Travelling to Infinity (2 page)

That term long ago in the autumn of 1962 was not supposed to be about putting on shows. It was supposed to be about university entrance. Sadly it was not a success for me in academic terms.
However great our adulation for President Kennedy, the Cuban missile crisis that October had well and truly shaken the sense of security of my generation and dashed our hopes for the future. With
the superpowers playing such dangerous games with our lives, it was not at all certain that we had any future to look forward to. As we prayed for peace in school assembly under the direction of
the Dean, I remembered a prediction made by Field Marshall Montgomery in the late Fifties that there would be a nuclear war within a decade. Everyone, young and old alike, knew that we would have
just four minutes’ warning of a nuclear attack, which would spell the abrupt end of all civilization. My mother’s comment, calmly philosophical and sensible as ever, at the prospect of
a third world war in her lifetime, was that she would much rather be obliterated with everything and everyone else than endure the agony of seeing her husband and son conscripted for warfare from
which they would never return.

Quite apart from the almighty threat of the international scene, I felt that I had burnt myself out with the A-level exams and lacked enthusiasm for school work after my taste of freedom in the
summer. The serious business of university entrance held only humiliation when neither Oxford nor Cambridge expressed any interest in me. It was all the more painful because my father had been
cherishing the hope that I would gain a place at Cambridge since I was about six years old. Aware of my sense of failure, Miss Gent, the Headmistress, sympathetically went to some lengths to point
out that there was no disgrace in not getting a place at Cambridge, because many of the men at that university were far inferior intellectually to the women who had been turned away for want of
places. In those days the ratio was roughly ten men to one woman at Oxford and Cambridge. She recommended taking up the offer of an interview at Westfield College, London, a women’s college
on the Girtonian model, situated in Hampstead at some distance from the rest of the University. Thus one cold, wet December day, I set off from St Albans by bus for the fifteen-mile journey to
Hampstead.

The day was such a disaster that it was a relief at the end of it to be on the bus home again, travelling through the same bleak, grey sleet and snow of the outward journey. After the
uncomfortable exercise in the Spanish Department of bluffing my way through an interview which seemed to hinge entirely on T.S. Eliot, about whom I knew next to nothing, I was sent to join the
queue outside the Principal’s study. When my turn came, she brought the style of a former civil servant to the interview, scarcely looking up from her papers over her horn-rimmed spectacles.
Feeling exceedingly ruffled from the fiasco of the earlier interview, I decided it was better to make her notice me even if in the process I ruined my chances. So when in a bored, dry voice, she
asked, “And why have you put down Spanish rather than French as your main language?”, I answered in an equally bored, dry voice, “Because Spain is hotter than France.” Her
papers fell from her hands and she did indeed look up.

To my astonishment, I was offered a place at Westfield, but by that Christmas much of the optimism and enthusiasm that I had discovered in Spain had worn thin. When Diana invited me to a New
Year’s party which she was giving with her brother on 1st January 1963, I went along, neatly dressed in a dark-green silky outfit – synthetic, of course – with my hair
back-brushed in an extravagant bouffant roll, inwardly shy and very unsure of myself. There, slight of frame, leaning against the wall in a corner with his back to the light, gesticulating with
long thin fingers as he spoke – his hair falling across his face over his glasses – and wearing a dusty black-velvet jacket and red-velvet bow tie, stood Stephen Hawking, the young man
I had seen lolloping along the street in the summer.

Standing apart from the other groups, he was talking to an Oxford friend, explaining that he had begun research in cosmology in Cambridge – not, as he had hoped, under the auspices of Fred
Hoyle, the popular television scientist, but with the unusually named Dennis Sciama. At first, Stephen had thought his unknown supervisor’s name was
Skeearma
, but on his arrival in
Cambridge he had discovered that the correct pronunciation was
Sharma
. He admitted that he had learnt with some relief, the previous summer – when I was doing A levels – that
he had gained a First Class degree at Oxford. This was the happy result of a viva, an oral exam, conducted by the perplexed examiners to decide whether the singularly inept candidate whose papers
also revealed flashes of brilliance should be given a First, an Upper Second or a Pass degree, the latter being tantamount to failure. He nonchalantly informed the examiners that if they gave him a
First he would go to Cambridge to do a PhD, thus giving them the opportunity of introducing a Trojan horse into the rival camp, whereas if they gave him an Upper Second (which would also allow him
to do research), he would stay in Oxford. The examiners played for safety and gave him a First.

