Travelling to Infinity (11 page)

I was not a little proud, too, to be able make a contribution of my own, other than the purely mechanical one of typing. Stephen’s use of English left much to be desired. His speech was
scattered with expressions such as “you know” and “I mean”, and his written style showed little concern for the English language. As the daughter of a dedicated civil
servant, I had been taught from an early age to use the language precisely, with appreciation for its clarity and its richness. Here was an area where in joining forces with Stephen I could assist
him on an intellectual rather than just the physical plane, and also help bridge the gap between the arts and the sciences.

The weekends were also the time for buying more equipment and furnishings, for exploring Cambridgeshire and for seeing friends. We spent the whole of one Saturday afternoon in an electrical shop
trying to decide whether we could afford the extra five pounds for a larger fridge than the one we had budgeted for. Considering that Stephen’s salary, as we had at last found out, was eleven
hundred pounds a year, while our weekly rent and housekeeping when we were both at home – not counting numerous other outgoings – was ten pounds, an extra five pounds on any purchase
was a major expenditure. On Sunday afternoons, if the Mini could be extricated from the Caius communal garage, we would tour Cambridgeshire, visiting villages and churches, always looking out for a
suitable house or plot of land to buy. Sometimes our expeditions had to be abandoned before they had begun because the Mini was so impossibly hemmed in by ageing Bentleys and Rovers in its corner
of the garage that it would have taken a crane to get it out.

One Sunday afternoon, having manoeuvred the Mini out of the garage, we tried to visit the local National Trust property, Anglesey Abbey. As the car park was a good half mile from the house, I
drove up along the leafy avenue to the main entrance, expecting a sympathetic welcome for my partially disabled passenger. In fact we were met with rude intolerance and sent away. We went straight
home, and I penned my first letter in furious protest, not only at the lack of facilities for the disabled in Britain but also for the scant respect with which they were treated, thus initiating a
role for myself as a campaigner for the disabled.

Often, on our Sunday afternoon jaunts, we would happen to be in the vicinity of some of our married friends at teatime and, clinging to the illusion of a spontaneous student lifestyle, we would
drop in on them. Slightly older than us, many of these friends had already had their first babies. Consequently we found ourselves drawn more and more into their pattern of domesticity, especially
when I became the fascinated and slightly bemused godmother to two of the said babies. Stephen was also being drawn into other circles: those of the Fellowship of Gonville and Caius. One Saturday
evening in early October, I accompanied him as far as the College Chapel for the service for the induction of new Fellows. At the suggestion of the Chaplain, I watched the service from the organ
loft and then he invited me, a mere wife dressed in my housecleaning clothes, to dine at High Table. This was an unprecedented break with the past, as it was a long established rule in Cambridge
colleges that wives – especially wives – were banned from High Table. High Table was the preserve of the Fellows who cultivated self-importance with the same exquisite care that lesser
mortals might be expected to lavish on a prized stamp collection or a breed of racing pigeons. Their conversation revolved around the finer details of the most abstruse subjects – their own
subjects naturally, about which they could expatiate at length while avoiding the embarrassment of having to discuss subjects about which they knew little or nothing. Mistresses were preferred to
dull, silly wives. Indeed a Fellow might invite any woman to dine provided she was not his wife. It went without saying, of course, that, together with wives, undergraduates were also banned from
High Table. Unbeknown to the College authorities, their renegade Chaplain had breached both hallowed rules.

