Travelling to Infinity

by Jane Hawking

Just as I was beginning to feel confident enough to take on further teaching more formally, in either French or Spanish, another meeting at the school gate provided a golden opportunity. One of the mothers put me in touch with a recently established private sixth-form college where she worked, the Cambridge Centre for Sixth-Form Studies (otherwise known as CCSS). The startling conclusion of an informal interview with the Principal was that I found myself agreeing to teach candidates for Oxbridge entrance, a challenging proposition, and one which I suspected to be some sort of initiation test. If I could get students into Oxbridge, then I myself would probably be taken on. The advantages were that I could choose my hours and, as the organization had only limited premises, I could teach at home.

  I spent hours looking up old entrance papers in the university library, devising teaching programmes and ruminating on the moral and philosophical questions set in the general paper, which revolved in some way or other around those philosophical and linguistic brain-teasers so beloved of Bertrand Russell such as: “There is a barber in Athens who shaves everyone who does not shave himself. Who shaves the barber?” or “Generalizations are false”. Epigrammatic quotations were also a favourite of the examiners, who found an ample supply in the works of Oscar Wilde: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple”, for example. Such formulations rubbed shoulders with essay titles inviting discussion about the ethics of nuclear deterrence or the positive and negative values of science, as for instance, “The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima”. All these topics and many others like them were food to my starving brain.

  My appetite whetted by university entrance papers, I next devoured the stuff of the A-level syllabus. Grammar, translations, comprehensions, literary texts – all required hours of thought, preparation and revision, but provided a sumptuous feast on which to feed my hungry intellect. What’s more, I actually found that I enjoyed teaching and I liked the age group of sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds who were put into my charge. As my pupils were always about the same age as one or other of my own children at some stage of their education, I felt a natural affinity with that adolescent age group and quickly found that even the most difficult pupils would respond to a friendly approach. Many of them had been placed in boarding school at the age of six, and by the age of sixteen had demonstrated their frustration in some dramatic way or other and had accordingly been expelled. Now they had a second chance and had to be eased into taking it. There was also a clutch of overseas pupils, often multilingual, whose parents wanted their offspring to benefit from an English education within the security of supervised accommodation. These pupils were usually the most highly motivated and the most stimulating, though often, because of their multinational backgrounds, they were uncertain of their true national identity, and lacked written fluency in any of their languages. The strength of the A-level course was that it taught pupils to think analytically and critically for themselves and it introduced literature to people who might never have read a book in their lives. It was particular gratifying when, after two years of study, a pupil would come and thank me for opening his or her eyes to the delights of reading.

  The pleasure was the more intense when one of those appreciative pupils was dyslexic. Through my own family I had such wide-ranging experience of the multitude of problems associated with the condition that I knew I could offer special encouragement. In an uncomprehending educational system, whether state or private, the dyslexics in a class, like my own sons, would typically be told that they were slow, stupid or lazy and would be sent to sit at the back of the class. Dyslexics are not stupid. Generally their intelligence quotient is higher than the rest of the population but their overdeveloped brain has squeezed out some other facility, usually associated with language or short-term memory. An intelligent child whose powers of communication are limited and who is sent to sit at the back of the class becomes a frustrated child who needs patient and considerate teaching to recover his self-esteem and express his latent intelligence.

  Teaching at home for a few hours a day at my own convenience was the perfect arrangement. Kikki’s successor, Lee Pearson, a gentle, reliable girl, took charge of Timmie in the mornings while I taught. My pupils would arrive as Stephen was leaving for work and when the bell rang, I had only to shed my apron before answering the door. I felt intensely happy: the skills that I had to offer were being mobilized. I won the respect of my pupils, and gradually discovered a professional identity for myself as I awoke from an intellectual coma.

