Travelling to Infinity

by Jane Hawking

  As the three areas and periods of my research were so clearly defined, the return to it was less challenging than I had feared. I had already documented my ideas on the earliest lyrics, the Mozarabic kharjas, and could now turn my attention to the second area of medieval lyrical flowering – Galicia, the northwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula. There the language was more akin to Portuguese than Castilian, and the city of Santiago de Compostela had attained international renown and commercial success on account of the shrine of St James, whose coffin, according to one local legend, was said to have been washed up on the Galician coastline in 824. By the thirteenth century the songs of the Galician troubadours had ousted the waning poetry of Provence as the favourite amusement at the Castilian court, and their composition developed into yet another of the full-scale industries of that remarkable king, Alfonso the Wise. Among many widely disparate compositions is a large group, the cantigas de amigo, which consist of love songs voiced by women and which contain many of the themes and features of the kharjas – the lovers often meet at dawn, the girl confides in a mother figure or her sisters, the lover is often absent. They also exhibit folkloric elements in their style and language, which appear to hark back to traditional antecedents. In those few hours at my disposal each day, it was my task to sift out the traditional elements from the five hundred and twelve cantigas de amigo, evaluate any salient stylistic and linguistic features which they shared with the kharjas, compare their language with that of learned classical or biblical precedents and situate them against a more general European background.

  I found many similarities between the kharjas and the cantigas de amigo, which were possibly the result of Mozarabic migrations northwards, away from later waves of fanatical Arab oppression. I also found striking differences, in that the cantigas do not contain any of the clear-cut radiance of kharja imagery or any sense of urgent anticipation. The imagery derives from the natural background of the mountains and streams of the northwestern corner of the Peninsula, exposed to the turbulence of the Atlantic winds, and is identified with the emotions of the protagonists. Cultured poets would have read classical and biblical allusions into this imagery of wind and waves, trees, mountains and streams, where stags come to trouble the waters. But much more persuasive in the search for the origins of this poetry is the influence of a distant pagan past, veiled in the mists of a much earlier time than the confident Christian certainties of the kharjas.

  A girl, closely identified with the beauty and whiteness of the dawn, gets up early and goes to wash tunics in the stream, a stream dedicated perhaps to one of the ancient Celtic fertility gods or goddesses of Galicia whose stones and inscriptions still survive:

  Levantou-s’ a velida,

  levantou-s’ alva,

  e vai lavar camisas

  em o alto:

  vai-las lavar alva.

  The lovely girl arose,

  the dawn arose,

  and goes to wash tunics

  in the stream:

  the dawn goes to wash them.

  In some of these dawn poems she is interrupted by the playful antics of the wind – in pagan terms, the vehicle of evil spirits – in others by the mountain stag. The stag stirring up the water is symbolic both of the lover’s presence and of their passionate activity, yet conceals any explicit reference to sexuality:

  Passa seu amigo

  que a muit’ ama;

  o cervo do monte

  volvia a augua

  leda dos amores’

  dos amores leda.

  Her lover passes by

  who loves her a lot;

  the mountain stag

  stirs the water

  happy in love,

  happy in love.

  The appearance of the stag at the fountain as a biblical reminiscence recalls the Song of Songs and the Psalms, but, at the popular level, it could well be a vestige of the persistent pagan fertility rites condemned by several scandalized bishops in the fourth and fifth centuries

  Many of the poems conveyed a bleakness and a melancholy which set them apart from the bright immediacy of the kharjas. Here the obstacles to true love are fickleness, unfaithfulness and rejection, as well as the practical realities of warfare or social convention, and they find expression through the medium of trees, birds and fountains. Surveying the emotional wasteland that her life has become, the lovelorn girl calls to her negligent lover, reminding him how the birds used to sing of their love. She accuses him of destroying the landscape of their love through his cruelty. The repeated refrain, leda m’ and’ eu, expresses her longing for the happiness she has lost.