Stephen went on to explain to his audience of two, his Oxford friend and me, how he had also taken steps to play for safety, realizing that it was extremely unlikely that he would get a First at
Oxford on the little work he had done. He had never been to a lecture – it was not the done thing to be seen working when friends called – and the legendary tale of his tearing up a
piece of work and flinging it into his tutor’s wastepaper basket on leaving a tutorial is quite true. Fearing for his chances in academia, Stephen had applied to join the Civil Service and
had passed the preliminary stages of selection at a country-house weekend, so he was all set to take the Civil Service exams just after Finals. One morning he woke late as usual, with the niggling
feeling that there was something he ought to be doing that day, apart from his normal pursuit of listening to his taped recording of the entire
Ring Cycle
. As he did not keep a diary but
trusted everything to memory, he had no way of finding out what it was until some hours later, when it dawned on him that that day was the day of the Civil Service exams.

I listened in amused fascination, drawn to this unusual character by his sense of humour and his independent personality. His tales made very appealing listening, particularly because of his way
of hiccoughing with laughter, almost suffocating himself, at the jokes he told, many of them against himself. Clearly here was someone, like me, who tended to stumble through life and managed to
see the funny side of situations. Someone who, like me, was fairly shy, yet not averse to expressing his opinions; someone who unlike me had a developed sense of his own worth and had the
effrontery to convey it. As the party drew to a close, we exchanged names and addresses, but I did not expect to see him again, except perhaps casually in passing. The floppy hair and the bow tie
were a façade, a statement of independence of mind, and in future I could afford to overlook them, as Diana had, rather than gape in astonishment, if I came across him again in the
street.

Only a couple of days later, a card came from Stephen, inviting me to a party on 8th January. It was written in a beautiful copperplate hand which I envied but, despite
laborious efforts, had never mastered. I consulted Diana, who had also received an invitation. She said that the party was for Stephen’s twenty-first birthday – information not conveyed
on the invitation – and she promised to come and pick me up. It was difficult to choose a present for someone I had only just met, so I took a record token.

The house in Hillside Road, St Albans, was a monument to thrift and economy. Not that that was unusual in those days, because in the postwar era we were all brought up to treat money with
respect, to search out bargains and to avoid waste. Built in the early years of the twentieth century, 14 Hillside Road, a vast red-brick three-storey house, had a certain charm about it, since it
was preserved entirely in its original state, with no interference from modernizing trends, such as central heating or wall-to-wall carpeting. Nature, the elements and a family of four children had
all left their marks on the shabby façade which hid behind an unruly hedge. Wisteria overhung the decrepit glass porch, and much of the coloured glass in the leaded diamond panes of the
upper panels of the front door was missing. Although no immediate response came from pressing the bell, the door was eventually opened by the same person who used to wait wrapped in a fur coat by
the zebra crossing. She was introduced to me as Isobel Hawking, Stephen’s mother. She was accompanied by an enchanting small boy with dark curly hair and bright blue eyes. Behind them a
single light bulb illuminated a long yellow-tiled hallway, heavy furniture – including a grandfather clock – and the original, now darkened, William-Morris wallpaper.

