Travelling to Infinity (33 page)

With a few modifications, the ground floor at 5 West Road could be made very suitable for us, especially because it consisted of a sufficient number of large, well-lit rooms to accommodate the
whole family, plus all the other necessary facilities, still leaving space to spare for parties for all ages. It was further from the Department than Little St Mary’s Lane, but not
inconveniently far, and was about the same distance from the primary school that Lucy would be attending. The gardens offered scope for parties and games of all descriptions – particularly
cricket, practised with the greatest reluctance at St Albans High School, but now vital to the proper upbringing of my son. The house had been vaguely threatened with demolition in the early
Seventies, I remembered, when the land on which it stood had been earmarked as the possible location for a new college, Robinson College. However, the site was too small and the house was spared.
And only five years or so previously 5 West Road had been a thriving family hotel, the West House Hotel, but when its lease ran out the College had taken it over for use as undergraduate
accommodation. The students had been given free rein to choose their own colour schemes, and the once fine Victorian dining room now had a black ceiling and scarlet walls. This did not upset me
unduly as paint was superficial and easily changed. I was much more impressed by the dimensions of the house, so at the end of our tour I opted for the West House without hesitation – and,
incidentally, effectively silenced the faction in the College which wanted to demolish any building, including that house, which had been built before 1960. Negotiations proceeded without a hitch
and it was agreed that, on our return from California in 1975, we would occupy the ground floor. In part exchange for the rent, the College would have the use of our own house in Little St
Mary’s Lane for Fellows, since the College had relaxed its rules to allow Fellows to rent accommodation.

During our absence, partition walls were erected on the staircase to screen the ground floor from the undergraduates upstairs; the newly created flat was redecorated throughout, and ramps were
built at the front and at the garden doors. In directing these operations from California, I enlisted the support of a courageous young man, Toby Church, who as a student had been struck down by a
paralysing illness which had deprived him of the power of speech and the use of his legs. Toby had employed his engineering expertise to adapt his environment to his needs so that he could look
after himself – with a little help from nurses – and also to build his own invention, the Lightwriter, a small, laptop keyboard with a digital screen into which he could type his
speech. Unfortunately, the invention was not of much help to Stephen since operating the keyboard required too much dexterity, and Toby was not particularly interested in electric wheelchairs since
he was concerned to keep his arm muscles in good shape by propelling himself around under his own steam. But as my intermediary, Toby propelled himself round to West Road many times in the course
of the summer of 1975. On our return from California, it was a pleasure to move into such lovely surroundings. For all the sixteen years of our occupancy, we were conscious of our good fortune in
being able to live in that house. The rooms were vast and high-ceilinged, with decorative plaster cornices and delicately embossed central roses around the light fittings. The tall sash windows
gave onto a true English lawn, framed with carefully chosen conifers and deciduous trees: dark, forbidding yew mingled with the light fronds of willow. A giant sequoia – a Californian
redwood, evidently a sapling newly introduced to Europe when the house was built – towered above the tumbledown conservatory at one corner of the building, communing with its partner, a
Thuja plicata
or western red cedar of comparable height at the far end of the lawn. The gnarled old apple tree faithfully produced its blossoms and its crop with such abundance that every
two years the ground beneath would be carpeted with an excess of cooking apples from October to December. “Not stewed apple again!” the children would chorus at the supper table while
their father would grin in mischievous collusion. Eventually he decided that he was allergic to stewed fruit, but that was not an excuse that the children were allowed to get away with.

In summer we would hang a hammock, swings and climbing ropes from the branches of the apple tree and listen to the twittering of the fledgling blackbirds inside its hollow trunk. To the left of
the apple tree, in full view of the living-room window, lay the gracefully curving herbaceous border with its backdrop of flowering trees and bushes, lilac, almond and hawthorn. Even in the depths
of the harshest winter, the beauty of the garden was still magical. Late one night after a persistent snowfall, I peered out through the heavy curtains and shivered in wonder at the transformation
of the dank, brown winter garden outside. The full moon in a cloudless sky illuminated a glistening blanket of snow, covering lawn and trees with an enchanted, dazzling purity.

In its prime, the garden must have been a splendid sight. Despite the rampant goosegrass and pervasive ground elder, it still conveyed hints of its former glory in its myriad collection of
perennials. Like the trees, they must have been planted as part of an overall scheme, perhaps as much as a century ago when the house was built. I tried to supplement the efforts of the
hard-pressed College gardeners with a little weeding and planting in an attempt to subdue the goosegrass. Jeremy Prynne, a colleague of Stephen’s in the Fellowship and College librarian,
applauded my efforts and proposed that I should be elected to the College gardening committee since, as he remarked, many of its members could not distinguish a dandelion from a daffodil. However
his proposal was rejected out-of-hand because it was inconceivable that a non-Fellow, let alone a wife, should be elected to a College committee.

From the time of our arrival in the autumn of 1975, the house, like the garden, was to lend itself enthusiastically to countless parties. There were the family celebrations, the birthday parties
and the Christmas dinners. There were also the duty occasions – fundraising events as I became drawn into charity work, coffee mornings and musical evenings, departmental parties, parties for
the beginning and the end of the academic year, conference receptions and dinners. In summer, there were tea parties (again usually for conferences, mostly of visiting American and Russian
scientists) on the lawn with cucumber sandwiches and croquet, and there were the folk-dance evenings, barbecue suppers and firework parties. Such occasions were fun and they were usually
appreciated, but it was hard work since I did not receive any help with the catering until years later. It was scarcely surprising that sometimes the unofficial companions of the official guests,
the hangers-on, mistook me in my working apron for a college servant, and condescendingly demanded another glass of wine or another sandwich with scant respect, not realizing that I was the
hostess.

