Travelling to Infinity

by Jane Hawking

  When Stephen’s name appeared as a Commander of the British Empire in the New Year’s Honours List of 1982, we decided that, given the potential for calamity involved in controlling the wheelchair, Stephen should not go forwards to meet the Queen alone, but that Robert should accompany him. The investiture at Buckingham Palace was arranged for 23rd February. The occasion demanded new clothes for all of us, except for Timmie who was too young to qualify for an invitation and had to stay with my parents. Robert was kitted out with his first suit – which he never wore again since by the time another formal occasion arose he had outgrown it. Lucy, who was going through a tomboy phase, made it quite plain that she would only allow herself to be forced into a dress and a coat as a never-to-be repeated exception to her usual jeans and T-shirt.

  As Robert and I were managing the exercise alone, we knew that we would be hard-pressed to arrive at the Palace from Cambridge at 10 a.m., so we drove down to London the evening before. There we stayed in the flat reserved for the use of Fellows on the top floor of the Royal Society, overlooking the tree tops of the Mall and the turrets and crenellations around Horseguards Parade. It was not until I was busily stowing all the new garments and their accessories away in the wardrobes late at night that I realized Lucy’s new patent leather shoes were missing. She was innocently lounging in her scuffed, old-school clodhoppers and seemed quite content to go to the Palace looking as if she had just come in from climbing trees in the garden. The caretaker’s wife thought there might be a shoe shop at the end of Regent Street, but doubted whether they sold children’s shoes. We resigned ourselves to starting even earlier than planned the next morning. Leaving Robert to feed Stephen his breakfast, Lucy and I dashed up to Regent Street as the shops were opening – to buy the only pair of shoes available in Lucy’s size. Sensible and unremarkable in brown leather, they were suitably smart but not as pretty as the shiny buckled pair that had been left at home. Ironically, they were to see plenty of wear, whereas the patent leather shoes lay untouched at the bottom of the wardrobe and were eventually given away.

  Despite the last-minute crisis, we were still just on schedule when we set out for the Palace. We had not reckoned, though, on joining the mother of all traffic jams in the Mall: the whole population appeared to be converging on Buckingham Palace, giving the Mall the same air of frenzied urgency as the roads leading to Heathrow airport. Just as at the airport, most of the arrivals were being dropped at the gate, but it was our privilege to drive through those ornate, oft televised portals into a world apart. This was a world which seemed to operate on a different timescale from our own, a world where everything ran with a clockwork precision yet where no one showed the least signs of fluster or impatience, a bland courtesy and an easy charm being the hallmarks of all encounters.

  Leaving the car, which suddenly looked embarrassingly old, battered and dirty, in the middle of the courtyard, we were shown to a different entrance from the other arrivals and were taken up several floors in an ancient lift. Lackeys ushered us with a genteel rapidity through a maze of corridors where we were able to pause only momentarily to glance at the furniture, the paintings, the Chinese vases and the exquisite, glass-cased ivories which lined the walls. When we came out into the main gallery, we were separated: Robert and Stephen were led away to join the waiting queues of national heroes and heroines, while Lucy and I were shown to our plush pink seats at the side of the magnificent ballroom.

  There was plenty to absorb our attention while we waited for the proceedings to begin. Huge crystal chandeliers sparkled against the white and gold decorations. One end of the immense room consisted of a sort of red velvet temple, bathed in a soft gilded light, where elderly beefeaters from the Tower mounted guard over the dais where the Queen was to stand. On a balcony at the other end, a military band played a festive repertoire before launching into the National Anthem on the Queen’s arrival. The morning’s business was briskly introduced and the investiture assumed a remarkably familiar format, combining the time-honoured British traditions of school-prize-givings and degree ceremonies with the national penchant for pageantry on a grand scale, as each candidate stepped forwards from a seemingly endless line for his or her moment of glory face to face with Her Majesty the Queen. Lucy nudged me in alarm when she saw an elderly beefeater, who was standing behind the Queen, keel over – a victim of the heat, the weight of his costume and the hours spent on his feet. He was discreetly removed from the scene, feet first, without any disruption to the ceremony.

