Travelling to Infinity

Praise for
Travelling to Infinity

“Stephen Hawking may think in 11 dimensions, but his first wife has learnt to love in several.”

The Times

“Jane Hawking has written a book about what it was like to be pivotal to her husband’s celebrated existence... but it is much more a shout from the outer
darkness.”

The Daily Telegraph

“What becomes of time when a marriage unravels? And what becomes of the woman who has located her whole self within its sphere? For Jane Hawking, the physics of love and
loss are set in a private universe.”

The Guardian

“Jane describes the final, painful years of her marriage in candid detail.”

The Independent

“Jane Hawking’s harrowing and compelling account... rings very true.”

Irish Times

“This is not a vindictive book, although the agony she went through is palpable; if Stephen’s struggle to keep his mind clear is heroic, so is her determination to
balance his escalating needs and those of their three children.”

Independent on Sunday

“Jane writes about her former husband with tenderness, respect and protectiveness.”

Sunday Express

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Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen
is a revised version (with new material) of
Music to Move the Stars
, first published by Macmillan in 1999
Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen
first published by Alma Books Limited in 2007
First paperback edition published in 2008
This new paperback edition published in 2010
Copyright © Jane Hawking, 1999, 2007
All rights reserved

Jane Hawking asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

ISBN: 978-1-84688-115-2
eISBN: 978-1-84688-285-2

Printed in Great Britain by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, Berkshire

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
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For my family

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Postlude

The story of my life with Stephen Hawking began in the summer of 1962, though possibly it began ten or so years earlier than that without my being aware of it. When I entered
St Albans High School for Girls as a seven-year-old first-former in the early Fifties, there was for a short spell a boy with floppy, golden-brown hair who used to sit by the wall in the next-door
classroom. The school took boys, including my brother Christopher in the junior department, but I only saw the boy with the floppy hair on the occasions when, in the absence of our own teacher, we
first-formers were squeezed into the same classroom as the older children. We never spoke to each other, but I am sure this early memory is to be trusted, because Stephen was a pupil at the school
for a term at that time before going to a preparatory school a few miles away.

Stephen’s sisters were more recognizable, because they were at the school for longer. Only eighteen months younger than Stephen, Mary, the elder of the two girls, was a distinctively
eccentric figure – plump, always dishevelled, absent-minded, given to solitary pursuits. Her great asset, a translucent complexion, was masked by thick, unflattering spectacles. Philippa,
five years younger than Stephen, was bright-eyed, nervous and excitable, with short fair plaits and a round, pink face. The school demanded rigid conformity both academically and in discipline, and
the pupils, like schoolchildren everywhere, could be cruelly intolerant of individuality. It was fine to have a Rolls Royce and a house in the country, but if, like me, your means of transport was
a pre-war Standard 10 – or even worse, like the Hawkings, an ancient London taxi – you were a figure of fun or the object of pitying contempt. The Hawking children used to lie on the
floor of their taxi to avoid being seen by their peers. Unfortunately there was not room on the floor of the Standard 10 for such evasive action. Both the Hawking girls left before reaching the
upper school.

Their mother had long been a familiar figure. A small, wiry person dressed in a fur coat, she used to stand on the corner by the zebra crossing near my school, waiting for her youngest son,
Edward, to arrive by bus from his preparatory school in the country. My brother also went to that school after his kindergarten year at St Albans High School: it was called Aylesford House and
there the boys wore pink – pink blazers and pink caps. In all other respects it was a paradise for small boys, especially for those who were not of an academic inclination. Games, cubs,
camping and gang shows, for which my father often played the piano, appeared to be the major activities. Charming and very good-looking, Edward, at the age of eight, was having some difficulty
relating to his adoptive family when I first knew the Hawkings – possibly because of their habit of bringing their reading matter to the dinner table and ignoring any non-bookworms
present.

