by Jane Hawking
Tim’s exuberance was enchanting but it could lead him to attempt potentially dangerous feats of independence in imitation of his brother and sister if left unguarded for the merest second. A couple of weeks before his second birthday, I was preparing the supper in the kitchen when suddenly the house seemed unnaturally quiet. There were no sounds of childish play – toy cars being pushed across the floor, the tin drum being thumped, chattering voices and laughter. The blood froze in my veins at the terrible silence. I rushed to the front door, only to find it wide open. Timmie had run away.
Robert, charging at full pelt ahead of Stephen and me, had frequently run away as a small boy but always to some purpose, and he had always put himself in the position of being easily found. Lucy had disappeared only once – on a fine day in the middle of summer when we were still living in Little St Mary’s Lane. Thelma Thatcher and I had been anxiously searching the lane and the churchyard for her without success, when some passing Americans told us that there was a tiny girl standing with a doll’s pram on the Mill Bridge. There she was – in her Bermuda shorts, one hand resting on the handle of the pram and the other holding up her transparent green umbrella. She was surrounded by an admiring band of undergraduates, who were clearly wondering what to do with this very self-possessed infant phenomenon.
Some ten years later in the isolation of 5 West Road, where there were no friendly adoptive grandparents to call upon for help and where the grounds ran for acres with neither a fence nor a gate, I stood at the open door in a frenzy of blank indecision, not knowing which way to turn. Had Timmie run out onto the road and down to the river, or round the house into the garden? The college staff, who were closing up their workshops for the day, heard me frantically calling his name, and came to help. Eventually Pat, one of the maintenance staff, soberly advised me to call the police. He stood by while, with my heartbeat resounding in my ears and my hands shaking, I dialled 999. I was upset that the officer who took the call did not react more dramatically. He did not seem to register the urgency of the situation. “Hold on a minute ma’am,” he said jovially. He returned to the phone a moment later. “Can you describe your little boy and tell me what he is wearing?” he asked, still in the same irritatingly cheerful tone of voice. “Fair hair, blue eyes, blue top and green trousers,” I replied distraught with worry. “That’s all right then,” the policeman said. “We’ve got a little boy in one of our police cars, but as he couldn’t tell us where he lived, the officer is driving round in the hope of finding his mother.” Timmie was brought home in a police car by a policewoman and the kind person who had picked him up just as he was about to set foot on the road – on his way, it seemed, to visit his godmother, Joy Cadbury. That same kind person had held him on her knee until the rather damp, blond, blue and green bundle was delivered back into my trembling arms.
Although they were less dependent on my physical presence, the two older children needed a great deal of understanding. Robert seemed destined to be a lonely child with few companions, while the transfer to secondary school parted Lucy from her band of cherished local friends whom she had known from birth. Because Robert had received a private education, thanks to his inheritance, we felt that we could do no less for Lucy, but she was the only one of her year to go from primary school to the girls’ Perse. We gave her a kitten to comfort her and distract her, and in the hope that it might help pay her school fees, Stephen decided that the time had come to write a popular book, describing his science – the study of the origins of the universe – to the public in accessible language, avoiding the barriers of jargon and equations. I had often urged him to meet the challenge of explaining his research, reasoning that I, in particular, would benefit from reading it, and so would the taxpayers, in general, who were financing that research through government funding.
Both Robert and Lucy sometimes came with me to St Mark’s where, ever inventive, Bill Loveless continued to cater for all ages and tastes. Not only did he keep the congregation of Newnham morally and intellectually awake with his monthly reviews of the state of the nation, he also put a prodigious effort into attracting families to the church by means of the family service. This service, always entertaining, sometimes unpredictable in the responses it could provoke, influenced a whole generation of children in an increasingly secular age. Lucy, who always had a part to play, whether lighting the altar candles or snuffing them out, reading the lesson, participating in the quizzes or performing in various dramatizations, loved it. One Sunday when I had left the children lazily dozing at home, Bill announced the inaugural session of a new youth club to be led by ordinands from the local theological college; it was to combine games, fun and serious discussion. Robert showed little interest when I told him about it, but reluctantly agreed to go that evening just to please me. At seven o’clock I drove him to the vicarage, promising to wait outside for ten minutes in case he did not like it. He liked it so well that I went home alone after the ten-minute wait, and thereafter he never missed a session. He met old acquaintances from primary school and made new friends, both girls and boys. They formed a cohesive and loyal group from that day onwards, encouraging Robert to develop the self-assurance and sociability which previously he had found so difficult. Only two weeks later, he met Bill Loveless as he was cycling home from school, and told him that he wanted to be confirmed. Bill became the trusted friend and mentor to both Robert and Lucy. He often reassured them and gently explained the complexities of adult life to them when the anomalies of their background – whether the scourge of Stephen’s illness or the unconventional nature of Jonathan’s presence in the family – disturbed their preconceived idealized notions of how family life and parents should be.