Stephen’s induction was soon followed by his first attendance at a meeting of the governing body of the College. Before he had time to understand what was happening that Friday afternoon,
he found himself deeply embroiled in College politics. To his confusion, he seemed to have walked right into a re-enactment of the C.P. Snow novel,
The Masters
. The only minor difference
was that in the novel the wrangling over the Mastership was deemed to have taken place in Snow’s own college, Christ’s, whereas the scenes that Stephen was witnessing were taking place
in Caius. Here was life imitating art in the most extraordinary manner. As Stephen discovered after the event, the charge against the incumbent Master, Sir Nevill Mott, was that he was using his
position to favour his own protégés. At the time it was impossible to tell what was happening. The governing body was in an uproar, tempers were flaring and immoderate accusations
were being flung about. As a result of a quick calculation, Stephen had the uncomfortable sensation that the votes of the new Fellows might be decisive – indeed his own vote might be the
casting vote – but as they had little idea of what they were voting for, their voting pattern was inevitably arbitrary. Stephen’s introduction to college politics came to a dramatic end
with the resignation of the Master that very afternoon.

During the course of the next year, the ructions over the Mastership crisis subsided as the new Master, Joseph Needham, tearing himself reluctantly away from his gargantuan task of compiling the
history of science in China, guided the College back to stability. Although I found him terse, apart from one memorable occasion when over port in the Combination Room after dinner he expansively
warned me never to drink sweet French wine – Barsac and suchlike – because of its high disulphide content, his distinguished wife Dorothy was to give me invaluable help in securing a
foothold for myself in Cambridge academic circles. She, notwithstanding all her scientific brilliance, was one of the most modest, likeable academics I ever met.

On the strength of his thesis, Stephen was gaining a reputation for himself as a prodigy in his field. In response to his share in the coveted Adams Prize with Roger Penrose
that winter, for an essay in mathematics entitled
Singularities and the Geometry of Space-Time
, his supervisor Dennis Sciama assured me that he was sure Stephen had a career of Newtonian
proportions ahead of him and that he would do all he could to encourage its progress. He was as good as his word. For all his ebullience, Dennis Sciama selflessly promoted his students’
careers rather than his own. His desire to understand the workings of the universe was more passionate than any personal ambition. By sending his students off to conferences and meetings, whether
in London or abroad, and by making them scrutinize and report back on every relevant publication, he dramatically increased his own fund of knowledge as well as theirs, and succeeded in nurturing a
generation of exceptional cosmologists, relativists, astrophysicists, applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists. The distinction between these various terms was never quite clear to me,
except that the identities changed according to the titles of the conferences: they would all become astrophysicists if the next conference was a conference of the Astrophysical Union or
relativists if it was a General Relativity conference, and so on. That autumn the relativists of the July conference in London began, chameleon-like, to adopt the trappings of astrophysicists in
preparation for the next conference, in Miami Beach in December.

It was fairly late in the term when Stephen learnt that funds were available for us both to go to Miami. I was doubtful about taking time off from Westfield, even though I would only be missing
a couple of days at the end of term, but surprisingly Professor Varey raised no objections, so on a dull December afternoon, after a long wait for the fog to lift at London airport, we took off. It
was already dark in Florida when we arrived, so it was not until the next morning that we discovered that our hotel room was right on the beach, looking out over the turquoise waters of the
Caribbean. Having just stepped out of cold wet London after a hard term’s work, I marvelled at the unreality, the improbability of the situation, as though I had walked into a different
dimension, through the looking glass perhaps. This impression was to grow as the stay progressed. The blue skies and sunshine were certainly welcome, especially since Stephen’s choking fits
were becoming more frequent, and his sister Mary had earnestly advised me to take him away somewhere warm for the winter. At least by a happy chance we had the prospect of a week in the sun.

On the opening day, Stephen, together with his casually dressed colleagues, disappeared into the preliminary sessions of the conference, while I explored the venue. The hotel, built in a curve
around the swimming pool, looked remarkably familiar. Was this a sense of déjà vu, I asked myself, for I was sure that I had seen it somewhere before. Suddenly it dawned on me that
this was the hotel where the opening shots of
Goldfinger
, the James Bond thriller, were filmed. It was in a room in that hotel that the girl had died of asphyxiation after being covered
from head to toe with gold paint! The Hotel Fontainbleau was a modern concrete structure with marble floors, plate glass and huge mirrors covering whole walls. In deference to its name, it was
furnished in every nook and cranny with Louis XV-style furniture.