  Vós lhi tolhestes os ramos en que siian

  e lhi secastes as fontes en que bevian;

  leda m’ and’ eu.

  You took away the branches where they [the birds] perched and dried up the springs where they drank;

  Let me be happy.

  Although the return to the thesis revived my intellectual morale, it was lonely work, sitting at a desk in the library, surrounded by yellowing tomes, trying to evaluate the relative importance of each of the numerous influences which had contributed to the composition of these poems. Stephen’s attitude to medieval studies had not mellowed with the years. In his opinion they were still as worthless as gathering pebbles on a beach. The medieval seminar, formerly such a source of encouragement and enthusiasm, had been disbanded; my links with the Cambridge Spanish Department had never been more than tenuous, and although my mother still loyally came to look after the children on Friday afternoons, I felt out of touch with the London seminars.

  The plangent voices of the cantigas filled my inner world and accompanied me in my solitary activities. They were with me as I went about my household chores, they occupied my mind while I sat feeding Stephen his interminable meals – diced to small morsels, spoonful by spoonful, mouthful by mouthful – and whenever an opportune moment, however brief, presented itself, I would dash to my table in the bay window of the living room and jot down a few notes, a few ideas, a few references. Yet, studying those songs, annotating them, analysing them was not enough. I passionately wanted to be able to express those emotions myself, through song, the song of any period. After my introduction to vocal music in California, I longed to be able to sing well. Vocal technique was portable, unlike the piano, and could be practised anywhere at any time, even at the kitchen sink.

  Although Stephen’s contempt for medieval studies was unrelenting and his devotion to grand opera, especially Wagner, continued unabated, he did, nevertheless, encourage my new interest. Just once a week he and a student would come home early to babysit, so that I could go out for an hour to an evening class in vocal technique, which was taken by a distinguished baritone, Nigel Wickens, who was both a singing teacher and a performer. His tall, erect figure was made all the more imposing by his domed cranium, and on initial acquaintance he was not a little intimidating, particularly on account of the exaggerated precision of his diction. This, however, was but one of the features of his expansive personality. Well-versed in the arts of performance, he could hold his class in awed subjection one minute – and the next send them into convulsive laughter. A veritable musical magician, Nigel would open his box of tricks every week and reveal a wealth of glittering gemstones, displaying all the shades and colours of the emotional spectrum and encapsulating the rich legacy of a succession of musical geniuses, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Fauré, Mozart... geniuses whose songs touched the inner self, reaching in to tap the core of the soul, expressing hopes and fears, sadness and a sense of tragedy for which words alone were inadequate. Sometimes the sadness of the songs and the ill-defined sense of longing that they evoked were so painful as to be unbearable. After a couple of classes, I knew that I wanted to learn to sing properly, to train my voice from scratch and create my own instrument.

  4

  A Board Game

  Well-settled in the new surroundings and secure in his employment in the university, Stephen was changing direction in phy
sics, turning his back on the macrocosmic laws of general relativity and immersing himself more and more in quantum mechanics – the laws which operate at the microcosmic level of the elementary particle, the physics of the quanta, the building blocks of matter. This change, which was a consequence both of his black-hole research and of his contacts with particle physicists in California, was beckoning him to a further quest, the search for a theory of quantum gravity which, he hoped, would reconcile Einstein’s laws of general relativity with the physics of quantum mechanics. Einstein had been deeply suspicious of the theory of quantum mechanics, developed by Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in the 1920s. He mistrusted the elements of uncertainty and randomness implied in that scientific breakthrough because they undermined his belief in the beautifully well-ordered nature of the universe. He voiced this dislike forcibly to Niels Bohr, telling him that “God does not play dice with the universe”.

