Travelling to Infinity

by Jane Hawking

  I succeeded in none of my aims. The merest hint of dissatisfaction with our situation was quickly identified as disloyalty to Stephen, summarily dismissed with the implication that it was a symptom of my own inadequacy. Frank did at least offer to discuss the situation with Stephen, but doubted that his words would have any effect. In any case, he asserted, there could be no question of forcing Stephen to accept more help. His only other comments were that Stephen was very courageous, that he drew his courage from his determination, and that he, Frank, was sure that Stephen was doing his best for his family. He was providing well for us, we had two lovely children and we were very fortunate in the position we occupied. I did not dispute the truth of all this, and by comparison with many disabled families we were no doubt well off, but there was little comfort in the repetition of such truisms. These were the blessings that I had conditioned myself to count for so many years. I knew well enough that Stephen’s determination was his defence against the illness, but I did not understand why he had to use it as a weapon against his family. As for Robert, Frank expressed his concern for him by turning my argument on its head: Robert was too introverted, he said; he should be brought out of his shell so that, in the future, social ineptitude would not damage his career as Frank believed it had damaged his own, depriving him of recognition for his important work in tropical medicine.

  There was no use in arguing. Though robust and in sterling health, Frank was old, a good ten years older than my father. Perhaps he was too old to understand how I felt and too old to adjust to what was being asked of him. For all his genuine concern for Stephen, he evidently found it difficult to see what was before his very eyes. To try and explain the obvious, to repeat the contents of my letter – that Robert’s introversion was mainly a result of the home situation – would have been hopeless; the more so, considering that my purely practical suggestion that perhaps Frank and Isobel might begin to participate in the running of the rented house in Cambridge, especially when so much redecoration and refurbishing were required between tenancies, had been quashed outright on account of the distance – some fifty miles – between St Albans and Cambridge. The conversation petered out and we returned to the house.

  Later the sky cleared. I was sitting on the terrace shelling peas for lunch when Isobel came and sat beside me. “So I gather you have talked to Father?” she enquired, eyeing me intently. “Not really,” I replied. She pursed her lips and with the same defiance that she had shown earlier, she announced fiercely. “You do know, don’t you, that Father will never allow Stephen to be put into a residential home?” So saying she stood up, turned on her heel and marched into the house. Her remarks stung me to the quick. I had never so much as thought about a residential home for Stephen, let alone mentioned such a preposterous idea. I had simply asked for help to protect my own young son from the psychological ravages of the physical disease which was afflicting theirs. Humiliated and even more despondent, I stood up. Abandoning the half-filled saucepan of peas, I walked slowly away from the house into Cleddon wood and there, in utter desolation, sat down on a broad, flat stone, scarcely conscious of the noise of the falls resounding in my ears. Never had I been so alone – alone there in the forest, on the hillside by the fast flowing stream. There was sympathy in nature when human beings could offer none, but nature was powerless to influence intellectual beings whose sole criterion was rational thought, who refused to recognize reality when it stood, bared before them, pleading for help.

  In the second week of the holiday, when the sun shone dependably out of a clear sky, it appeared that I might have misjudged Stephen’s mother. She took us to a hotel at the seaside on the coast and shared in Stephen’s care for much of the time, sometimes feeding him his meals, helping to dress him and sitting by him on the path above the beach so that I could play with the children on the sands below and bathe in the sea. My spirits rose as my energies began to revive. It seemed that Isobel was responding to my pleas, after all, and was genuinely making an effort to help. I was grateful, but I smiled in puzzlement at some of the remarks she made. “Looking after Stephen is not really that difficult, you know,” she observed breezily. “Robert doesn’t seem to mind helping his father at all; in fact, I think it’s good for them both,” was her next cheerful remark. I was prepared to view such remarks as kindly meant, since the holiday that she had generously provided had been such fun and so beneficial to us all. However the persistent harping on the ease with which all my responsibilities could be accomplished, and the implication that my cries for help were not to be taken seriously, dampened my reawakening confidence in her. She did not seem to understand that, whereas my childhood naivety had long since died and my inherent youthful optimism had vanished, the thought that that was already happening to Robert at less than ten years of age was intolerable. “Really the wheelchair is not as heavy as you might think,” she announced airily at the end of the week. “Lucy helped me to put it and the batteries in the car and between us we managed perfectly well.” Lucy was five years old; the weight of the chair and its solid gel batteries had already made many a strapping student blanch.