The furnishings were not the least of the incongruities, since the astrophysics conference was a major incongruity in itself. The smartly dressed hotel staff looked distinctly uncomfortable with
the delegates, who were by no means models of sartorial elegance in their open-necked shirts, shorts and sandals. One day I ventured into the conference hall, intending to sit in for a while on one
of the lectures. At first I was perplexed, not seeing any recognizable faces in the audience, then I noticed that the dress of the delegates bore no relation to the clothing the physicists had been
wearing at breakfast, in that these people were all dressed in dark suits with ties, their hair neatly brushed and brilliantined, with not a trace of a beard anywhere. I listened to the speaker
only for a moment before realizing that this was a conference of Jewish funeral directors promoting biodegradable plastic coffins.

From the exotic colours and summer sun of Miami we flew into autumn – to Austin, Texas, a small university town which in the mid-Sixties was trumpeted in the press as the home of the
brightest and best in cosmology. George Ellis, who travelled with us from Miami, was spending a year in Austin with his wife, Sue, whom I had met briefly at our wedding. As we were to stay with the
Ellises for a week, this was my opportunity to get to know them both better and forge the beginning of a lifelong friendship which would survive the vicissitudes of many turbulent episodes in all
our lives. Pensive and reserved, George was the son of a much respected former editor of the
Rand Daily Mail
, a paper acclaimed for its resistance to apartheid in South Africa. It was at
Cape Town University that Sue, the daughter of a traditional Rhodesian farming family, had met George. Both George and Sue were fierce opponents of apartheid and had become self-imposed political
exiles from South Africa, insisting that they could never think of returning to live there. Where George was thoughtful and introverted, Sue was outgoing without being overpowering, vivacious yet
sensitive to the needs of others. A talented artist and sculptor, she bubbled with warmth and creativity, qualities which she was putting at the disposal of a school for deprived children near
Austin. Among her pupils were not merely the victims of broken homes and physical abuse, some were even tiny black child prostitutes who had been rescued from the Chicago slums and brought to Texas
for rehabilitation. It was not hard to imagine what an asset Sue must have been to that particular school, for she had a way of making a fascinating artefact out of the smallest twist of paper,
length of wire or handful of matchsticks, and her caring friendliness made her instantly popular among children who from an early age had learnt to mistrust adults.

In creating a structure to her life in Texas, Sue appeared to be the exception rather than the rule among science wives. For them there was little of any interest apart from the Max Beerbohm
manuscripts and cartoons in the university library, and the gridlike streets of opulent houses in a landscape dominated by black-billed crane-like oil pumps, nodding up and down as they extracted
the liquid gold from the yellow earth. The feeling of remoteness from the rest of civilization was overwhelming in an environment where even radio reception was a chancy thing. This sense of
isolation was reinforced by the length of time, all of twenty hours, it took Stephen and me to get back to London via Houston and Chicago, where we were stranded for hours by snow on the
runway.

Though Stephen may have harboured ambitions of joining the physics group in Austin, one salutary experience made me more than glad to put America, for all the advantages of its southern climate,
behind us once more. We were visiting friends of the Ellises one Sunday afternoon when Stephen had a bad fall, which resulted in his coughing up a spot of blood. As his worst fear was brain damage,
he insisted on our hosts calling a doctor. Their consternation was remarkable. They were embarrassed that their guest had had a fall, but it was truly unheard of for doctors to home-visit,
especially on a Sunday afternoon, and they doubted very much whether they would be able to persuade any doctor to come. After a long succession of telephone calls, they were finally put in touch
with a general practitioner who, as an exception, agreed to come and inspect Stephen. When he arrived he received right royal treatment. As he conducted his tests, which indicated nothing amiss, I
concluded that America was a fine place for the healthy and successful, but for the strugglers and the infirm, for the people who, through no fault of their own but through accidents of birth,
prejudice or illness were less able to help themselves, it was a harsh society where only the fittest survived.