by Jane Hawking
It was quite casually, without a second thought, that I waved goodbye to Stephen as he left home on 29th July. Geneva after all was no distance compared with China and it was renowned for its standards of hygiene. We were all concerned for Stephen’s father, who was in the throes of a chronic illness, and feared that he might die during our absence. He bore his illness with the same gruff pragmatic stoicism that he had brought to all situations and which he used to conceal pain or embarrassment. Despite the vicissitudes of my relationship with the Hawking family, I had not ceased to respect him, the more so because of late he had begun to write me truly appreciative letters, praising my care of Stephen and the children and my management of the letting house. However, my greatest anxiety at this time was for Robert, my eldest son, whom I saw off in the company of the Venture Scouts three days after Stephen’s departure. Their plans – to trek across a glacier and to canoe round the north coast of Iceland – filled me with silent foreboding.
Part Four
1
Darkest Night
It was seldom that Jonathan and I were alone together for any length of time. We tried to observe a code of conduct in front of Stephen and the children whereby we behaved simply as good friends, suppressing, sometimes with difficulty, any display of closer affection in our attempts to avoid hurting anyone. Each evening I would stand behind Stephen at the front door as he saw Jonathan off, dispatching him to his own house on the other side of Cambridge. In our efforts to keep the home going by this unconventional method we had the support of many people, among them my elderly home help, Eve Suckling. These were people who had witnessed the situation from the inside and who were wise enough not to draw hasty conclusions. Even Don, whose absolute values had been shaken one evening in the spring of 1978, just before Tim’s birth, when he found Jonathan and me comfortably lolling against each other on the sofa, had conceded that the situation often demanded of him much more than he had expected, and sometimes more than he could give – certainly more than he could give indefinitely. He admitted that he had lived with us long enough to find that the ceaseless rigours of our way of life often brought him into uncomfortable conflict with his own conscience. Always we knew too that we could count on the guidance of Bill Loveless to strengthen our resolve and help keep our perspective within the disciplined framework that we had tried to establish for it while viewing our weaknesses with compassion. More than once he was heard to say that our situation was unique and that he could not say how we should deal with it.
Occasionally, when Stephen went abroad or when we were to take the car to join him somewhere on the Continent, we tentatively allowed our relationship to blossom. But so sensitive was I to its unorthodox nature that the experience was often watered with tears of guilt, since an unthinking word from one of the children or an unexpected encounter on a beach or campsite could quickly destroy the brief, heady illusion of freedom and send my conscience plummeting into despair. Discretion and deceit were divided by only the finest line, and it was never easy to judge on which side of the line we stood. There were a couple of other celebrities in the public eye who were seriously disabled, and it was public knowledge that their spouses had found solace with other partners while still caring responsibly and lovingly for them. Perhaps it was because those spouses were husbands rather than wives that it was easier for them to bring their new relationships into the open than it was for me.
Nevertheless, those short periods of respite, even if spent under canvas in a raging wind or sometimes sharing a small foreign hotel room with two or three children, allowed us a freedom from nagging anxiety and constant care – they restored our flagging morale and, paradoxically, reinforced our loyalty to Stephen. Our travels would often take us through France, giving me the opportunity to introduce Jonathan to Brandon and Lucette, who were now living outside Paris, and to Mary and Bernard Whiting, who with their two small children were living in the heart of that magical city. They all wholeheartedly welcomed Jonathan as an essential element in our family life. In 1985 however, our route took us through Belgium and Germany rather than France. It had become an accepted part of the family routine that Stephen would attend a summer school in some desirable part of Europe, flying out with his students and nurses, and that Jonathan and the children and I would arrive by car in a more leisurely manner, taking a few days’ holiday on the way. So on Friday 1st August 1985, after Robert’s departure to Iceland with the Venture Scouts, Jonathan, Lucy, Tim and I set out for Felixstowe to board the ferry for the overnight crossing to Zeebrugge.
