Travelling to Infinity (14 page)

The literature of the medieval period attracted me as an area of research, but as our circumstances would not permit me to travel to remote libraries in search of dusty manuscripts, I could not
expect to edit a hitherto undiscovered text. My research would have to take the form of a critical study, using texts that were already published, which would not be difficult considering the
facilities available in Cambridge. I continued to be registered, however, as a student of London University for various good reasons, the most cogent being that Cambridge PhDs were subject to a
fairly strict time limit of three years, whereas there was no such restriction on the London degrees, and it seemed unlikely that I should be able to devote myself uninterruptedly to my thesis.

I did not embark upon my chosen field of research, the medieval lyric poetry of the Iberian Peninsula, straight away because, thanks largely to Stephen, another topic had presented itself as a
subject for a preliminary research paper. As a result of reading
La Celestina
while I was doing my exams, Stephen had come up with a bright idea which he put to me as we were driving back
to Cambridge at the end of Finals week. Had I not realized, he asked, that the ultimate tragedy of death, destruction and despair in the drama was precipitated by the old bawd Celestina’s
rejection of a minor character, Parmeno, a youth who has a mother complex about her? The idea was a fascinating one, which won my supervisor’s amazed approval: he was even more amazed when I
confessed that the idea was Stephen’s. I too was astonished at his powers of perception and invention, which could focus on the essence of a problem in any field, my own included. My task was
to explore and develop the idea and justify the Freudian concept when applied to a text dating from 1499. The most gratifying aspect of the project was that it was a tribute to the success of our
relationship: we were living and working in harmony, supporting each other, participating in each other’s interests, despite the disparity of our chosen subjects, despite attempts to divide
us and despite the inevitable difficulties of Stephen’s worsening disability. We were very happy. We both gained confidence and courage from the strength of our mutual resolve and from our
trust in each other. Then in the early autumn we found that I was expecting a baby.

Following close on the confirmation of the pregnancy came the sad fulfilment of one of the inevitable laws of nature: Stephen’s paternal grandmother, Mrs Hawking senior,
whose acquaintance I had made just a month before, died at the age of ninety-six while Stephen’s parents were away in China on an official tour of the country at the height of the Cultural
Revolution. That August, on a trip north with Stephen, his mother and Edward to visit ageing relatives, I had been introduced to Isobel’s elderly maiden aunts in Edinburgh and, on our return
journey, we had stayed overnight in the Hawking ancestral home in Boroughbridge in Yorkshire.

In the early nineteenth century, the ancestor who had been steward to the Duke of Devonshire and built himself the grand mansion had also amended the surname from the vulgar ’awkins to the
more genteel Hawking. The Hawking Chatsworth, with its sweeping staircase, high ceilings and bay windows, had seen better days. Poor Aunt Muriel managed the vast house alone, while at the same time
attending to her disabled but still imperious mother. Like the house, Mrs Hawking was certainly a shadow of her former self, but it was not hard to discern in her wrinkled features the
determination and fortitude of the woman who had raised five children and saved her family from bankruptcy. She lived in the only room in the house which was still warm and habitable, the drawing
room. The other rooms, including ours with its half-poster bed, were cold, dark, damp and not a little eerie, in spite of Aunt Muriel’s efforts to make them comfortable.

While his parents were away, Stephen’s younger brother Edward stayed with my parents. When he came to Cambridge to spend a weekend with us, he found himself, at the tender age of ten,
obliged to cook his own Sunday lunch – under his brother’s instruction, because I was suddenly laid low with an attack of morning sickness. It lasted all that day and into the next, and
the next, and so on for week after week. An experienced friend suggested that the best cure for morning sickness was a cup of tea first thing in the morning before getting up. This was fine in
theory, but in practice I could not have a cup of tea without getting up to make it myself. My parents came to the rescue with the gift of a tea-making machine. Thereafter I was troubled by few of
the effects of pregnancy and was able to resume my usual routine of study and writing with renewed vigour.