  When Robert and Stephen appeared at the side entrance awaiting their turn, about halfway through the proceedings, my spine tingled with love and pride. As they crossed the floor to the centre and turned towards the Queen, they made a dramatically impressive pair – the indomitable but frail scientist slouched in his chair grinning broadly, accompanied by our tall, shy, fair-haired son. Stephen had every right to grin in pleasure at his own achievements. Perhaps he was also grinning at the irony. The formerly iconoclastic, angry young socialist had been nominated by a Tory government to receive one of the highest honours from the sovereign and was being taken into the bosom of the Establishment which he used to despise so vehemently.

  Afterwards, over lunch in a posh hotel in central London, we inspected the insignia, a cross finely worked in red-and-blue enamel suspended from a red ribbon edged with a grey stripe. The inscription, “For God and Empire”, like the Palace itself, belonged to the mysteries and the mythology of another age. When we studied the booklet of information that came with the “badge”, as it was officially called, the only privilege we could discover that might be remotely relevant to us was that Lucy, as the daughter of a CBE, could be married in the Order’s chapel in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral. “Let’s hope she remembers her shoes,” Robert observed drily.

  It was not only the British Establishment which was keen to number Stephen among its scions. He had already received the Papal medal in 1975, and in the autumn of 1981 he was invited to attend a conference organized by the Jesuits at the Pontifical Academy in the Vatican. The Pontifical Academy is the close-knit group of eminent scientists of unimpeachable character who advise the Pope on scientific matters. This conference was called by way of a papal updating on the state of the universe. At that early stage Stephen’s nurses had not yet begun to accompany him on trips abroad, so Bernard Whiting, the Australian postdoctoral researcher who had been working with Stephen, agreed to accompany him to the conference, interpret his lecture to the audience and help me with his general care.

  Since Timothy’s birth, all my anxieties about leaving the children had returned and I could only reconcile myself to going to Rome by taking one or all of them with me – if not Robert, for whom school was now serious business, at least Lucy and Timmie. Happily, Mary Whiting, who knew Rome well, came too. Without the Whitings, the trip would have been an unmitigated disaster. The Hotel Michelangelo, supposedly the closest hotel to the Vatican though by our standards a good twenty minutes away from the conference venue, served no meals, not even breakfast. There was a lift but to get to it one had first to surmount a flight of steps. As if that were not enough, Rome was in the throes of cataclysmic rains. The mornings would dawn bright and sunny and we would cheerfully accompany Stephen into the Vatican, bowling along past the Swiss Guards at the gate, through the grounds to the Residence of Pius IV, a beautiful, rustic Renaissance building, constructed for the Pope in the sixteenth century. Later it accommodated female visitors to the Vatican and, since 1936, had housed the headquarters of the Pontifical Academy. There we would leave Stephen gleefully preparing to fight the Galilean corner and instruct the papal cosmologists in his revised view of the universe which had neither beginning nor end, nor any role for a Creator-God.

  Until lunchtime at the Academy, the one reliably good meal of the day, I would stroll through the groves of bay trees and the children would play in the ornamental streams which trickled down the hillside. But the fine mornings would deteriorate into sultry, overcast aftern
oons when majestic clouds, worthy of Michelangelo, would billow over the dome of St Peter’s. They would burst spectacularly amid dazzling lightning and crashing thunder, and would go on rending the heavens apart well into the night. Mary took us on guided tours to the places she loved and knew so well – to the Colosseum, the Forum, the Baths of Caracalla and out to the Catacombs of San Calixto – but our excursions were always tempered by the knowledge that we would be drenched to the skin if we were not back in the hotel by four o’clock in the afternoon. Thereafter we would have to hope for a break in the clouds around dinner time to allow us to dash out, wheelchair and pushchair in tow, for supper. Needless to say, the permanently gridlocked state of Roman traffic made it impossible to get anywhere near the hotel before the rains descended. Usually four o’clock and the first flash of lightning and roll of thunder found us in the vicinity of the railway station, searching for a bus to take us back across the Tiber.

