Travelling to Infinity

by Jane Hawking

  It was some consolation that, for all the chaos that A Brief History of Time had plunged us into, at least it had not left me destitute. We were able to buy and enlarge a detached house on a modern estate on the same side of Cambridge. At first sight I found the house and its garden dispiriting to the point of heartbreak. The house was cramped, featureless and uninspiring – a modern brick-and-concrete box, its inner walls covered in torn and faded hessian; the garden was pitifully bare and sombre, shaded from the neighbours by a row of overgrown leylandii. Yet again I would have to start from scratch and try to recreate a home in that characterless house and a flower garden from the unyielding grey clay which passed for soil. The attraction of the house was its position: it was still within cycling distance of the centre of town and of Tim’s school. It also happened to be quite close to Stephen’s luxury flat, which had to be regarded as an advantage, since Stephen insisted on seeing Tim twice a week. With uncomplaining loyalty, Arthur accompanied Tim on these regular visits, the outcome of which was never predictable and always disturbing. I was relieved that Stephen showed no urgency in pressing for divorce, because I dreaded that Tim might become a pawn in yet a further acrimonious battle. Occasionally a demanding letter would arrive, but as this clearly was Stephen’s response to domestic pressure, these letters could be taken lightly, whatever their contents. Generally our discussions were civilized and even affectionate whenever we met.

  As long as no divorce proceedings were filed, Tim was safe from legal wranglings over custody. Eventually that potential problem, because of his age, ceased to be an issue. For my part, I was leading a normal life, a tremendous luxury after more than twenty-five years of a life which had never really been normal. Jonathan and I cherished our normality and our privacy, though still living in fear of abuse by the gutter press which, we knew, would not hesitate to exploit our situation to please the salacious tastes of their readership. Occasionally those fears were justified, though never to lasting effect.

  It was no secret that both the University and the College had designs on the land on which the house at 5 West Road stood. The two institutions were engaged in negotiations for the redevelopment of the end of the garden as a library for the Law Faculty, while for many years the College had been intending to build a hall of residence on the site of the house. In that last year of our occupation, we watched from the house in a silent state of siege as surveyors stalked the garden, armed with measuring rods, marking out distances with stakes and poles, while down by the holly hedge a pile driver forced its way deep into the light alluvial soil. With our removal the fate of the whole property – the old house, its lovely tranquil garden and its majestic backdrop of trees – would be sealed. In the name of progress, the University and the College were predictably intent on destroying yet another shady green space. In the mayhem of moving, there was little that I could do to save the house and garden except to ensure that the trees, especially the two magnificent sentinels, the wellingtonia by the house and the western red cedar, the Thuja plicata at the end of the lawn, were protected by tree-preservation orders. The self-styled arboreal officers conducted a survey and assured me that I had no need to worry: the trees were protected already because they were in a conservation area. I moved house satisfied that I had done my civic and environmental duty.

  During the course of the next year, I visited the garden frequently on my way home from town to check that nothing untoward had happened. The threat appeared to have receded. All was quiet apart from the constant grinding action of the pile driver. The garden, the lawn, the trees were untouched, just as we had left them. I wandered in that sanctuary of nostalgia, sadly remembering the parties, the dancing, the games of croquet and cricket, and gazing at the blank, unseeing windows of the house, those windows that had contained so much joy and so much anguish. The house guarded its secrets closely, revealing its past in only a few scattered remnants, like the forgotten spoils of a battle – the rain-washed remains of Tim’s sandpit, a battered toy bucket, a deflated football, a cracked flowerpot and the rusting rotary washing line which had given such good service. They told of lives and events of which the current student occupants of the house were scarcely aware.

  Lulled by the unchanging tranquillity of the scene, my concerns for the garden were replaced by other more pressing matters. The literary agent was having scant success in finding a publisher for At Home in France, my handbook about buying French property. After various failures on his part, I thought I might try publishing the book myself, whereupon he sent me a copy of his contract pointing out that I was bound by its terms for four long years – unless, that is, I would sign a new contract giving him rights in perpetuity over any biography I might write about Stephen. I was angry, as much with myself for being so naive, as with this slippery customer of an agent who had taken such blatant advantage of my inexperience and my dejection. His deviousness fired my determination to publish my French book myself whatever the cost and to deprive him in perpetuity of any commission on any other book that I might write.

  At about the same time the Inland Revenue turned their attention to the profits made from A Brief History of Time. As a result of the high rate of unemployment caused by the Tory government policies, the Treasury was short of funds and was instructing the Inland Revenue to increase its income from compliance investigations, particularly by looking into situations where a marriage break-up might have caused fiscal confusion. Although I was no longer involved in the handling of Stephen’s book, the tax inspector brought the full force of his bullying professional belligerence down on my weary head. He harassed me with letters and phone calls, even ringing up at Christmas when my hands were deep in flour and my mind on carols, puddings and presents.