We had planned to spend the weekend by the sea on the Belgian coast before driving through Belgium and Germany to Bayreuth, where on 8th August we were to meet Stephen for the performance of the Ring – but just one night on the coast, where stinging sandstorms were blowing along the beach under leaden skies, was enough to turn us inland to look for campsites in the Ardennes, the hilly, forested area of Belgium near the German border. Not only did torrential rain begin to lash our windscreen before we had even reached Brussels, but a strange itchy feeling also began to creep around the nape of our necks, like prickly burrs caught in our pullovers and anoraks: the truth was that we were giving a free ride to the head lice that had infested Tim’s school just before the end of term. We had all carefully washed our hair with the prescribed shampoo, while Stephen, for good measure, had insisted on also having his locks doused with a foul-smelling lotion, which he wore throughout a whole day in the Department. He remarked that evening that, apart from his faithful attendant-student, no one had come near him all day.
On that summer holiday in Belgium we were little better than tramps, soaked to the skin, and lice-ridden until I could find the appropriate shampoo. We ambled on still in the pouring rain from Belgium into Luxembourg, where we paused for a picnic lunch in Echternach, a leafy town on the German border. After being cooped up in the car all morning, Tim raced gleefully up and down a long alleyway of trees in a park. Inevitably he slipped and fell flat on his face in a muddy puddle. The apparition rising from the dirt was of an unrecognizable small boy, previously blond, caked in mud from head to foot, from the very tips of his eyelashes to his shoelaces – every item of clothing, including his anorak, oozed brown mud. Jonathan steered me onto the front seat of the car and then hastily brought out the washing-up bowl and set up the camping stove on the pavement. He warmed some water and then washed the offending creature and his clothes as best he could in full view of all the passers-by – to Lucy’s intense mortification. The final leg of that journey took us via some friends of Jonathan’s in Mannheim to Rothenburg, a medieval showplace within easy reach of the Wagnerian holy of holies. We pitched our tents in the early evening and lingered drowsily over food and wine in a pleasantly atmospheric restaurant. On the way back to the campsite, I stopped at a phone box to ring through to Geneva to check the arrangements for meeting Stephen in Bayreuth the next day. The phone was answered by Laura Ward, who had replaced Judy Fella when the latter had left to go on an extended trip to South Africa with her husband. Laura’s voice was tense with unexpected urgency. “Oh, Jane, thank goodness you’ve called!” she almost shouted down the phone. “You must come quickly, Stephen is in a coma in hospital in Geneva, and we don’t know how long he’ll live!”
The news was shattering. It plunged me into a black pit of misery. Quite irrationally forgetting all those travels to distant places that he had survived perfectly well without me, I asked myself how I could ever have let Stephen go off alone with his entourage, deprived of the protection of my intimate knowledge of his condition, of his needs, his medicines, his likes, his dislikes, his allergies, his fears? How could I have seen him off without a qualm of anxiety and then have set out on holiday myself – with Jonathan?
While we were still in Cambridge, Stephen had rung, as he usually did on arrival, to say that all was well. He was living in a nice house in Ferney-Voltaire, well situated, if a little distant from the laboratory. He had wished us well for our journey and looked fo
rward to seeing us in a week’s time at Bayreuth. After that, in the mishmash of all my other concerns, especially my anxiety for Robert on his canoeing trip round the north coast of Iceland, I had scarcely given him another moment’s thought, knowing him to be safe and in good hands. Apart from the troublesome cough, which he had brought back from China, he had been fine when he left home. It was incredible that he could have fallen into a coma in Geneva. We sat in the car numbly discussing the news. We decided to strike camp and set off for Geneva immediately, but on our return to the campsite we found everything closed for the night: the main gate was shut and the only entry or exit was by means of a wicket gate for pedestrians. There was no way we could leave until the early morning. I lay awake in my sleeping bag, listening to wolves howling and farm animals cackling somewhere in the distant black night. “Please God, let Stephen be alive!” I whispered, impatient for dawn.