  Little Tim proved to be the unexpected hero of the hour: he loved the buses, grindingly slow, packed with bodies and suffocatingly steamed up though they were, and the Italian passengers adored him. “Che bel bambino!” they would exclaim, making space for me to sit down with him on my knee. “Carissimo, carissimo!” they would smile, stroking his blond hair and tickling his chin. He had just begun to discover the art of stringing sentences together in precise, grammatical English and was delighted to have a captive audience on whom to practise his new-found talent. “Do you have a house?” he would searchingly ask the adoring, though uncomprehending secretaries, students, businessmen and corpulent grandmothers. “Do you have a car?” He would continue with his own answers. “We have a house. We have a car. We have a garage. We have a garden.” They would laugh, nodding sentimentally, while the rain streamed down the windows and the Roman traffic honked and hooted itself to a standstill in the darkening evening outside.

  Mary took her role as guide so conscientiously that she would not rest until Lucy, Timmie and I had seen every church of note in Rome, including her favourite, the church of San Clemente. The medieval church, noted for its radiantly colourful eleventh-century mosaic of the Triumph of the Cross in the apse, is built above the ancient church, with its early frescoes dating from the sixth century, beside the remains of a Roman house. Having admired the brilliance of the mosaics, we followed Mary warily down into the dimly lit, red-brick lower church which, unaccountably, echoed with the sound of running water. “Oh,” said Mary blithely, “that’s the Cloaca Maxima, the main drain built by the Romans. It comes through here.” The main drain sounded to me more like a rushing mighty river, but I supposed that Mary knew what she was talking about.

  The bus ride back to the hotel in the pouring rain took even longer than usual that evening. The whole city had ground to a halt. From the conversation of the other passengers with the driver, Mary found out that the delay was caused by flooding – the Cloaca Maxima had burst the bounds of its Roman conduit and was pouring out into the streets of the city. In idle amusement to pass the time, we discussed whether this was a portent, a sign, an indication of divine wrath at Stephen’s temerity in professing his heretical theories within the sanctified walls of the Vatican itself.

  The Vatican – one of the most powerful, dogmatic and wealthy city states ever known – was presided over by a man whose personal attributes of holiness and courage were not in doubt, yet he sought to impose limitations on freedom of thought – just as rigidly as those atheistic scientists who would dispute our right to ask the question “why” the universe exists. The very man who should have been addressing the question “why” was busy telling the scientists that they had no right even to ask the question “how” about certain aspects of creation. At the end of the conference, the Pope told the assembly in his address that, although scientists could study the evolution of the universe, they should not ask what happened at the moment of creation at the Big Bang and certainly not before it, because that was God’s preserve. Neither Stephen nor I was impressed by such injunctions; they were all too reminiscent of the attitudes behind Galileo’s arrest and confinement three hundred years earlier. Only now was the Church beginning to catch up with the history of Galileo’s discoveries. There was detectable embarrassment that his theories had lain proscribed for so long. Though they were kept under lock and key, the papers relating to his fate were readily, almost apologetically, produced for Stephen’s scrutiny – the implication being that it was simply an oversight that no one had thought of rehabilitating his reputation sooner. Nevertheless, the papal pronouncement indicated that the Church was still seeking to restrict thought, giving the undeniable impression that not much had been learnt from the lessons of those three hundred years.

  13

  Harmony Restored

  Music, through which I had come back into the Church of England, had become the gateway to my spiritual rebirth and growth, and it was thanks to Mary Whiting that I was able to take up my singing lessons again soon after Timothy’s birth. She positively begged to be allowed to take him out for a walk once a week in the hope that association with babies might help her have a baby of her own. On Wednesday afternoons therefore, though often tired, I resumed my lessons with Nigel Wickens, who was no stranger to the demands of parenthood after the birth of his daughter Laura. Under his guidance and to Jonathan’s sensitive accompaniment – as and when his teaching commitments allowed – I returned to the joys of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Mozart. Variously they intensified then assuaged those emotions competing within my deepest self. Meanwhile Mary and Tim went to feed the ducks, walk in the park, sit on the swings and bury their faces in ice cream.