There was no shortage of helpful friends, all of them recent mothers, to advise on the pros and cons of hospitals, nursing homes, health treatments, prophylactic breathing, relaxation classes
and breast-feeding. In despair at my ignorance in such matters, they even left their babies with me for practice sessions in changing nappies, but it all seemed highly theoretical since, on the
whole, the pregnancy was so straightforward and their babies were so well behaved. I was convinced that babies just ate and slept, whimpering a little from time to time.

My own health was unexceptional by comparison with Stephen’s, which was beginning to require some management. Before leaving for China, Frank Hawking had read in a medical journal that a
regular intake of vitamin B tablets might benefit the nervous system, which could also be reinforced by a weekly injection of a preparation called hydroxocobalamin. The vitamin tablets could be
obtained on prescription from Dr Swan, a Bart’s man like Stephen’s father, with whom Stephen was registered in Cambridge – but the weekly injections were more of a problem, since
the surgery was on the other side of Cambridge and, in Stephen’s opinion, a morning spent there waiting for an injection was a morning wasted. We tried it a few times, to Stephen’s
growing irritation. One morning we arrived back home from the surgery at about midday to find Thelma Thatcher out in the lane, broom in hand, engaged in her daily exercise of sweeping the road and
the pavement. Noticing our despondent faces, she called to us, “Dears, dears, what’s the matter?” I explained, and she immediately came up with a solution. “Oh, but
that’s easy! We’ll ask Sister Chalmers to call in on her way from Peterhouse!” She hugged us both and then went off to get in touch with Sister Chalmers, who had kindly lent us
her gas cooker when we moved into Little St Mary’s Lane. At Thelma Thatcher’s instigation, she was now commandeered into giving Stephen his injection at home once a week when she had
finished her college surgery. This in our household coincided more or less with breakfast time.

A similar problem arose when the medical authorities suggested regular physiotherapy to keep Stephen’s joints extended and his muscles active. Already his fingers were beginning to curl,
and he could no longer write, except to sign his name. We attended just one physiotherapy session at Addenbrooke’s, the new hospital on the outskirts of Cambridge, but by the end of it
Stephen was so angry that he declared that he would not squander any more of his precious time waiting around to be treated. It was Dennis Sciama who came to the rescue on this occasion. He
persuaded the Institute of Physics to sponsor twice-weekly domiciliary visits by a private physiotherapist from its benevolent fund. This is when Constance Willis entered our lives.

Constance was one of those stalwart English spinster ladies, cast in the same mould as the jolly-hockey-stick Molly Du Cane, the leader of the St Albans Folk Dance and Song Society – open,
jovial and straightforward of manner. Before coming to stretch Stephen’s muscles at ten o’clock on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, Constance Willis would visit two octogenarian patients
in Trinity College: Mr Gow, the eminent classicist, and the Reverend Simpson, formerly Dean of the College – principally to help them put their socks on.

Between them, Sister Chalmers and Miss Willis minimized the inconvenience to Stephen’s routine, enabling him to work approximately the same hours as any of his colleagues. In reality,
although he might arrive in his office later in the morning than they did, he usually worked later into the evening as well. He would spend long periods deep in thought, and often at weekends would
sit silently wrangling with the equations governing the beginning of the universe, training his brain to memorize long, complicated theorems without the aid of pen or paper. “Celestial
mechanics,” Mr Thatcher called it jokingly. “I suppose your young man is busy with his celestial mechanics?” he would ask if Stephen had passed him in the street without
acknowledging him, a common occurrence which, together with Stephen’s reluctance to expend any effort on polite small talk, tended to offend some of our more sensitive neighbours,
acquaintances and relations, and for which I frequently had to apologize, explaining that Stephen had to put all his concentration into remaining upright.

Bouts of morning sickness had prevented me from attending old Mrs Hawking’s funeral in Yorkshire. In fact I had never yet been to a funeral. That omission was sadly soon to be rectified.
Mary Thatcher, the only daughter of our neighbours, was planning an extended study tour of the Middle East, where she would divide her stay of several months between Israel and Jordan. Just before
her departure that autumn I saw her walking along the lane hand in hand with her father, whose pace had become slower and more halting. They disappeared from view into the churchyard. This poignant
vision of father and daughter struck me forcibly, for it seemed that in those precious moments they were anticipating their final parting. Soon after Mary had left, her father fell ill and was
taken into the nursing home, where he died some weeks later.