  15

  Departures

  Although through teaching, first at primary-school level and then later for A level, I was beginning to find some sense of my own worth, there remained the other area of unfinished business, the one major barrier to the recovery of my true self: the fear of flying. Flying phobia, the black consequence of that fateful trip to Seattle so soon after Robert’s birth when I nursed my small bundle on aeroplanes the length and breadth of the United States, had deprived me of many an exciting opportunity to accompany Stephen – to California in midwinter, to Crete in spring or to New York on Concorde. It had forced me to invent patently feeble excuses, because every suggestion of travel by air sent cold shivers down my spine, putting me immediately on the defensive. It had caused tension in the home and it had made me very unhappy. The anxiety had started to produce physical symptoms so marked that, before the trip to Rome in the autumn of 1981, I was actually sick. I was desperate to find a cure.

  It was with great excitement that, while idly thumbing through a magazine in the dentist’s waiting room later that winter, I came across a reference to a clinic where flying phobia was accepted without embarrassment as a treatable condition. Enquiries and a letter from my GP eventually put me in touch with the York Clinic at Guy’s Hospital where Mr Maurice Yaffe, a senior psychologist, treated sufferers, either privately or in groups on the National Health Service, with a variety of techniques. There was nothing clinical about Maurice Yaffe: his personality and manner were absent-mindedly donnish rather than medical; he never mentioned the word “phobia”, only “difficulty”. As he enthused over the delights of cheap air fares, we, his patients, became adjusted to a perspective which encouraged us to concentrate on the pleasures of Paris, Rome or New York instead of on the agonies of getting there. Then a very basic course in aerodynamics left no doubt in the minds of the sceptical that aeroplanes were meant to fly. Finally Maurice Yaffe unveiled his own brainchild, a simulated aircraft cabin, housed in a small room in the basement of Guy’s Hospital. Within minutes of taking our seats in the simulator, we found ourselves soaring away to Manchester – Manchester because the video film which appeared in the cabin window was of a flight to Manchester with all the appropriate sounds and sensations of take-off and flight: the announcements, the revving engines, the crying babies, the floor tilting, the undercarriage jolting and slight turbulence as the plane supposedly passed through cloud. After an initial feeling of panic followed by twelve or so flights to Manchester, the whole business became so boring that I forgot to be frightened and began to relax. The culmination of the course was a weekend in Paris, arranged in fine detail by Maurice Yaffe, though not of course paid for by the National Health Service.

  If Paris was the first step on my road to liberation, California was but another short step away in psychological terms. There in the summer of 1982, we renewed old friendships the length and breadth of the state and revisited old haunts. Jonathan had arranged to attend a conference on early music in Vancouver that August and combined the conference with a visit to us in Santa Barbara, where he was often taken for one of Stephen’s students. Indeed, he lived with the students in their accommodation and to all intents and purposes shared their rota of duties, although, unlike them, he was paying his own way.

  Little Tim was amazed at the size of the country. “They did build a big country!” he would mutter to himself as he gazed out of the car window over deserts and mountains. As we watched the sun setting over the Santa Inés range from our apartment ever
y evening, he would declare solemnly, “It’s the end of the world, it’s the end of the world.” Some time later, I asked him what he liked best about California – the J. Paul Getty Museum, the deserts, the mountains, the sea or the Huntingdon Museum and gardens. It was a stupid question to ask a three-year-old. He answered me in what he considered to be my own terms, for, as quick as a flash he replied, “The Mickey Mouse Museum…”

  I was now ready to fly east again as well as west. With a cautious eye on employment possibilities, Lucy had begun to study Russian for O level. In retrospect, this was not a good choice since, despite changing times, it did not lead to a brilliant career and produced only much frustration. However, the rigours of studying seventeenth-century church Russian at Oxford and a winter spent in Moscow amid the privations of 1992 were still on the distant horizon when Lucy flew with her father, a bevy of nurses and me to a conference in that city in October of 1984. Lucy’s attempts to speak Russian were met with ecstatic delight, especially when she stood up to propose a brief toast to “mir i drujba” – “peace and friendship” – at the closing banquet of the conference. It was one of those Russian banquets where the hors d’oeuvre are lavish – caviar, smoked fish and meats, nuts, pickles and, of course, the ubiquitous cucumber – and last for hours, interrupted by toasts, speeches and, in the case of one misguided Japanese delegate, an endless dirge delivered in a monotone which he himself had composed in unintelligible English. The main course, the usual lump of unidentifiable meat and mashed potato, arrived at the tables just as everyone was leaving.