  These and other preoccupations distracted me from the issue of the trees and the garden at 5 West Road. It was not until one Monday in July 1993 that I found myself thinking about them again; strangely these thoughts grew in strength until they became an irresistible urge to go to the garden. My rational self suppressed that puzzling feeling, since I was far too busy that Monday with preparations for the summer holidays as well as other activities. It was not until later in the week that I found the time to call in at West Road on my way home from a final pre-holiday shopping expedition. As I rounded the corner of the house, I encountered a horrific spectacle. Where I expected to find the well-known, much loved haven of flowers and greenery, all I saw was mass wanton destruction. The far end of the garden had been ransacked, obliterated. Where previously there had been trees and shrubs, roses and poppies, birds, hedgehogs and squirrels, now there was nothing more than a huge black hole in the ground, a muddy crater where Mother Earth was laid bare, ravaged and exposed. A quick mental count suggested that as many as forty trees had been felled, the most spectacular being the western red cedar, under whose shady branches Cottontail, Tim’s little rabbit, had had her hutch. As I stood paralysed with shock and disbelief at the scale of the devastation, I remembered the strange call I had felt earlier in the week. Could those trees really have been calling me to their rescue? What had become of my attempts to protect them with preservation orders?

  In response to my enquiries, the City Council could find no record of my earlier requests for preservation orders to be placed on the trees. The plans for the new building when presented to the planning committee had made only passing reference to a few insignificant shrubs and saplings, so the planning committee had given the go-ahead without further enquiry. The protection to the trees afforded by the conservation area was worthless. There was however a sense of poetic justice in the tragedy. The fate of the trees and the garden mirrored the fate that had befallen us. There could not have been a more potent or poignant metaphor for the end of our family life than that black hole in the ground.

  Postlude

  February 2007

  I am beginning to write this new postlude while taking off for Seattle with a nine-and-a-half-hour flight ahead of me. Heathrow soon disappears below, yielding t
o an English patchwork of green fields as we bounce off the clouds. This is a journey I have flown many times since that first trip in 1967, and having a new grandchild on the other side of the planet is now a compelling cure for flying phobia. As we fly over the snow-dusted Scottish mountains, heading north-west to Iceland and Greenland, I travel back in time recalling that flight when Robert was a tiny baby and Stephen, his father, was showing the initial disabling effects of motor-neuron disease, and I marvel yet again at the coincidence that Robert should have settled in Seattle with his wife Katrina, a talented sculptor, and their baby son. I also marvel at the fact that Stephen, who was given approximately two years to live in 1963, is not only still alive forty-four years later, but has recently received the most prestigious medal of the Royal Society, the Copley medal.

  In 1995, while visiting Robert, who had taken up a job with Microsoft six months earlier, I felt that there was a certain sense of poetry in the way that Seattle had described a circle around almost all the years of our marriage. Now I feel that poetry of coincidence even more strongly as we prepare to celebrate in that city the first birthday of our little grandson, named George, after my father. On this flight I am not alone: Robert is with me, returning to Seattle after my mother’s funeral yesterday. Only a week ago she died very peacefully and quietly in her sleep after a sudden illness. I was at a rehearsal at the time and felt her passing as a slight frisson, a brushing of angel’s wings. I scarcely needed to be told on my return home that there was a message for me from her care home, because I already knew what had happened.

  It was in Seattle back in 1995, soon after the divorce had been finalized and a year after the eventual publication of At Home in France, that I began to contemplate writing the long memoir of my life with Stephen. I was surprised therefore to find an invitation from a publisher to do just that awaiting me back in Cambridge. That September the words flowed quickly and passionately, as if urging me to free myself of a past that had often scaled the giddy peaks of impossible achievement and yet had plumbed the depths of heartbreak and despair. I had to exorcise that past and clearly define the end of a long era before embarking on a new future, and it was to their credit that the publication team allowed me to tell my story spontaneously. That first edition represented a great and cathartic outpouring of optimism, euphoria, despondency and grief.

