Travelling to Infinity (31 page)

My father was due to retire from the Ministry of Agriculture on his sixtieth birthday in December 1974 after a long and dedicated career, and he and my mother planned to
celebrate his retirement by coming out to stay with us in California. In the meantime we had a constant stream of visitors, some of whom stayed for a weekend or so while others, like Peter
De’Ath, Stephen’s PhD student, took up residence and helped Bernard with Stephen’s care, until he found his own accommodation. I grew more confident at driving and did not find
shopping for so many visitors a strain, because all the purchases were neatly packed into brown paper (not plastic) sacks and carried out to the car for me by smiling assistants. Moreover Robert
– aged seven – was a brilliant navigator: he seemed to carry the freeway map in his head and, unlike his father, told me where to turn off well in advance.

On the children’s first morning at the Pasadena Town and Country School, I delivered them somewhat apprehensively to the school gate, then at noon I returned to pick up Lucy from the
nursery department and joined the car queue of waiting mothers, sidling round the block in their automobiles. As I edged to the school gate, I gave her name to the teacher standing guard on the
pavement and he hailed her over the loudspeaker:“Loossee Hokking, Loossee Hokking!” he bellowed. No one came forwards and there was no sign of Loossee Hokking among the crowd of small
children waiting patiently inside. A great commotion ensued. Could Loossee Hokking have been kidnapped – the worst fear of the school – on her first day? The place was in chaos. I
parked the car and went in. The Principal came running out of her office and a bevy of middle-aged ladies scattered in all directions in frantic search of the lost infant. Loossee Hokking was not
hard to find. She had liked school so much that she had taken herself off to lunch and was intending to stay until two-thirty. Thereafter she came out of school, sometimes temperamentally, a bit
the worse for wear, as it was a long day for a three-year-old.

The children found a new friend in Shu, the eight-year-old son of our Japanese neighbours, Ken and Hiroko Naka, who had lived for some time in Cambridge before moving to the United States. Ken
was a biologist, specializing in catfish eyes, some sort of scientific oddity closely resembling the human eye. The Nakas not only took Robert and Lucy to school every morning after that first day,
they also planned all sorts of expeditions to fun parks and beaches for the three children. As I found out when I collected the children from school in the afternoon, Shu’s conversation was
peppered with computer jargon. While Lucy babbled on irrepressibly, Shu conducted his own monologue at which Robert nodded knowingly; doubtless attracted by this, his first introduction to
information technology, the science that would eventually become his career. Delighting in his new-found independence, Stephen also secretly rejoiced in being the star of the campus – where
he sat in an air-conditioned office all day. Ramps appeared everywhere on campus as well as in the driveway to the house. He had his own secretary, Polly Grandmontagne, and a regular
physiotherapist, Sylvie Teschke, whose husband, a Swiss watchmaker, was anxiously anticipating the end of his livelihood with the advent of quartz watches. Bernard Carr, Stephen’s student,
began to settle into the routine of our household, unfailingly cheerful despite his somewhat erratic regime, which consisted of helping me put Stephen to bed at night then going out to parties,
after which he would sit up till the early hours watching horror movies on account, he said, of his insomnia – and then he would sleep till lunchtime. Once I went upstairs to rouse him in the
middle of the morning and found him sleeping soundly with his body in the bed and his head on the floor!

That autumn Mary Thatcher came on a tour of the United States, to lecture on her newly released film archive of the lives of the British in India. Like all our visitors we took her to the local
attraction, the Huntington Gardens and Gallery, founded by Mr Huntington who had made his money on the railways and married his aunt to keep it in the family. Her portrait suggests that he paid a
rather heavy price for the privilege, but the accumulation of wealth enabled him to purchase Constable’s
View on the Stour
, various Chaucerian manuscripts and the Gutenberg Bible
among other notable works for his Gallery, as well as establishing a beautiful garden. The garden was divided into fascinating specialized geographical and botanical areas: a viciously prickly
desert-cactus garden, an Australian area with eucalyptus trees but no kangaroos, a jungle area, row upon row of camellias, a Shakespearean knot garden, a classical Japanese garden complete with
bridge, tea house, and gongs, and a mysteriously philosophical Zen garden – mostly raked gravel dotted about with a few significantly sited rocks. In fact some of the best of European art was
to be found within easy reach. If it were not in the Huntington Gallery, it would be in the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum at Malibu, or Hearst Castle on the way up to
San Francisco. Sometimes I felt quite sentimental if not a little homesick on seeing European art, particular the Constable, in the brash brightness of California. There was little room for those
subtleties of life that we knew so well, the grey skies, the respectable shabbiness, the crumbling buildings, the diffidence, the snobbery. The Californian skies, the colours, the landscape, the
people, their behaviour and their use of language I found starkly well-defined, honest and devoid of nuance. As for the food, it was gargantuan, but so stuffed with additives that we were glad to
be able to grow some of our own fruit. Fifty-two avocado pears fell off the tree one weekend in October when we were away in Santa Barbara. We hurriedly picked them all up on our return and stored
them in the bottom of the fridge to save them from the weekly cleansing operation by the gardeners.