  Sad news greeted us in Cambridge at the end of August. During our absence Thelma Thatcher had been taken into hospital for an operation from which she did not recover. The ten years that we had known her, though a large proportion of our lives, were only a small proportion of hers, yet she treated us as if we were part of her family. Her soul was large, all-embracing, caring and practical, always ready to come to the rescue in times of crisis, always ready to help those worse off than herself, always ready with her quick sense of humour to pinpoint the ridiculous or the absurd. The children adored her and she adored them as their adoptive granny. For me she was a true friend and a staunch ally, whose judgement, I knew, was always sound, even though sometimes it might have been hard to digest. I had seen her just before we went to Wales. She was philosophical, dismissing her own health problems as insignificant, although she already knew that they were serious. Typically she was more concerned to talk about us. “I wish old Thatcher were stronger and could help her brave girl more,” she said as she hugged me for the last time.

  6

  A Backwards Glance

  That autumn, many scientists joined us for family meals at the end of long days filled with all the usual bustle associated with children and schools, clubs and after-school activities, as well as Stephen’s requirements. Not much had changed in our circumstances – and Robert’s help was still often called upon at home – but that week by the sea, the second week of the holiday in Wales, had restored both my stamina and my resolve, and I was better able to cope. Stephen was also in better health and spirits, although his recovery from the spring’s bout of pneumonia did not mean that motor-neuron disease, which continued to exact its implacable toll of muscle degeneration, eating difficulties, choking fits and respiratory problems, had retreated.

  In the Department the latest academic exercise to gain popularity was the symposium, a sort of protracted conference which extended over a whole year. This exercise held great attractions for Stephen since, with the increased funding now at his disposal, he could bring scientists to Cambridge from all over the world and work with them at leisure on lengthy projects such as books and papers – something which would have been an impossible undertaking in the hurried atmosphere of the customary four- or five-day conference. Although he was still wavering in his interests between general relativity and quantum mechanics, most of the visitors to the Relativity Group in the early part of the academic year were the old familiar faces, and most of them came from North America.

  From my standpoint, the most formidable of them were the modest, amiable Chandrasekhars – not because of any clashes of personality, but because, just before they arrived for a dinner party, I learnt that they were vegan. I had supposed that they were vegetarian after mistakenly serving them a fish sandwich at a tea party, but had not suspected further complications. A last-minute revision of the menu was call
ed for. Out went my planned recipes, and the search was on for meat-free, fish-free and dairy-free dishes – that were also gluten-free and sugar-free. My old Spanish stand-by, gazpacho, lent a touch of distinction to a meal of mushroom and onion risotto. It was really more appropriate to the Sunday supper table than to a dinner party for such distinguished guests.

  In the middle of the term, the Cambridge coterie decamped to Oxford, where Dennis Sciama had moved to take up a Fellowship at All Souls College. Roger Penrose had been appointed Professor of Mathematics there, and he and Dennis regularly organized one-, two- and three-day conferences. While Stephen and his colleagues gave their seminars, I took the opportunity to get to know the museums and monuments of Oxford better. Over the past few years we had made six-monthly visits to the meetings in Oxford, even when the children were very small, and I too had begun to appreciate the charm of the place, at once more cosmopolitan and animated than its fenland counterpart. Stephen loved being back in Oxford. He carried the layout of the city in his head and, with a hint of pride, could direct me infallibly to any location, negotiating lanes and back streets with an easy confidence. He would nostalgically point out the wall he had once climbed over, only to fall into the arms of a policeman, and the bridge he and some friends were daubing with a ban-the-bomb slogan in the middle of the night, when a policeman sauntered by and arrested the friends, who left Stephen dangling in a cage beneath the bridge. These and other similar yarns had a somewhat apocryphal ring to them, though there were plenty of photos to attest to Stephen’s disastrous antics on the river. There was little doubt, too, that he had been an eager participant in the sconce – a sort of beer-drinking contest, imposed as a fine for a breach of behaviour. Stephen’s delight in those memories was touching: they provided a tantalizing glimpse of the old carefree rebel with whom I had fallen in love. They related, of course, to the days of his hedonistic youth, before the diagnosis of motor-neuron disease, which was, in chronological terms, a Cambridge phenomenon.

  For conferences and trips further afield there were now plenty of colleagues and students who were glad of the opportunity to travel and to meet the famous names in physics. This was a great relief to me as I was still terrified both of aeroplanes and of leaving my children. I tried to be both father and mother to each of them and did not want them to suffer from having a severely disabled father, though of course I encouraged them to love and respect him. Unbeknown to Stephen, I shared my concerns with their teachers in the vain hope of protecting them against teasing in the playground. Occasionally, as in December 1976, when Stephen flew off with his students to Boston for a pre-Christmas conference, I could devote myself to my maternal role, attend the nativity plays, ballet shows and school carol services and take the children to the College Christmas party.