The atmosphere of those years was generally so much more relaxed that I was able to resume contact with my school friends again. They would come with their husbands and families for a Sunday visit once or twice a year. After a leisurely lunch during which many a topic – political, environmental, scientific, literary or musical – would be intensively discussed, the adults would amble round the garden and join the children for a game of hide-and-seek in among the glades and bushes of Harvey Court, the Caius property next door. This game became a tradition. With Stephen acting as lookout, the rest of us shed our adult reserve and recaptured for just an hour the intense excitement of childhood.
In the comparative harmony of that period, my relationship with Stephen entered a new phase where the tendency for us to slip into the roles of master and slave was arrested. We were companions and equals again – as we had been in our campaigning in the Sixties and early Seventies. The CND badge, which Stephen regularly wore on his lapel in television programmes, was but one indication of the several causes which we championed jointly. The inexorable increase in nuclear weapons, of which Rob Donovan had chillingly warned us in the early Seventies, had developed into a fully fledged arms race, a mad, uncontrolled competition between East and West to reach Armageddon as soon as possible and annihilate all living creatures on the planet. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament once again became a national force and local groups sprouted all over the country.
Our group, Newnham Against the Bomb, met once a month in the house of Alice Roughton, a retired doctor. A figure of immense and generous energies, trenchant convictions and fabled eccentricity, she was reputed to serve stewed squirrel and nettles at dinner parties. Her husband was known to prefer the garden shed to the house. We dozen or so members of Newnham Against the Bomb would sit round her smoking fire warming our hands on a glass of mulled wine, while we listened to presentations by knowledgeable but pessimistic speakers. Then we would plan strategies, discussing what we could do to stop the arms race. The prospects were not encouraging. We were after all pitting ourselves against the military industrial complexes of the two superpowers. There was some slight consolation to be derived from the fact that we were at least making an effort – and in any case, Stephen and I were used to playing David against many a monolithic Goliath.
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sp; Together he and I composed a letter and sent it off to all our friends around the world, particularly to those in the United States and in the Soviet Union. We urged them to protest at the escalation in nuclear weapons, which threatened to destroy the population of the northern hemisphere and produce so much radiation that the prospects for remaining life elsewhere would be negligible. We pointed out that there existed four tons of high explosive for every man, woman and child on the planet, and that the risk of a nuclear exchange being set off by miscalculation or computer failure was unacceptably high. Stephen used the same theme in his address to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia when he was awarded the Franklin Medal in 1981. He remarked that it had taken about four billion years for mammals to evolve, about four million years for man to evolve and about four hundred years to develop our scientific and technological civilization. In the previous forty years, progress in understanding the four interactions of physics had advanced to the state where there was a very real chance of discovering a complete unified field theory, which would describe everything in the universe. Yet all that could be wiped out in less than forty minutes in the event of a nuclear catastrophe, and the probability of such a catastrophe occurring, either by accident or design, was frighteningly high. He concluded that this was the fundamental problem facing our society and was much more important than any ideological or territorial issues.
We made roughly the same points when we met General Bernard Rogers, a former Rhodes Scholar and Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, at a feast in University College, Oxford. After the meal, Stephen barred his way with the wheelchair as he was about to leave the dinner table. The General listened considerately while, in some embarrassment, I recited my speech on behalf of Newnham Against the Bomb. He then politely acknowledged that he himself was very concerned about the situation and had in fact been engaged in discussions with his Soviet opposite number. Within a few years, the rapidly changing economic and political situation behind the Iron Curtain overtook our local efforts. We shall never know whether our modest individual and group protests had even the slightest impact on the course of history, whether any of our letters ever reached their targets or whether our messages ever struck home to the heart of the political establishments of the East or the West.
Closer to home our campaigns concerned less apocalyptic matters, though they were equally impassioned, especially when they related to the rights of the disabled. The Cambridge colleges were so remarkably slow in implementing the Disabled Persons Act – which in its initial form had first reached the statute book in 1970 – that in the 1980s new buildings which made no provision for disabled access were still being commissioned. One of them, Clare College, not a hundred yards from our house, was sending out an appeal to attract funds for a building containing a library and recital room, which was advertised as a public place but had made no provision for disabled access. We campaigned vigorously in the media against this two-faced attitude and were met with comments such as: “If Stephen Hawking wants a disabled lift, he should pay for it himself.” When finally Lord Snowdon – who had come to photograph Stephen for a glossy magazine – took up our cause on the radio, the College was forced to capitulate.
