from the hall, bicycles stolen from the porch – the medals had to be consigned to the bank vault, rarely to be seen again.

  3

  Buried Treasure

  The reality of everyday life always began the night before, when, after giving Stephen his medications and putting him to bed, I would lay out the breakfast things for the children. At long last, Robert’s enthusiasm for early rising found its true purpose, since he could be trusted to get his own breakfast and supervise Lucy’s as well. In the morning I would get Stephen out of bed, dress him and give him a cup of tea and his early-morning vitamins, before taking Lucy to school on the back of my bike. On my return, usually laden with shopping, I would give Stephen his breakfast and attend to his personal needs before he went to work. After the freedom he had enjoyed in California, Stephen was in no mind to put up with the frustrations of a push wheelchair and applied to the Department of Health for an electric model, the fast one, since, according to the propaganda, such appliances were available free of charge. However, the truth did not conform to the promise of the advertising. All the force of Stephen’s considerable persistence and doggedness were not enough to shift the grey officials of that particular governmental department into granting his application, for fear of setting a precedent which would open the floodgates to similar applicants. They told him that he could submit another application for the three-wheeler battery-driven car, which he now lacked the strength to control, or, indeed, for an electric wheelchair – but only the slow model, designed for indoor use like the one, purchased by a philanthropic fund, he already had at the Institute. We wasted hours arguing our case for the faster chair unsuccessfully. So much for the Welfare State. It had contributed so very little to our welfare that one might suppose that its purpose was actually to prevent the disabled from working to their full capacity and, consequently, from contributing as taxpayers to the National Exchequer. A handful of vitamin pills on prescription seemed to be the best it could offer with only minimal physical, practical, moral or financial support.

  We became even more dependent on family, students and friends in the daily battle to function as a family. Stephen did acquire the wheelchair he wanted – from philanthropic funds, not through the National Health Service – and, discreetly accompanied by a student, rode to work in it every morning. His route took him along the path through King’s College, where aconites and snowdrops bloom in winter and daffodils in spring, across the river over the humpbacked bridge and out of the College by a side entrance, to his office in the Department on the opposite side of Silver Street. That Stephen was at last able to enjoy the basic human right to move about freely, as and when and where he chose, was not a result of any government provision or benefit, it was the result only of his own hard work and of his own success in physics.

  Transport for the children was another problem. I took Lucy to school on the back of my bike every morning, but Robert’s school was some distance away. Thanks to a relative newcomer to Cambridge, John Stark, Robert got to school on time. Jean and John Stark and their two children had come to Cambridge from London in the early Seventies when John took up the post of chest consultant at Addenbrooke’s Hospital; they had moved into the house that Fred Hoyle had built for himself a decade earlier. John kindly picked Robert up on his way to work, and dropped him together with his own son Dan, off at the Perse Preparatory School. I returned the Starks’ help by collecting the boys in the afternoon and taking Dan home. I would occasionally stay and talk to Jean while the children played. A graduate of the London School of Econo
mics, she found the male-chauvinist attitudes prevalent in Cambridge, and the domination of all walks of life by the University, cramping and discouraging. We shared our frustration at a system which had educated us to compete with men until the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, and then had summarily consigned us to second-class status. Not for one moment did we regret our roles as wives and mothers, but we did resent the low esteem which society, particularly Cambridge society, accorded those essential roles.

  It was Jean who insisted that I should take up the thesis again, though I thought it foolish even to contemplate such a hopeless enterprise. It had been a presence in my life, sometimes welcome, sometimes much resented, for nearly ten years. I had completed only one third of the whole project, although I had amassed a vast amount of material, and I could not envisage ever finishing it. The only free time at my disposal was the sparse intervening period between Stephen’s departure at midday and a quick round of the shops in the early afternoon, before picking Lucy up from school at a quarter past three – two and a half hours at the most. Nevertheless, thanks to Jean’s insistence – and to the extraordinary example of Henry Button, one of my father’s old Civil Service colleagues who had begun his research on the German Minnesänger in 1934 and finished it on retirement forty years later – the prospect began to appear less ludicrous.