  My initial reluctance to tackle a biography – arising from diffidence about the loss of privacy that the exercise might entail – gave way before the gradual awareness that I had no choice in the matter. My privacy was compromised anyhow, because my life was already public property as a result of Stephen’s fame, and it would be only a matter of time before biographers started to investigate the personal story behind his genius and his survival: that would inevitably include me. I had no reason to suppose that they would treat me with any more consideration than the press had in the past. It would therefore be far better for me to tell my own story in my own way. I would be revealing truths which were so deeply and painfully personal that I could not bear to think that their music might resound only with the ring of the chaudron fêlé, Flaubert’s cracked kettle. Although my role in Stephen’s life was drastically diminished – Stephen’s remarriage had effectively slammed the door on our lines of communication – I could not close my mind to a quarter of a century of living on the edge of a black hole, especially when the undeniable living proof of the extraordinary successes in those twenty-five years was to be seen in our three handsome, well-adjusted, very loving children, as well as in the acclaim that Stephen enjoyed. As the words flowed, I discovered that the voice and the register were there within me, ready and waiting to surface and express that mass of memories accumulated over the years. They were memories which might simply be seen to relate the saga of an English family in the latter part of the twentieth century. Much of it would be quite ordinary, quite common to most people’s lives, were it not for two factors: motor-neuron disease and genius.

  Indeed motor-neuron disease provided a further equally powerful motive for putting pen to paper, in the desire to awaken politicians and government officials to the heart-rending reality faced daily in an uncaring society by disabled people and their carers – the battles with officialdom, the lonely struggles to maintain a sense of dignity, the tiredness, the frustration and the anguished scream of despair. The memoir would, I hoped, also reach the medical profession with the aim of improving the otherwise sketchy awareness within the NHS of the ravages of motor-neuron disease and its effects on the personality, as well as on the physical bodies of its victims.

  As a result of the hardback publication in August 1999 of Music to Move the Stars, the original title derived from the Flaubert quotation, I received a sackful of supportive letters, mostly from women who empathized keenly with my situation, commended my decision to write and recounted the story of their own often troubled lives. Some had been carers themselves or had struggled to bring up families in adverse circumstances; others simply found resonances with which they could identify. Many admitted that the book had made them weep. From within Cambridge the expressions of support were quite overwhelming. All said they were gripped by the story, including a ninety-four-year-old who refused to go to bed until she had finished reading it! Many people, deceived by Stephen’s television appearances into thinking that we enjoyed all possible help, were appalled to discover how little assistance we actually received, thus confirming my long-held suspicion that the public face and the private reality were far removed, if not at odds with each other.

  The past had largely been consigned to computer, if not fully exorcised, when Jonathan and I were married in July 1997. Our wedding day proved to be an island of respite against the tumultuous background of illnesses, accidents and disasters which were affecting our families and some of our closest friends. We ourselves were not in great shape either: Jonathan had been taken ill with kidney stones while performing on the concert platform in Liverpool, and I had been hobbling about on crutches for some time with torn ligaments in both knees after a skiing accident. The multitude of problems that had befallen us and our near and dear had left scant time for the practicalities of planning, let alone for any mental, emotional or spiritual preparation.

  In truth, nothing could have prepared us for the emotional and spiritual power of that day. Just a minute or two before leaving home, I suddenly became aware to my embarrassed amazement that a mile down the road there was a church full of people awaiting me. Then, on arrival at St Mark’s in the company of my three children, even our new Vicar’s calm, friendly greeting could not allay that mounting sense of awe and wonder. Perhaps her resplendent white-and-gold ceremonial vestments only added to the potent, dream-like quality of the occasion – a quality which became overwhelming as Robert, Lucy, Tim and I took up our positions in the porch from where we glimpsed my future husband, rising to his feet at the chancel steps. A wave of emotion engulfed us as the organist launched into the majestic opening chords of The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba and my children bore me, trembling and incapable of looking to right or left, up the aisle, depositing me at Jonathan’s side. In a space to my left, looking wan and frail, sat my mother, in the wheelchair to which she had recently become confined.

  There followed the hymns, the prayers, the readings and the anthems, their words carefully chosen, pored over, analysed, translated into French and Spanish, typed into and extracted from the computer many a time. All those words came alive in speech and song, lent breadth and depth, truth, urgency and clarity by the voices of the clergy, the readers, the congregation and the choir. The latter was composed of old friends, many of them professional musicians who gave a poignant rendering of ‘How lovely are thy dwellings fair’ from Brahms’s German Requiem. As for the preacher, there was only one possible choice. Only Bill Loveless, who had known us both for so long and had sustained us through such times of trial, could have given the address. Despite ill health and old age, he climbed into the pulpit and launched into a passionate sp
eech which bore all the hallmarks of his customary vigour and commitment. He spoke with heartfelt candour and honesty of the dilemmas and anguish of the past without glossing over the reality of our relationship. As he recalled former times, it occurred to me that so many of the friends from all over the world who had given us so much valuable support in days gone by, and for whom I regularly said a silent prayer from my pew on a Sunday morning, were all in the church, with us and around us – all that is except Stephen, my companion over such a long period and the father of my children.