That November I wrote to warn Mum and Dad what to expect.

In early December, Stephen went off with his entourage to the conference in Dallas. While the children and I were alone in the house, I awoke one night to find the bed and the
floor shaking beneath me. Our instructions were that we should run to the porch in the event of an earthquake, but I was too terrified to move, literally petrified. When finally I recovered my
senses, I ran upstairs to see if the children were all right and was astonished to find them both sound asleep. I went back to bed, turned out the light and then it happened again. Even the
aftershock was tremendous, quite unlike the little tremors that rattled windows regularly each afternoon. However, had there been earthquakes at Christmas, we probably should not have noticed them
(just as Stephen failed to notice a major earthquake in Persia in 1962 because he was travelling cross-country on a bus at the time and was suffering from dysentery). Mum and Dad, George Ellis and
Stephen on their return from Dallas, and Stephen’s sister Philippa arrived in the middle of consecutive nights, and then we gave a party for forty or so friends and colleagues, who enjoyed
themselves so much that they stayed till after 2 a.m. To prove it, we have a photo of a very distinguished elderly physicist, Willy Fowler, practising yoga on the living-room floor at 2 a.m.
precisely!

Sixteen people came to Christmas dinner, which meant that the children had a ready-made audience for their conjuring show. Robert was given a conjuring set and he, with his ebullient assistant,
regaled us with a winningly innocent first attempt at sleight of hand – a change from the constant diet of riddles and jokes which bemused us and kept the children in ecstasies of laughter.
The contrast between his quasi-professional opening gambit – “If you want to ask questions, please ask them after the show and not before it” – and the disarray in his box
of tricks, his pleasure when a trick actually worked and his suppressed irritation at his show-stealing assistant, not to mention his gaping toothless smile, were very endearing.

After Christmas and the Pasadena Parade on New Year’s Day, we summoned the energy to take the family to Disneyland for a day. The queues were long and the children managed to ride on only
two attractions each. We did have a good vantage point for the lavishly produced Disneyland parade though, but even that was a bit of a disaster because it was Lucy’s misfortune to be offered
an apple by the Wicked Witch in the Snow White section. She was so terrified that she hid behind my skirts. Then early in the New Year we drove over to Death Valley, the desert park, 300 miles to
the north-east. It was a great relief to have my parents with me to share the driving, to help with loading Stephen and the wheelchair – not to mention the batteries – into the car, and
to keep the children entertained while I attended to Stephen. We were awed by the weird primeval landscape, a giants’ playground where the Valley floor is littered with sand dunes here,
volcanic craters there, and scree and sand-coloured rock protuberances everywhere. Vast salt flats below sea level are all that remain of a deep ice-age lake. On all sides the Valley is enclosed by
rugged snowcapped mountains, which in their many-hued stratifications bear witness to enormous geological upheavals in the dawn of time. In summer Death Valley is said to be the hottest desert in
the world and is almost barren of vegetation: only cacti, desert holly and the creosote plant survive among its hostile rocks and stones, and only the tiny, prehistoric pupfish can withstand the
extreme saltiness of its few shallow creeks. Constantly changing colour with the movement of the sun, the landscape is magnificent but not beautiful. The sorry tales of the pioneers who tried to
cross the Valley in 1849 and the ghost-town remnants of the gold prospectors’ dreams, together with the sterility and silence of the place, invest it with a menacing and forbidding
atmosphere. My mother remarked how dynamic, tough and persevering those pioneers must have been and added that we shouldn’t be surprised to find those same qualities in modern Californians,
especially the women, the descendants of those pioneers.