As dry leaves danced through the streets before the biting December wind, Stephen and I stood hand in hand at the back of the lofty, cold church of the Holy Trinity, the Low Church which William
Thatcher had attended in preference to the High Anglicanism of Little St Mary’s. The stirring words of the funeral service, intoned as the coffin was carried into the church, sent a chill
shiver down my spine. Watching and listening, I was haunted by the paradox that, in one stroke, death had erased all the learning, the experiences, the heroism, the goodness, the achievements, the
memories of that life from which we were taking our leave, while within me I was carrying the miraculous beginnings of a new life, a blank page on which the long process of learning, experience,
achievements, memories, had still to be written. Beside me stood the child’s father, young and vibrant despite the onset of disability. His general health was good, and his determination to
enjoy life to the full – and to succeed in physics – was gaining strength by the day. Walking was difficult, buttons were a nuisance, mealtimes took longer and the brain had taken over
from pen and paper, but these were mechanical problems which invention and perseverance could overcome. It was unthinkable that he could be a candidate for the sad ceremony we were attending that
day. Death was the tragedy of old age, not of youth.

Youth is essential to the very existence of Cambridge, despite the medieval buildings and the fossilized Fellows who come home to roost in their dusty nooks and crannies. The magnetism of the
place draws in wave upon wave of young people for three years, or if they are lucky six, and then ejects them into the real world, as if rousing them from an enchantment. Many of our early friends
had already gone off to positions in universities all over the globe, and their places were soon filled by new arrivals, some semi-permanent, some transient. One such visitor that autumn was our
quiet American friend whom we had met at Cornell, Robert Boyer. He paid only a brief visit to Cambridge, and after a session in the Department came to dinner with us. He talked about his English
wife and little daughter, and Vietnam, the main preoccupation of Americans in those days, as well as about singularities and physics.

One day not long after Robert’s visit, the radio was blaring out the
News
headlines, while I was preparing lunch and waiting for Stephen to come home. Since his return from Texas,
George Ellis had kindly brought Stephen home at lunchtime on his way to eat at the newly opened University Centre on the riverfront at the end of the lane. I listened intently as the main item
recounted a sniper attack in Austin, Texas. A madman had climbed to the top of the university tower, from where he had shot at the lecturers and students crossing the square below. One of the
victims had been shot dead. The report was all the more horrific on account of the familiarity of the scene. I could picture it in my mind’s eye and realized at once that the sniper’s
targets could well have included some of our acquaintances. Later that day we heard that it was Robert Boyer who was the victim of the sniper’s bullet. This was not death from old age, or
from natural catastrophe like the recent Aberfan disaster in Wales, or from premature illness, it was death at the brutal hand of man. There was a sober truth in those stark words of the funeral
service: “...by man came death...” Shocked and bewildered at such a cruel trick of fate, we searched for a lasting way of expressing our sorrow and our admiration for Robert Boyer.

Robert George was born, weighing six pounds five ounces, at ten o’clock at night on Sunday 28th May 1967, just as Francis Chichester, the lone yachtsman, sailed into
Plymouth harbour to be met by cheering crowds on his return from his round-the-world voyage. Robert’s birth was received with private rejoicing of such intensity that when Stephen went the
next morning to impart the good news to Peck and How Ghee Ang, our neighbours from Singapore who had taken over the house at number 11 from us, he was so overcome with emotion that Peck feared that
I had died in childbirth.

Robert, in his eagerness to come into the world two weeks early, had taken me by surprise. In March, Stephen’s sister Mary, his cousin Julian and I, together with thousands of other
graduates, had all received our BA degrees at the mammoth London University degree ceremony in the Albert Hall, the occasion marred only by the absence of the Chancellor of the University, the
Queen Mother, on account of illness. Afterwards our parents treated us to a memorable party in a splendid venue, the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine, obtained for our use by my
father-in-law.