  That December, Alan Lapedes, who had given us so much quietly dedicated help throughout the period of crisis, returned to his home in Princeton. I then spring-cleaned the spare room, our one room in the upstairs part of the house, for the arrival of our new resident physicist, Don Page, whom we had met in California where he was a former graduate student of Kip Thorne’s. He and his mother had come to Cambridge on a tour of inspection. Naturally, they wanted to see whether the arrangement we were offering was suitable – and, I suspected, to judge whether I was a sufficiently respectable landlady. Evidently we passed the test, for Don bounced energetically into our household, like A.A. Milne’s Tigger. He arrived with Stephen on his return from Boston on 18th December, and eagerly joined in all our Christmas festivities.

  I had moved among physicists for long enough to know that they mostly come from somewhat unusual backgrounds. Don Page’s background was so unusual that it was exceptional even among physicists. Born of missionary-teacher parents, he was brought up in isolation in a remote part of Alaska, where his parents provided his early schooling. He later attended a Christian college in Missouri, his parents’ home state, and from there graduated to Caltech where he joined Kip’s group as a postgraduate student. His fundamentalist beliefs were so firmly ingrained that the apparent clash between them and his field of study, gravitational physics and the origins of the universe, while paradoxical to many onlookers, did not appear to disturb him unduly, because he was able to compartmentalize his activities. On the one hand, his Christianity was devout, principled according to absolute values which, as yet unchallenged in their rigidity, could seem to lack sensitivity; on the other, those very evangelical convictions required of him a tireless zeal in all his endeavours.

  While I respected his fervour – he attended church twice on Sundays, with additional midweek bible-study classes – and welcomed the supportive religious influence he brought to our lives, I sided with Stephen in refusing to be evangelized, particularly at breakfast time. Doubtless well-meaning, Don cherished the hope of making a spectacular conversion – comparable to that of Saul on the road to Damascus – through his early-morning bible readings and prayers. I could have told him that he was doomed to failure, for his broad, floodlit highway of biblical certainties was even less likely to meet with success than my own path, a quiet, unpretentious amble along the meandering lanes of simple trust in faith and deeds. Stephen had no patience with anything other than the rational power of physics, so I very much doubted that Don’s earnest readings and literal sermons – at 8.30 in the morning when I came back from taking Lucy to school – were going to illuminate the way forwards. In any case Stephen always hid behind the newspaper, which was propped up on a wooden frame for want of an electronic page-turner, at breakfast. The upright newspaper was a barrier that the laden spoon had to negotiate when delivering his substantial breakfast of pills, laxative, boiled eggs, pork chops, rice and tea, and it was also a barrier to conversation.

  This was not a barrier that Don had anticipated when he came down to breakfast in the early days, armed with Bible and edifying tracts. I said nothing, leaving him to address his invisible congregation as best he could. Shielded by the Times, Stephen would not be distracted from his perusal of current affairs, essential for a Fellow who prided himself on having the last word in high-table discussions – whether about Britain’s precarious financial position shorn up by loans from the United States, or about the test runs of the Space Shuttle. I usually managed little more than a quick glance at the headlines, whereas Stephen read slowly, mentally photographing and digesting every snippet of information, every fact and figure, for regurgitation on some later occasion, probably at High Table.

  As Don was finding his task heavy-going, it occurred to me that a distraction was needed, so I invited him to help himself to cornflakes, muesli, boiled eggs and toast, and asked if he had ever tried Marmite. He picked up the round, brown jar with its yellow lid. “No, no, we don’t have this in the US; I guess it’s some kinda chocolate,” he replied, avidly ladling thick spoonfuls of the dark, treacly substance onto his slice of toast. “Try it and see,” I said, whereupon he took a large bite. His open, childlike expression creased into wrinkles of repulsion at the pungent, salty assault on his taste buds. Even Stephen looked up from the newspaper, his broad grin revealing those alluring dimples in his cheeks. Good-humouredly, after a moment’s puzzlement, Don was able to take the joke in good part, and never again did he bring his proselytizing zeal to the breakfast table.

  The great advantage of having an American from Caltech in residence was that whenever Stephen wanted to go to Los Angeles – or anywhere else in the United States for that matter – in the interests of science, the American would want to go too. So although the following summer Stephen pressed me to accompany him to America for three weeks, Don was all too ready to go instead. This unexpectedly easy solution to a previously intractable problem cleared the way for me to fulfil a longing which had lain dormant for many years. It was in fact thirteen years since I had set foot on the Spanish mainland, and I longed to renew my contact with that country and its civilization, which had played such a significant role in my education before all my modest pretensions and a
spirations were swallowed up. Pleasantries exchanged on dining nights with the Spanish butler of Caius had scarcely sufficed to maintain my once fluent command of the spoken language, and over the years that skill had dwindled pitifully to a handful of insubstantial polite formulae. The thesis was suffering from a serious lack of inspiration and motivation, partly on account of its length which had become unwieldy, partly because of the huge quantities of scrappy notes which remained to be incorporated into some sort of order, and partly because the topics were so remote that I was losing touch with them.