  The origins of the universe had held my imagination for the whole extent of my married life and before. My mother used to point out the constellations, sparkling against the bright, unpolluted clarity of the Norfolk night sky when Chris and I were children. Still in the Seventies, terrestrial lighting was dim enough for Robert and Lucy and me to be able to look up at the night sky and marvel at the remote, spangled beauty of the glittering stars in the darkness. We could speculate about immeasurable distances and incomprehensible time spans and wonder at the genius, their father and my husband, who could transform that infinite space and time into mathematical equations and then carry those equations in his head – as if, according to Werner Israel, he was composing a whole Mozart symphony in his head. Those equations held the key to many questions about our origins and our position in the universe, not least the all-important question of the nature of our role as the minuscule inhabitants of an insignificant planet revolving round an ordinary star on the outer reaches of an unremarkable galaxy. These questions appealed to my imagination, even if my knowledge of the physics and the maths was only rudimentary. In contrast, the collisions of invisible particles, especially when those particles were not only invisible but imaginary as well, did not fire my interest with the same passion as the extraordinary mental journey through billions of light years to the beginning of space and time. Nor, I have to confess, did the set of scientists with whom Stephen was now associating attract me in the least. On the whole, particle physicists were a dry, obsessive bunch of boffins, little concerned with personal contact but very concerned with their own scientific reputations. They were much more aggressively competitive than the relaxed, friendly relativists with whom we had associated in the past. They attended conferences and came to the social functions arranged on their behalf, but, apart from a handful of ebulliently jovial Russians, their personalities made very little lasting impression. In among that grey morass it was an occasional pleasure to see the faces of those cultured, articulate, charming old friends from the relativity days – the Israels, the Hartles, Kip Thorne, George Ellis, the Carters and the Bardeens.

  At least the most famous quantum physicist of them all left a long lasting impression, though he was certainly taciturn. Paul Dirac, a Cambridge physicist who in the 1920s had reconciled quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of special relativity and in 1933 had won the Nobel Prize, was regarded as a legendary figure in physics. Stephen and Brandon considered themselves as Dirac’s scientific grandchildren, since their supervisor, Dennis Sciama, had himself been supervised by Dirac. I had been introduced to Dirac and his wife, Margit Wigner, the sister of a distinguished Hungarian physicist, in Trieste in 1971. It was said of Dirac that when he introduced Margit to a colleague soon after their marriage, he did not say “This is my wife” but “This is Wigner’s sister”. After Paul’s retirement in 1968 from the Lucasian chair – Newton’s chair – the Diracs had moved from Cambridge to Florida, where he became an emeritus professor. The story was told that Dirac had once watched his wife knitting a garment. When she reached the end of the “knit” row, her husband, having worked out the mathematical theory of the craft of knitting, immediately instructed her how to turn the needles and “purl” the next row.

  The Diracs visited us one afternoon in Cambridge. Margit was not dissimilar to Thelma Thatcher in her aristocratic bearing. If anything, though, with her flowing auburn hair, hers was an even more irrepressible personality, unselfconscious and gifted with a natural ease of conversation which contrasted strikingly with her husband’s silence. As we sat having tea on the lawn, she talked about their travels, their family and their home in Florida, and she admired the children, chatting with them freely and openly, while her husband listened and watched. Margit more than compensated for his periods of taciturnity, attributed to the pressure put upon him by his Swiss schoolteacher father, who would only allow him to speak in impeccable French as a child at home in Bristol. She often spoke for her husband, just as I often found myself acting as Stephen’s mouthpiece, especially when the talk did not concern physics. Stephen and Paul Dirac were not unalike in that they were both men of few words and preferred to put their well-considered utterances either to the service of physics or to trumping an otherwise meandering discussion. But in one particular respect they differed drastically.

  In the week of their stay in Cambridge, Margit Dirac rang with an invitation to the ballet at the Arts Theatre. I hesitated, knowing only too well that Stephen would not be best pleased to spend an evening watching Coppélia even in the company of one of the world’s most famous scientists. “No, no, my dear, it’s not him we are inviting!” Margit exclaimed emphatically in response to my excuses on Stephen’s behalf. “Paul wants you to come with us!” Paul’s wishes brooked no further hesitation. A couple of evenings later I joined them at the theatre, slightly surprised to find that Paul really was there too, for I suspected that he would share Stephen’s contempt for the dance that I loved so much. I was wrong: he seemed to enjoy the performance as much as anyone else. Despite his taciturnity, he and Margit exuded a comforting reassurance, making me very welcome, and for one evening I was not obliged to do anything at all, least of all worry about whether my companions were enjoying themselves.