Stephen and I – and Jonathan – had supported the fundraising activities of the Motor Neuron Disease Association since its inception in 1979. For some time, Stephen as the Patients’ Patron and I had attended meetings and conferences. In the early Eighties he was asked to become a Vice-President of the Leonard Cheshire Foundation as well and, in October 1982, I was invited to join the Appeal Committee to raise funds for converting a Victorian house at Brampton near Huntingdon into a Cheshire Home for the disabled. I attended monthly meetings in Huntingdon and soon discovered that my catchment area for fundraising was none other than the University of Cambridge – each college within the University and each individual Fellow within each college. Armed with a copy of the University register, my task was to sift through hundreds of likely donors and personally address pleading letters to each one, in preparation for the public launching of the appeal in the summer of 1984. The launch in Hinchingbrooke House augured well for the appeal, but unluckily for the charity it coincided with a six-week postal strike, while the national consciousness was distracted from giving to local charities by the horrendous pictures daily on television of starvation in Africa. Consequently it took many years of fundraising before the Home was opened. For Stephen and me, however, these campaigns were a wholly positive and unifying activity which gave us a joint role – outside physics.
14
Unfinished Business
In the early Eighties, there were two areas of unfinished business which I had to settle. First and foremost there was the thesis. I was summoned to Westfield for my oral examination in June 1980 in the presence of Stephen Harvey, the Professor of Spanish at King’s College and of my supervisor, Alan Deyermond. The previous evening in Cambridge, Stephen and I had attended a performance of a Handel opera, Rinaldo, as part of the end-of-year celebrations in Caius. Much lauded though the performance was, it failed to make any impression on me because music, even the famous aria, ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’, had temporarily lost its appeal. Like those occasions when Stephen had unwillingly found himself at the ballet, I squirmed in my seat in impatience, resenting the misuse of valuable time. I was fraught with worry that I would never be able to remember every point, every date, every reference in the 336 pages of the thesis the next day at 2 p.m.
The next day, tense and partially sighted, having lost a contact lens on the way to London, I groped my way through the exam until, with a mischievous smile, Stephen Harvey asked if I had read a book by the author David Lodge. Somewhat taken aback, I searched his face for clues to his meaning. Surely he wasn’t referring to Changing Places, the hilariously authentic account of an academic exchange between Philip Swallow of Rummidge University (alias Birmingham) and Maurice Zapp of Euphoric State University (alias Berkeley)? I could not remotely discern any connection between Changing Places and medieval Spanish poetry; nonetheless I plucked up the courage to ask whether he was referring to any of David Lodge’s novels. “No, no,” he replied, “I mean Modes of Modern Writing” – which critical study, I had to admit, I had not read. After that, the exam proceeded in a more relaxed atmosphere. Later Alan Deyermond confessed that he had not read Changing Places.
The following spring Jonathan and Stephen – who bought me the flowing red robes of a Doctor of Philosophy – accompanied me to the Albert Hall and patiently sat through the mammoth degree ceremony. It was the end of a long and arduous journey. The fact that it ended in a blind alley was not significant. I had certainly not entertained any great hopes of a teaching post or even of hourly paid supervisions at the University of Cambridge, since my tentative enquiries as to whether there might be some teaching in the Spanish Department were politely ignored.
The chance to begin an occupation, if not a career, came unexpectedly and centred upon my other language, French, the language I had first encountered with some puzzlement on the side of HP Sauce bottles at the age of three or four. Fortunately the fascination for French engendered by the HP Sauce – together with sympathetic teaching in early childhood – had been strong enough to outweigh the powerful disincentive of Miss Leather, the gaunt, feline senior French mistress who regularly meted out “fifty French verbs” as her preferred form of punishment. It was said in her obituary that she could keep a classroom in absolute silence, even in her absence.
In the early Eighties, just as I had finished the thesis and Lucy and her contemporaries were looking forward to learning French in primary school, language teaching was summarily removed from the curriculum, a victim of the Tory government’s economy measures. One of my much valued friends from the school gate, Christine Putnis, the Australian mother of a large family of clever children, prevailed upon me and Ros Mays, another of the mothers, to teach French to a group of children after school hours. With some trepidation, we began a project which
was to last for ten years. Every Monday afternoon we would greet our pupils with drinks and biscuits, and then subject them to an hour’s worth of intensive learning, artfully concealed in puzzles, games, songs, drawings and stories.
A year or two later I found myself obliged to revise French for GCE O level with Robert. It was his school report, just before the O-level term, which spurred me into action. “He is unlikely to pass the exam,” it said of his French. The thought of a child of mine failing French was so terrible that drastic measures were called for. Robert’s friend Thomas Cadbury was brought in to provide some competition and to ensure seriousness of purpose, and a minimum of fifty verbs were conjugated in all persons in all tenses. This linguistic onslaught struck its target so successfully that after the exam results it was actually suggested that the chip off the old scientific block might consider French for A level, a suggestion given only frivolous consideration as he had been earmarked from birth for physics, chemistry, maths, more maths and, of course, computing.