As soon as the campsite opened, we loaded the car and set out on a mad dash across Europe to Geneva. Hundreds of miles of German pasture land sped by without our noticing as we raced to the Swiss border. The one advantage of being in Germany was that there were no speed restrictions. We paused at the frontier for some refreshments for the children, though I had no stomach for food, and then resumed our frenzied progress along the heartlessly tranquil shores of the blue lakes, Lake Neuchâtel and then Lake Geneva. We spoke little, each absorbed in an unhappy turmoil of confusing reflections. Even the children were quiet in the back of the car. Geneva glistened in the late afternoon sun as we approached it, but we had only one goal: the Hôpital Cantonal, where the fearsome truth of life or death awaited us. A combination of Jonathan’s map-reading expertise and my ability to ask for directions in French brought us to it – a clean, clinical complex of buildings, white and glowing on the outside, highly polished and shining with stainless steel all over the inside. We were taken straight up to the intensive-care unit, and there Stephen lay, quiet and still, his eyes closed in a comatose sleep. A mask covered his mouth and nose, and tubes and wires, attached to various parts of his body, trailed in all directions; across monitors an endless dance of luminous green and white wavy lines traced the rhythmic patterns of his life forces battling to maintain their superiority over the old enemy, death. He was alive.
The medical staff on the ward gave me a curt reception. “How many years is it since you last saw your husband?” they asked coolly. It was obvious they thought that Stephen and I lived separate lives and that his illness had developed since we last met. They were baffled when I replied that I had seen him only last week. “Well, then, why is he travelling in his state of health?” they asked with the shocked incomprehension of inbred medical caution. I could no more answer that question than they could themselves, though I tried to recount the usual story of Stephen’s indomitable courage combined with his scientific genius, etc. etc. – an oft-repeated tale that was too long and too complicated in the telling for my drained emotional state, and nobody believed it anyhow. Instead they gave me a garbled version of what had happened.
Apparently, Stephen’s cough had worsened after his arrival in Geneva. Perhaps, as they did not live with him every day and every night, his companions had not realized that this was fairly normal. Much to his annoyance, they had insisted on calling a doctor. After hours of argument, the doctor in turn had insisted on consigning him to hospital. There pneumonia was diagnosed and, after more argument, Stephen was put on a life-support machine. He was not in fact in a coma, as his secretary had said, but had been drugged to permit a potent mixture of antibiotics and nourishment to be fed into his system through various drips, while the ventilator did his breathing for him. He was not at present in danger, since all his functions were governed by machines. I could all too easily imagine that this had been the realization of his worst, most terrifying nightmare. His fate, which lay in his own control of his medical care, had been taken out of his hands by strangers who knew nothing about him, not even who he was.
At the rented house in Ferney-Voltaire, our arrival was greeted with relief by the students, nurses and the secretary – all at a loss since, with the removal of the key player, their presence was superfluous. They also were all in a muted state of shock, silently questioning what else they could have done. While Stephen lay drugged in hospital, there was nothing for them to do. However, in the succeeding days, as I found myself sucked into a vortex of administrative, emotional and ethical problems, they invented new roles for themselves, which they fulfilled with quiet efficiency. The students did the shopping and the cooking, the nurses looked after the children and took them on outings – this, after all, was supposed to be their summer holiday – and Laura, the secretary, was in perpetual contact with Cambridge and Cern, trying to sort out our financial and insurance problems. The news was a bitter blow for Stephen’s family, especially for his mother. Her husband was an invalid, and now her son’s life was critically threatened too. We were in touch by phone daily, and she was consistently supportive and philosophical. In her unemotional way, she already seemed to have resigned herself to Stephen’s death. It was cruel that three generations of Hawking menfolk were at risk at the same time, yet so far apart: Frank was old and ill in the small, manageable house in Bedfordshire to which he and Isobel had recently moved; Stephen was critically ill in Geneva; and goodness knows what had become of Robert. It was just as well that I did not know that his canoe had overturned in the North Sea off the coast of Iceland.