  There were many opportunities to perform the solo repertoire in fundraising concerts for the causes which Stephen and I had espoused, and sometimes I was brought in to fill the gaps in other programmes, which was how my singing career reached its extraordinary apogee in the summer of 1982 with a short burst of song in King’s College Chapel as an interlude in an organ recital that Jonathan was giving for a medical conference. My confidence both in my voice and in my ability to learn music quickly had grown sufficiently for me to feel that it was time to branch out by joining a choral society. It was just possible to contemplate such a step since I now enjoyed an unprecedented degree of freedom. While Stephen basked in the deserved glory of international acclaim, those early years of the Eighties witnessed my own transformation. On the one hand, the team of nurses brought desperately needed relief from the unrelenting physical demands that had previously consumed all my available energy. On the other, through Jonathan’s unwavering support, and his devotion to the family as a whole, aspects of myself, which had long been suppressed, lying dormant in a dark corner in the daily struggle, emerged into the light. Partial living was no longer called for. I was beginning to experience the fullness of life myself, realizing that the sands which had run through my fingers on the beach in Santa Barbara years before had not, with the passing of time, spelt the end of my individual aspirations.

  At a concert in the university church of Great St Mary, I encountered the sort of choir I was looking for – a mixed bunch of people of all ages and all walks of life – performing a wide repertoire and aspiring to a high standard. The dynamic young conductor, Stephen Armstrong, a recent graduate of the University, took me on and thereafter I found myself attending the once-weekly rehearsals, which demanded intense application for two solid hours at the end of a long day, and a great deal of learning in the intervening week. The day of the performance, usually a Saturday, was hectic. Concert or no, the family had to be fed and cared for, and the final rehearsal was always gruelling. Then the concert itself would be over in a flash and eight weeks’ work would vanish in a single evening, sometimes creating a wild sense of euphoria at phrases that had gone exceptionally well, sometimes leaving tinges of frustration that others had not come up to expectation. Concert succeeded concert with quick changes of idiom and musical personality from baroque to modern via the classical and Romantic periods. Fro
m Bach to Benjamin Britten, the exhilaration from each performance well sung was heady. I did not mind what we sang; each successive work, each successive composer became my passionate favourite for the duration of the rehearsals and the concert, bringing about a timeless distillation of the fragile pathos of our lives, transforming painful intensity into consoling spirituality.

  It was at this time, when my star was in the ascendant, that my mother fell seriously ill. Recently she and her only surviving cousin Jack had been overburdened with worry on account of Auntie Effie, who was now well into her nineties. Nor, I knew, did one need to look further than my own household to find one very obvious cause of chronic anxiety which could have exacerbated Mum’s illness. At least the profound change in our own circumstances, occasioned by the advent of Nikki’s nursing team, allowed me to give my parents some moral support at that most critical time and try to repay some of the care that they had shown us for so long. The revised regime also meant that, less harassed and less haggard, I could also give the children more attention. The baby had grown into the most irresistibly funny little child, observant, endlessly enquiring, dancing with an impish vitality. At about eighteen months, long before his encounter with doting Italian bus passengers, he had started to develop a precocious fascination for astronomy. In the early evening he would watch the moon from his high chair in the kitchen, following its course, distracted from the important business of his supper. As it moved across the sky – and across the window – he would grow impatient with his food, clamouring to be released from his harness. When it disappeared from view, he would dash excitedly into the living room to await the reappearance of its white shafts through the bay windows there. Each evening was for him a triumph of expectation – until the moon waned, abandoning him in the darkness of mystified disappointment. Then, at twenty-two months, he demonstrated a poetic though unscientific awareness of other natural phenomena. One cold afternoon in February 1980 as huge snowflakes came drifting down in a leisurely fashion, white and delicately geometrical against a leaden sky, he raced to the living-room window, shouting “I see tars! I see tars” – tars being his way of saying stars. He danced round the room, excitedly chanting his little refrain to the silent music of those softly falling starry constellations.