  At home, the routine was eased when a new postgraduate student of Stephen’s, Alan Lapedes from Princeton, agreed to come and live in our spare room and, like Bernard in California, help with the more onerous tasks, especially the lifting. Reserved and self-contained, Alan was an uncomplaining helper, but I was wary of exploiting his willingness, since with other colleagues he often contributed to Stephen’s daily care in the Department too.

  Indeed problems with Stephen’s bodily comfort were now considerable, because, true to form, he refused to resort to any palliative measures and often kept us tied to the house at weekends. During the week it was a perpetual source of anxiety and frustration, despite the efforts of Constance Willis’s latest assistant, Sue Smith; she tried to make him take more regular exercise, by straightening his body and helping him to walk the length of the hall, supported by one helper on each side. However much Sue, with her engaging northern sense of humour, amused Stephen by telling him all the latest gossip in her own entertaining fashion, she could never persuade him to devote any more than those two hours of her visits to his exercises each week. “Now, you will do them, won’t you, just for me?” she would plead, but he would simply regale her with one of his most beguiling, sphinxlike smiles.

  The fact was that since Stephen was sedentary for all his waking hours, his limbs were much wasted through illness and lack of exercise. To outsiders, the mechanical advantages of the electric wheelchair, and the independence it conferred, hid the true extent of the ravages of motor-neuron disease because he was able to get about quite freely, flitting back and forth across the river, to and from the department. Any obstacle in the way of this revolutionary vehicle, however, required the assistance, not just of one able-bodied man but two or three to lift its 120 kilograms over a steep step or up a flight of stairs. If, on the way to an evening out togeth
er, we encountered a single step, we were in trouble.

  Unlike me, Stephen, surprisingly, was not usually prey to the numerous minor ailments which the children brought home from school. He maintained a healthy appetite and a robust constitution, priding himself on never missing a day’s work. Outsiders could have no concept, though, of how painfully emaciated his body had become, nor did they generally witness those horrendous choking fits which would come on at supper time and last well into the night, when I would cradle him in my arms like a frightened child, till the wheezings subsided and his breathing slipped into the easy rhythm of sleep. We tried to avoid these fits by experimenting with different diets, at first eliminating sugar, and then dairy products and finally gluten, the sticky protein in flour which binds bread and cakes. They were all suspected of irritating the hypersensitive lining of the throat. Although the children and I continued to eat bread and cakes, and cooking without sugar was not difficult, the challenge of gluten-free cookery in the 1970s – long before the advent of “free from” products on supermarket shelves – required some major adjustments in the kitchen since gluten-free flour in those days was a culinary nightmare. Even so, that challenge was infinitely preferable to those terrible life-threatening attacks of choking.

  Just as we thought that we had escaped the worst of the winter’s ills, the spring of 1976 lay in wait with a series of cruel tricks which made of it an obstacle course akin to a snakes-and-ladders board, though with many more snakes than ladders and with the dice weighted to land on the snakes. On 20th March the first small snake on the board snapped us up when Lucy fell ill with chickenpox. This unremarkable though uncomfortable ailment was certainly better disposed of in early childhood than at the age of twenty, as I knew from my own experience as a student in Valencia. By the following Monday, 22nd March, poor little Lucy was miserably red with spots, crying for all the attention I could give her by day and by night. As far as the chickenpox was concerned, we were no different from any other family with young children, but there the similarity ended. It was fortunate that Lucy made a speedy recovery during the course of that week, since the next throw of the dice was to send us hurtling down a much more precipitous snake.