There was no anxiety about the well-being of the fourth and youngest Hawking, Tim. His immediate future was a problem however, since he had to be returned to England and my parents by some means or other; I was far too preoccupied in Geneva to be able to look after him, and the nurses would shortly be leaving. Although Lucy had her own passport, Tim was registered on mine, so I approached the British Consulate for help in getting him home. One could have been forgiven for thinking that the consular officials were being deliberately obstructive. The hard-faced, dark-haired woman at the consular desk summarily waved me away after I had spent ages waiting for an interview, even though I explained the extraordinary circumstances fully. There was no chance of Tim’s returning to England without a passport, she said: for that, I would need to produce his birth certificate. I sighed. Tim’s birth certificate was in the living room at home, in the William and Mary desk which had belonged to Stephen’s grandmother.
On an off-chance, I telephoned our home number, not expecting it to be answered. To my surprise Eve’s voice came on the line at the other end: providentially, she was in the house doing a spot of spring-cleaning. She went to the desk, found the birth certificate and sent it out to Geneva by express delivery. Triumphantly I waved the document at the same consular official a couple of days later, but she was not impressed. “That will not do,” she said, as acerbic as ever, “that’s only a short birth certificate, and we need the full one – from Somerset House.” I stared at her in disbelief. “And in any case,” she went on, “there are papers to fill in that your husband will have to sign.” “I have already told you,” I replied through gritted teeth, “that my husband is unconscious and paralysed on a ventilator in intensive care in the Hôpital Cantonal. He cannot possibly sign anything.” “Well,” she continued obtusely, “if your husband does not know that you are taking the child out of the country, you certainly cannot have a passport for him.”
In one final attempt, near to tears in exasperation, I pleaded with her. “I am only trying to send the child home.” She paused for a second, during which her mood mollified slightly, as if only at that moment had my words registered on her brain. “If you can get someone else, a British person with some qualifications, a teacher perhaps, to sign the papers and bring a photo, then we might consider it,” she replied. To our private amusement, Jonathan filled in and signed the forms, since he fulfilled all the official requirements. We took Tim to a photo booth and made him practise his signature. At last, on 13th August, a full British passport was issued in the name of Mr T.S
. Hawking; it bore the appealingly innocent photograph and the untried spidery signature of a six-year-old. Thus equipped, Mr T.S. Hawking travelled home – business class for want of a seat in economy – to England with Lucy and the nurses, and went to stay with my parents.
In his absence, Robert was the source of the sole piece of good news that summer. Bernard Carr, always a loyal ally in extremis, flew out to Geneva to take over from the students as the situation began to change. He brought Robert’s A-level results, which were excellent, the only glimmer of light through the blackest of clouds. Those results assured Robert a place at Cambridge, at Corpus Christi College, my father’s college, to read Natural Sciences.
2
A Slender Thread
If the comparative triviality of Tim’s passport took an inordinate amount of time to resolve, it was in the topsy-turvy nature of things during that period that a far more serious matter was resolved in seconds. Two days after our arrival in Geneva, the doctor in charge of Stephen’s case asked to see me as a matter of some urgency. He took me into a bare, grey side room. At first I thought that he simply wanted to verify the facts of Stephen’s exceptional existence. The nursing staff had begun to accept that Stephen was no ordinary patient, nor was he the victim of neglect by his family. Having ascertained various details about his phenomenal longevity and his self-management, the doctor came abruptly to the point. The question was whether his staff should disconnect the ventilator while Stephen was in a drugged state, or should try to bring him round from the anaesthetic. I was shocked. Switching off the life supply was unthinkable. What an ignominious end to such a heroic fight for life, what a denial of everything that I, too, had fought for! My reply was quick and ready. I did not need either to think about it or discuss it with other people, as there was only one possible answer. “Stephen must live. You must bring him round from the anaesthetic,” I replied. The doctor went on to explain the complications of the procedures that would ensue. Stephen would not be able to breathe unaided, and when he was stronger he would have to undergo a tracheotomy operation. This would be the only way of weaning him off the ventilator, as it would bypass the hypersensitive area in his throat, which had been giving him so much trouble. The technicalities of the tracheotomy, a hole in the windpipe below the vocal chords, would require permanent professional care. I did not pay much attention to this gloomy, if realistic, prognosis. I had made the decision that was required. The important truth was that Stephen was alive and would remain alive as long as I had any power to influence events.