  Eleven years earlier, our acquaintances had demonstrated the utmost caution in their dealings with us. Now they seemed not to care a fig for officialdom. The young guide who was sent to “mind” Lucy and me was much more interested in accompanying us to buy clothes in the hard-currency shops to which we had access than in directing our movements. Two of Stephen’s closest colleagues, Renata Galosh and her husband, Andrei Linde, openly invited us to dinner in their small flat on the outskirts of Moscow. They provided a delectable meal, in part down to an amicable relationship with the manager of some restaurant or other, and in part because of Renata’s preserves from her dacha in the country, among them home-made strawberry juice strained from precious home-bottled fruit.

  Although the flying phobia was more or less under control, it was simply not practicable for me to accompany Stephen on each one of his international expeditions: travel had become an obsession with him and he regularly seemed to spend more time in the air than he did on the ground. He found it hard to accept that, quite apart from Lucy and Tim, I was not prepared to abandon either Robert or my students as their A levels approached in the spring of 1985, a period which he had designated for an extensive tour of China. Bernard Carr and Iolanta, one of his nurses, manfully took charge, heaving Stephen on and off aeroplanes and trains, and valiantly manoeuvring the wheelchair up onto the Great Wall. They came back exhausted – nor was Stephen in the best of health, though he was triumphant at his achievement. He coughed frequently and appeared to be even more sensitive to irritants in foodstuffs. Many a night would be spent nursing him in my arms, trying to calm the panic which itself precipitated even worse choking fits.

  However, the summer holidays promised a respite. We were to spend the whole of August in Geneva, where Stephen was planning to have discussions with the particle physicists at Cern, while the rest of us could enjoy the environs of Lake Geneva. At Cern Stephen would be working on the implications for the direction of the arrow of time of quantum theory and of the observations from the particle accelerator. This was a topic upon which he had expatiated at some length, with Robert’s help, to the Astronomical Society at the Perse School. It was at this lecture that I resigned myself to the realization that physics had become so abstract that, even when explained in pictorial form, it was beyond my comprehension. No amount of film played backwards of broken cups and saucers jumping back onto tables and reassembling themselves could persuade me that the direction of time could be reversed. Such a supposition could potentially alter the course of human history if visitors from the future could interfere with the past. It seemed however that it was essential to prove mathematically that this was not a possibility, since the proof would ensure that nothing could travel faster than light.

  Stephen’s travels in time and space notwithstanding, it had been a good summer: it had begun when the cat had a large litter of kittens on the kitchen floor. The prettier specimens were farmed out to various friends and acquaintances, until eventually all that remained was one undistinguished black-and-white tom, which one of my more susceptible students, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, a young Peruvian, insisted on taking to join his uncaged rabbit in his room. Lucy completed her first French exchange with a Breton girl whose boatman father had won the lottery, and there were parties. Robert set the style by celebrating his eighteenth birthday, just before the onset of his exams, with a ceilidh on the lawn on a warm clear night under a full moon. There were also concerts of every description, choral and instrumental, recitals and even a pop concert at the Albert Hall to celebrate Tim’s sixth birthday, as he had become a great fan of Sky, devoting himself single-mindedly in his every waking moment to emulating their tremendous, sustained drum rolls. An unscheduled concert of a different nature took place on our back lawn when, one Sunday at the beginning of July, just as Stephen and I were returning home from an expedition into medieval Suffolk with the delegates to that summer’s physics conference, the lights failed in the University Concert Hall up the road. Jonathan was to play the harpsichord in the concert that evening and brought news of the disaster. The weather was fine and dry, so the obvious solution was for the players to set up their instruments on the lawn while the audience grouped round, sitting alfresco on whatever rugs, cushions and mats we could muster.