We appeared to live in privileged surroundings, but there were disadvantages. Despite our occupancy, the house remained under threat of demolition. After the completion of the renovations
carried out for our benefit, only minimal maintenance work was authorized. In winter, the central heating system, based on the original Victorian radiators, was scarcely adequate when the north
wind blew snow through the gaps in the ill-fitting doors and windows. At one stage the gas fires, used to supplement the radiators, were found to be emitting more fumes into the rooms than they
were sending up the chimneys. The wiring consisted of an eccentric combination of modern sockets fitted onto old wires of which no one knew the provenance.

Much more alarmingly, ceilings tended to crash to the ground with disturbing regularity, even though my father, with his catastrophic history of provoking the gravitational collapse of many a
ceiling, was nowhere in the vicinity. By the grace of God, the damage was never more than material. One July night in 1978 the living-room ceiling lost its key and descended with an almighty thud
amid a cloud of grime and plaster dust, smashing the stereo system to smithereens in the room beneath and sending the chandelier into a spin. Fortunately we had just gone to bed and the children
were sleeping safely in their rooms. Equally luckily, no one was in the bath when a little later the bathroom ceiling also came down.

Outside, the roof regularly shed its tiles. This latter hazard was rectified thanks to a timely visit by His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, who
came to pay Stephen a private visit in June 1982. So afraid were we that a tile might crash onto the royal pate as His Highness entered the front door that I asked for a protective screen of
netting to be put round the guttering. The point was taken and, some months later, the building was reroofed. Thanks to the royal visit we also acquired new bathroom fittings.

We were not the sole residents of the house since we occupied only the ground floor. Students, who had a separate entrance, lived on the upper floors, and mice lived in the dark depths of the
cellar among the equipment belonging to the University Caving Club. The mice kept their distance after Lucy acquired a predatory cat, but it was less easy to attain a satisfactory modus vivendi
with the students. As individuals they were as delightfully a friendly bunch as one could hope to meet, as we discovered on those occasions when we invited them in for a drink, or met them on the
lawn in the middle of the night when the intermittent fault in the fire alarm roused the whole house for no good reason. But inevitably, the students’ lifestyle, their routine and their
habits were often at odds with ours. At times their presence made itself felt in a more tangible form than just loud noises and bumps in the night. About once a year someone would leave the
bathwater running in the student bathroom upstairs, just above our kitchen. The last time this happened, I arrived home at lunchtime with a quarter of an hour to spare before the expected arrival
of some cousins of Stephen’s from New Zealand. I could hear the rush of flowing water the moment I turned my key in the door and smelt a musty dankness as I crossed the hall to the kitchen.
The floor was already under a layer of water and the best plates and bowls, put out ready on the worktop, were collecting dirty puddles. The cheese, tomatoes, lettuce and bread swam in warm, grey
pools, as more water poured through the ceiling and trickled down the light fitting…

Such drawbacks had not yet come to our notice however when, in September 1975, my mother and I cleaned out 6 Little St Mary’s Lane before handing it over to the College, and I arranged the
removal of our possessions to 5 West Road. Post-California our circumstances changed dramatically. We had come back to England to living quarters which were more akin to a mini-stately home, or a
Master’s Lodge, and Stephen was assured of his first official post in the University, a Readership, since while we were away a rumour had circulated in Cambridge that we were considering
staying in California for good. Immediately the old biblical adage about a prophet being without honour in his own country proved itself and the Readership, later to be superseded by a personal
Chair, materialized. Far from wanting Stephen to go, as had been predicted once by a senior don, the University had actually been impatient for his return.

The Readership brought with it the much-needed services of a secretary – in the form of Judy Fella, who introduced a fresh vitality and an unaccustomed glamour to the drab realms of the
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. Judy worked for Stephen for many years with tireless loyalty and efficiency. At last there was someone to take over the administration of
his official life in England, just as Polly Grandmontagne had done in California. She typed his papers, including the hieroglyphs, dealt with his correspondence, organized his conferences, arranged
his travels and applied for his visas, all of which amounted to a full-time occupation since he was now much in demand with celebrity status.

America was not unique in its adulation of success. In a more discreet fashion, cloaked in a diffident respectability, the same attitude prevailed in Britain. Afraid of being outdone in the
scramble to acknowledge the brilliant scientific star blazing across their horizons, successive scientific institutions took their lead from each other and awarded Stephen their most prestigious
medals. On many an occasion over the course of the next few years, my parents would come over to Cambridge in time to meet the children from school while I picked Stephen up from the Department,
loaded him and the wheelchair into the car, and then set off for some smart London hotel – the Savoy, the Dorchester or the Grosvenor – where the evening’s presentation dinner was
to take place. Sometimes we were given overnight accommodation and that eased the strain on me since I was chauffeur, nurse, valet, cup-bearer and interpreter, as well as companion-wife, all at
once. When finally all the intervening hurdles between the customary tenor of life in Cambridge and the glitzy London social scene had been surmounted, we would appear, always late, decked out in
evening dress – complete with the hand-tied bow tie on which Stephen insisted – in a sparkling ballroom or dining room to be greeted by the assembled ranks of the scientific
intelligentsia, peers of the realm and assorted dignitaries. They were all very charming and their wives were often kindly, but to me they all seemed so old, older than my parents: they were not
the sort of people I was likely to meet in the street or at the school gate where my real friends were. The same people, along with the most affected members of London’s glitterati, also
turned up at other notable social occasions in the scientific calendar, particularly the
Conversazioni,
the evening gatherings in summer at the Royal Society, where the rich and famous
mercilessly elbowed each other out of the way in the scrum for drinks and canapés, while the exhibitors, guarding their carefully prepared displays, patiently waited for the chattering
assembly to show some interest in their painstaking research.