A school friend of mine, Diana King, had experienced this particular Hawking habit – which may have been why, on hearing some time later of my engagement to Stephen, she exclaimed,
“Oh, Jane! You are marrying into a mad, mad family!” It was Diana who first pointed Stephen out to me in that summer of 1962 when, after the exams, she, my best friend Gillian and I
were enjoying the blissful period of semi-idleness before the end of term. Thanks to my father’s position as a senior civil servant, I had already made a couple of sorties into the adult
world beyond school, homework and exams – to a dinner in the House of Commons and on a hot sunny day to a garden party at Buckingham Palace. Diana and Gillian were leaving school that summer,
while I was to stay on as Head Girl for the autumn term, when I would be applying for university entrance. That Friday afternoon we collected our bags and, adjusting our straw boaters, we decided
to drift into town for tea. We had scarcely gone a hundred yards when a strange sight met our eyes on the other side of the road: there, lolloping along in the opposite direction, was a young man
with an awkward gait, his head down, his face shielded from the world under an unruly mass of straight brown hair. Immersed in his own thoughts, he looked neither to right nor left, unaware of the
group of schoolgirls across the road. He was an eccentric phenomenon for strait-laced, sleepy St Albans. Gillian and I stared rather rudely in amazement but Diana remained impassive.

“That’s Stephen Hawking. I’ve been out with him actually,” she announced to her speechless companions.

“No! You haven’t!” we laughed incredulously.

“Yes I have. He’s strange but very clever, he’s a friend of Basil’s [her brother]. He took me to the theatre once, and I’ve been to his house. He goes on ‘Ban
the Bomb’ marches.”

Raising our eyebrows, we continued into town, but I did not enjoy the outing because, without being able to explain why, I felt uneasy about the young man we had just seen. Perhaps there was
something about his very eccentricity that fascinated me in my rather conventional existence. Perhaps I had some strange premonition that I would be seeing him again. Whatever it was, that scene
etched itself deeply on my mind.

The holidays of that summer were a dream for a teenager on the verge of independence, though they may well have been a nightmare for her parents, since my destination, a summer school in Spain,
was in 1962 quite as remote, mysterious and fraught with hazards as, say, Nepal is for teenagers today. With all the confidence of my eighteen years, I was quite sure that I could look after
myself, and I was right. The course was well organized, and we students were lodged in groups in private homes. At weekends we were taken on conducted tours of all the sights – to Pamplona
where the bulls run the streets, to the only bullfight I have seen, brutal and savage, but spectacular and enthralling as well, and to Loyola, the home of St Ignatius, the author of a prayer I and
every other pupil at St Albans High School had had instilled into us from constant repetition:

Otherwise we spent our afternoons on the beach and the evenings out down by the port in restaurants and bars, participating in the fiestas and the dancing, listening to the
raucous bands and gasping at the fireworks. I quickly made new friends outside the limited St Albans scene, primarily among the other teenagers on the course, and with them, in the glorious, exotic
atmosphere of Spain, experimented with a taste of adult independence away from home, family and the stultifying discipline of school.

On my return to England, I was whisked away almost immediately by my parents who, relieved at my safe return, had arranged a family holiday in the Low Countries and Luxembourg. This was yet
another broadening experience, one of those holidays in which my father specialized and which he had been arranging for us for many years – ever since my first trip to Brittany at the age of
ten. Thanks to his enthusiasms we found ourselves in the vanguard of the tourist movement, travelling hundreds of miles along meandering country roads across a Europe in the process of emerging
from its wartime trauma, visiting cities, cathedrals and art museums, which my parents were also discovering for the first time. It was a typically inspired combination of education, through art
and history, and enjoyment of the good things of life – wine, food and summer sun – all intermingled with the war memorials and cemeteries of Flanders’ fields.

Back in school that autumn, the summer’s experiences lent me an unprecedented feeling of self-assurance. As I emerged from my chrysalis, school provided only the palest reflection of the
awareness and self-reliance I had acquired through travelling. Taking my cue from the new forms of satire appearing on television, I, the Head Girl, devised a fashion show for the sixth-form
entertainment, with the difference that all the fashions were constructed from bizarrely adapted items of school uniform. Discipline collapsed as the whole school clamoured for entry on the
staircase outside the hall, and Miss Meiklejohn (otherwise know as Mick), the stocky, weather-beaten games mistress on whose terrifyingly masculine bark the smooth running of the school depended,
was for once reduced to apoplexy, unable to make herself heard in the din. In desperation, she resorted to the megaphone – which usually only came out for a blasting on Sports Day, at the pet
show, and for the purpose of controlling those interminable crocodiles we had to form when marching down through every possible back street of St Albans for the once-termly services in the
Abbey.