  Although Jonathan was regularly asked to play with modern and amateur orchestras such as the one which performed on our lawn, he had long lamented the lack of authentic baroque performance in Cambridge, where many young hopeful keyboard players vied for the few opportunities available. On the other hand, he was too remote from the London scene for involvement there to be a feasible prospect. Had it not been for his commitment to us, particularly to me, clearly he might well have moved to London, where he could have advanced his career much more easily. The only course was for him to start his own orchestra, but that was a daunting prospect in terms of the time, the commitment and the money required. He was becoming so frustrated by the musical isolation in which he found himself, and he hankered so desperately to perform as part of an ensemble that when, in the spring of 1984, he went into hospital for an operation, I decided to take charge of the situation. First I picked up the telephone and booked the University Concert Hall, and then I rang round various contacts and booked a small but complete orchestra of baroque players. Jonathan came round from the anaesthetic to the news that, in his temporary absence from consciousness, he had been appointed the director of the newly formed Cambridge Baroque Camerata which was due to give its inaugural concert on 24th June. Frenzied planning, programming and publicity filled the intervening weeks, which were also the weeks of his convalescence.

  On the night, Robert ran the box office, Lucy sold programmes and various friends acted as ushers while I ran to and fro, liaising between front of house and backstage and attending to Stephen who sat at the side of the platform. To our amazement, the queue for tickets stretched out into the forecourt. We counted each and every member of the audience as they filed into the concert hall that June evening, since a full house was crucial to the financial success of the enterprise. “Financial success” did not mean making a profit; it merely signified breaking even. All seats were taken and the performance, entitled The Trumpet Shall Sound, received rapturous applause. Emboldened by the success of the 1984 concert, the Cambridge Baroque Camerata ventured onto the concert platform again in 1985 with another own-promotion, a programme to mark the tercentenary of the births of Bach, Handel and Sc
arlatti. Fortunately the gamble paid off a second time – although on some later occasions, unexpected rival attractions such as televised football finals would decrease the size of the audience dispiritingly. The London debut of the ensemble, planned for October 1985 in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, had to be regarded as an investment for the future, as it certainly would not break even, but it would bring the Cambridge Baroque Camerata to the attention of a wider public.

  Our household seemed to have recovered a considerable degree of equilibrium. For no one were the results more satisfactory than for Stephen himself, who had finished writing the first draft of a popular book about cosmology and the origins of the universe. The book ranged wide, from a discussion of early cosmologies to modern theories of particle physics and the arrow of time – with particular reference, of course, to the significance of black holes. In conclusion the author looked forward to the time when mankind would able to “know the mind of God” through the formulation, at some not-too-distant date in the future, of a complete unified theory of the universe, the theory of everything. Stephen had been given the name of an agent in New York where the book was being offered to publishers, and meanwhile in England we discussed tax-efficient methods of receiving royalties, which we expected to bring in a modest supplementary income regularly over the years, like textbooks which were said to be far more reliable in the long run than bestsellers. It was unlikely to fulfil the original aim of paying Lucy’s school fees, as she was already well into her secondary education.

  At the end of July, a few days in advance of the rest of us, Stephen, his new secretary Laura Ward, some students and nurses, flew out to Geneva. I was anxious to stay to see Robert off on a scout expedition to Iceland before leaving Cambridge myself. The plan was that within the week we would meet Stephen and his entourage in Germany at Bayreuth, the Wagnerian Mecca, for a performance of the Ring Cycle, and then all travel back to Geneva to a house rented for the duration of the holidays. At last I had begun to achieve a happy balance in my life and felt that with the help of Purcell, Bach and Handel, I could cope with the effects of Wagner’s sinister modulations in a spirit of good-humoured tolerance.