Stephen Hawking (23 page)

With her blond hair, four-year-old Lucy was the epitome of the California flower child and loved the place. Robert had to continue with his schooling, but there was plenty of time for the family to be together and do at least some of the things they enjoyed back home. Within Caltech's cloistered environment, the family was sheltered from the extremes Los Angeles had to offer and, moving in privileged academic circles, Pasadena was not unlike the coziness of Cambridge—but with sunshine. Jane took the children to Disneyland, and Stephen joined them to travel around Southern California when he could take time off from his research. Friends and colleagues would often visit. They took trips in rented cars to Palm Springs and resorts along the coast, as well as getting to see a little more of America between duties at Pasadena.

Back in Britain, the government had finally agreed to join the European Common Market by the end of the decade and oil had begun to flow from the North Sea rigs. It seemed that the early-seventies gloom of strikes, power cuts, and the three-day week may at last have begun to lift. American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts shook hands hundreds of miles above a burning Cambodia. Returning to England in 1975, the family was ready for changes and improvements in their own lives.

It often takes a protracted change of lifestyle to highlight the alterations that can be made when things return to the old routine, and the Hawkings saw immediately that they did not want to go back to the old pattern of life in Cambridge. In some ways they were glad to be back home. The countryside
was greener, the weather less predictable, the television less obtrusive, and the tea tasted as God had ordained it to taste. But the simple fact was that, having experienced the comforts of California, they were no longer prepared to put up with some of the inconveniences of their lives in Cambridge.

The first thing that hit them was that, quaint and nostalgic as it may have been, the house in Little St. Mary's Lane was far too small for them. Stephen was finding it impossible to use the stairs, and it was too cramped for a family of four. Hawking asked the college to help them find somewhere more suitable for their needs. On this occasion, the authorities were more than willing to come to their assistance. As Hawking puts it, “By this time, the College appreciated me rather more, and there was a different Bursar.”
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They were offered a ground-floor flat in a large Victorian house owned by the college, on West Road, not far from the gate of King's College and a mere ten minutes' wheelchair ride from the DAMTP. The house had a large garden, regularly tended by college gardeners who kept it in a permanent state of elegance. The children loved it, and there was never a problem about their playing on the lawns, an informal truce with the gardeners having been established. Wide doorways made it easy for Hawking to maneuver his wheelchair around the entire flat, and because it was all on one level he no longer had to struggle upstairs to get to the bedroom.

By 1974, Hawking was having difficulty getting in and out of bed and feeding himself. Until their return from the States, Jane had been Stephen's unpaid, twenty-four-hours-a-day nurse, as well as his wife. She had, of course, been fully aware of the responsibilities expected of her when she decided
to marry Stephen in 1965, but the effort of bringing up two young children and running the home as well as looking after her husband was beginning to take its toll on her emotional well-being. They decided to invite one of Hawking's research students to live with them on West Road. The flat was big enough for another adult, and in return for free accommodation the student would help Jane look after Stephen.

The system worked well. In fact, as Hawking's prestige grew it was considered an honor and a good career move to become his “student-in-residence.” It was inevitable that close bonds were established between the young research assistant and his mentor. While Jane received much-needed help, the student gained a closer insight into Hawking's mind, and some of his genius was bound to rub off. At least that was the theory. There was, of course, another side to this: as Hawking himself has said, “It was hard for a student to be in awe of his professor after he has helped him to the bathroom!”
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Bernard Carr, who was one of Hawking's earliest students to have this honor and is now at the University of London, describes his time there as “like participating in history.”
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The duties of the lodgers were manifold. To earn their keep they were expected to play, as required, the roles of nanny, secretary, and handyman, helping with travel arrangements, babysitting the children, drawing up lecture schedules, and managing general household repairs.

Another early lodger was the American physicist Don Page. After finishing his Ph.D. at Caltech, Page had written to Hawking asking for a job reference. In the months that followed, several research groups wrote to Hawking about Page, and each time he gave a favorable reference. Then, some time
later, he wrote to the young physicist, “I've been writing letters of reference for you, but I may have a position myself.”
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Hawking managed to help Page secure funding for a year and then organized a grant for a further two years of research. Page joined the Hawking household in 1976 and reestablished the close friendship they had enjoyed in California.

One of Page's duties was to commute with Hawking each day between West Road and the DAMTP. This was seen as a good time to talk, to summarize the previous day's efforts, and to consider the tasks for the day ahead. It was a very productive time, even though Page found Hawking's way of working through complex mathematics in his head quite hard to get used to. Talking about the twice-daily journey, he has said:

I found it very good training. During the three years I was a postdoc, I lived with the Hawking family, and a lot of times I'd walk back and forth with him. Of course I couldn't write while I was walking, and sometimes he would ask me something, and I'd try to think it out in my head. When you have to do it in your head, you have to get really to the heart of the matter and try to eliminate the inessential details.
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Around the time of the move to West Road, Hawking found that he could no longer use the three-wheel invalid car he had had on loan from the National Health Service since 1969 and in which he traveled to the Institute of Astronomy three times a week. At first this appeared to be another blow; but, as has often been the case with the Hawkings, they were able to turn the situation to their advantage. Jane says:

It was a blessing in disguise, because the roads are so dangerous out to the Institute anyhow. It didn't matter because we could afford to buy the electric wheelchair . . . which he runs along in, and is really much more convenient for him because he doesn't have to be sure of having people to help him in and out as he does with the car. So he's completely independent in the electric wheelchair. There's always some compensating factor that makes deterioration acceptable.
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Hawking became a real demon of a wheelchair driver. One journalist described his skills thus:

He hurtles out into the street. At full throttle the chair is capable of a decent trotting pace, and Hawking likes to use full throttle. He also knows no fear. He simply shoots out into the middle of the road on the assumption that any passing cars will stop. His assistants rush nervously out ahead of him to try to minimize the danger.
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Jane's relief that he no longer had to use the three-wheeler on the roads of Cambridge could so easily have been misplaced. Indeed, in early 1991, Hawking was involved in an accident in his wheelchair. He is a very familiar figure in the city, and passersby stop and talk to him. However, on this occasion a driver failed to see the chair with the slumped figure of the world's most famous living scientist at the controls. The car hit the chair, and Hawking's frail body was thrown onto the road. It could have been a disastrous accident,
but fortunately he suffered only minor injuries, cutting his face and damaging a shoulder. It is typical of the man that, against medical advice, he was back in his office within forty-eight hours and demanding that his papers and books be propped up in front of him so that he could work.

On other occasions, his “boy-racer” antics have caused great embarrassment. In June 1989, Hawking was to deliver the prestigious Halley Lecture at Oxford University. A young, newly appointed physics professor, George Efstathiou, was given the unenviable task of looking after the eminent visiting lecturer before, during, and after the talk. Hawking arrived at the Department of Zoology, where the university's largest lecture theater is housed, and was escorted into reception. It was Efstathiou's job to get his famous charge to the theater, one floor below, where the vice-chancellor of the university and six hundred students, city dignitaries, and interested laypeople were waiting in expectation.

A two-man elevator at the end of the reception area would take them to the floor below and lead, via a short corridor, to the lecture theater. The elevator doors were open. Before Efstathiou had a chance of helping Hawking into the elevator, Hawking set the chair to full throttle and headed for the open doors a dozen yards ahead of him.

Efstathiou remembers clearly that he estimated, even from that distance, that Hawking could not make it into the narrow elevator entrance, and he could do nothing but watch in horror as his guest speaker hurtled toward the aperture. At last propelled into action, Efstathiou gave chase but could not catch up. To his amazement, Hawking made it through the elevator doors.

But that was only the beginning of Efstathiou's troubles. For as Hawking had entered the elevator, the chair had twisted at an angle and jammed in the narrow space. The elevator doors closed automatically behind the chair, trapping its wheels between them. Efstathiou was panic-stricken. Downstairs, hundreds of people were waiting for Hawking, who was already late. The disabled scientist could not reach any of the control buttons, but the doors had closed on him. What was to be done?

Meanwhile, seemingly unperturbed by events, Hawking was busily punching instructions into his computer to get it to put the chair into reverse. If Efstathiou could have seen his face, he would undoubtedly have encountered the famous, mischievous Hawking smile. Finally, Efstathiou succeeded in squeezing his arm into the crack between the doors and just managed to reach the door-opening button. Freed, Hawking sent the chair into high-speed reverse and reemerged unscathed and grinning. As Efstathiou says, “That experience was quite an initiation into college administration!”

At the time, Hawking used his wheelchair as an appendage to his paralyzed body, a device for the physical expression of his personality. (Nowadays, he unfortunately cannot control the wheelchair by himself.) He cannot shout and scream at people. Of course, his computer-generated voice is totally expressionless, but he could certainly move his wheelchair around. Hawking has, as one journalist put it, “a strain of fierceness running through [his] personality, surfacing in spates of impatience or anger.”
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If he felt that someone was wasting his time, he would simply spin his wheelchair on the spot and speed out of the room in a huff.

John Boslough recalls an incident when he got on the wrong side of Hawking and received the usual rebuff. While talking to him, he had become so oblivious to the other's condition that he began talking about a problem he was having with his elbow as a result of a squash match in London the day before. “Hawking made no comment. He simply steered his wheelchair out of the room and waited in the hall for me to return to the subject at hand—theoretical physics.”
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Perhaps talking to a paralyzed man about squash was not the most subtle of things to do, but the incident illustrates the very well-known fact that Hawking is certainly not a man to cross lightly.

His favorite move, when he was annoyed by something someone had said, was to drive over their toes. By all accounts, a number of his students and colleagues had to develop pretty fast reflexes. One of Hawking's former students, Nick Warner, claimed, “His great regret is that he's not yet run over Margaret Thatcher!”
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He never got the chance.

There is, of course, a very different side to his personality: Hawking the family man. He loved nothing more than using his wheelchair skills when playing with his children and applied his usual recklessness when racing around the garden of West Road playing tag. The sad fact is that he can play no other physical games with them. It was Jane who taught them cricket and played Stephen's old game of croquet on warm summer evenings with Robert, Lucy, and, later, Timothy. As one journalist wrote,

In many ways, she has had to be both mother and father to her children. Even the hours she spent as
a schoolgirl on the cricket pitch of St. Albans High School, alternately bored to tears and terrified of the ball, were to have their value. “I have been the one who has to teach my two boys to play cricket—and I can get them out!” she has said.
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