As different members of the family began to appear round the living-room door to greet the new arrivals, I discovered that I knew them all: Stephen’s mother was well known from her vigils
by the crossing; his young brother, Edward, was evidently the small boy in the pink cap; the sisters, Mary and Philippa, were recognizable from school, and the tall, white-haired, distinguished
father of the family, Frank Hawking, had once come to collect a swarm of bees from our own back garden. My brother Chris and I had wanted to watch, but to our disappointment he had shooed us away
with a gruff taciturnity. In addition to being the city’s only beekeeper, Frank Hawking must also have been one of the few people in St Albans to own a pair of skis. In winter he would ski
down the hill past our house on his way to the golf course, where we used to picnic and gather bluebells in spring and summer and toboggan on tin trays in winter. It was like fitting a jigsaw
together: all these people were individually quite familiar to me, but I had never realized that they were related. Indeed there was yet another member of that household whom I recognized: she
lodged in her own self-contained room in the attic, but came down to join in family occasions such as this. Agnes Walker, Stephen’s Scottish grandmother, was a well-known figure in St Albans
in her own right on account of her prowess at the piano, publicly displayed once a month when she joined forces in the Town Hall with Molly Du Cane, our splendidly jolly-hockey-sticks folk-dance
leader.

Dancing and tennis had been just about my only social activities throughout my teenage years. Through them, I had acquired a group of friends of both sexes from various schools and differing
backgrounds. Out of school we went everywhere in a crowd – coffee on Saturday mornings, tennis in the evenings and socials at the tennis club in summer, ballroom-dancing classes and folk
dancing in the winter. The fact that our mothers also attended the folk-dance evenings along with many of St Albans’ elderly and infirm population did not embarrass us at all. We sat apart
and danced in our own sets, well out of the way of the older generation. Romances blossomed occasionally in our corner, giving rise to plenty of gossip and a few squabbles, then usually faded as
quickly as they had bloomed. We were an easygoing, friendly bunch of teenagers, leading simpler lives than our modern counterparts, and the atmosphere at the dances was carefree and wholesome,
inspired by Molly Du Cane’s infectious enthusiasm for her energetic art. Fiddle on her shoulder, she called the dances with authority, while Stephen’s grandmother, her corpulent frame
upright at the grand piano, applied her fingers with nimble artistry to the ivories, not once allowing the sausage bang of tight curls on her forehead to become ruffled. An august figure, she would
turn to survey the dancers with a curiously impassive stare. She, of course, came downstairs to greet the guests at Stephen’s twenty-first birthday party.

The party consisted of a mixture of friends and relations. A few hailed from Stephen’s Oxford days, but most had been his contemporaries or near contemporaries at St Albans School and had
contributed to that school’s success in the Oxbridge entrance exams of 1959. At seventeen, Stephen had been younger than his peer group at school, and consequently was rather young for
university entrance that autumn, especially as many of his fellow undergraduates were not just one year older than him, but older by several years because they had all come up to Oxford after doing
National Service, which had since been abolished. Later Stephen admitted that he failed to get the best out of Oxford because of the difference in age between him and his fellow undergraduates.

Certainly he maintained closer ties with his school friends than with any acquaintances from Oxford. Apart from Basil King, Diana’s brother, I knew them only by repute as the new elite of
St Albans’ society. They were said to be the intellectual adventurers of our generation, passionately dedicated to a critical rejection of every truism, to the ridicule of every trite or
clichéd remark, to the assertion of their own independence of thought and to the exploration of the outer reaches of the mind. Our local paper,
The Herts Advertiser
, had trumpeted
the success of the school four years earlier, splashing their names and faces across its pages. Whereas I was just about to embark on my undergraduate career, their student years were now already
behind them. They were, of course, very different from my friends, and I, a bright but ordinary eighteen-year-old, felt intimidated. None of this crowd would ever spend their evenings folk-dancing.
Painfully aware of my own lack of sophistication, I settled in a corner as close to the fire as possible with Edward on my knee and listened to the conversation, not attempting to participate. Some
people were seated, others leant against the wall of the large chilly dining room, where the only source of heat was from a glass-fronted stove. The conversation was halting and consisted mostly of
jokes, none of which were even remotely as highbrow as I was expecting. The only part of it I can remember was not a joke, but a riddle, about a man in New York who wanted to get to the fiftieth
floor of a building but only took the lift to the forty-sixth. Why? Because he was not tall enough to reach the button for the fiftieth floor...