Travelling to Infinity (34 page)

The artificial glamour of these occasions was simultaneously entertaining and irritating. While I enjoyed myself, I was inevitably aware of the hours ahead. There would be no coachman to drive
us home from London after midnight or to help get Stephen ready for bed, and the next morning we would be back in our routine. I would be dressing Stephen, feeding him his breakfast, his pills and
his tea, then I would clean the house and put two or three loads of washing into the machine before peeling the onions and potatoes for the next meal. Across the road, the tower of the University
Library would loom accusingly, a silent but eloquent reminder of my neglected thesis. There would be no glass slipper either, even though there might be a glistening gold medal, set on a bed of
satin and velvet, to remind us that the previous evening had not been just a passing dream. Even the medals disappeared from view after a day or two. Since the house was subject to occasional,
opportunistic petty theft – handbags stolen from the hall, bicycles stolen from the porch – the medals had to be consigned to the bank vault, rarely to be seen again.

The reality of everyday life always began the night before, when, after giving Stephen his medications and putting him to bed, I would lay out the breakfast things for the
children. At long last, Robert’s enthusiasm for early rising found its true purpose, since he could be trusted to get his own breakfast and supervise Lucy’s as well. In the morning I
would get Stephen out of bed, dress him and give him a cup of tea and his early-morning vitamins, before taking Lucy to school on the back of my bike. On my return, usually laden with shopping, I
would give Stephen his breakfast and attend to his personal needs before he went to work. After the freedom he had enjoyed in California, Stephen was in no mind to put up with the frustrations of a
push wheelchair and applied to the Department of Health for an electric model, the fast one, since, according to the propaganda, such appliances were available free of charge. However, the truth
did not conform to the promise of the advertising. All the force of Stephen’s considerable persistence and doggedness were not enough to shift the grey officials of that particular
governmental department into granting his application, for fear of setting a precedent which would open the floodgates to similar applicants. They told him that he could submit another application
for the three-wheeler battery-driven car, which he now lacked the strength to control, or, indeed, for an electric wheelchair – but only the slow model, designed for indoor use like the one,
purchased by a philanthropic fund, he already had at the Institute. We wasted hours arguing our case for the faster chair unsuccessfully. So much for the Welfare State. It had contributed so very
little to our welfare that one might suppose that its purpose was actually to prevent the disabled from working to their full capacity and, consequently, from contributing as taxpayers to the
National Exchequer. A handful of vitamin pills on prescription seemed to be the best it could offer with only minimal physical, practical, moral or financial support.

We became even more dependent on family, students and friends in the daily battle to function as a family. Stephen did acquire the wheelchair he wanted – from philanthropic funds, not
through the National Health Service – and, discreetly accompanied by a student, rode to work in it every morning. His route took him along the path through King’s College, where
aconites and snowdrops bloom in winter and daffodils in spring, across the river over the humpbacked bridge and out of the College by a side entrance, to his office in the Department on the
opposite side of Silver Street. That Stephen was at last able to enjoy the basic human right to move about freely, as and when and where he chose, was not a result of any government provision or
benefit, it was the result only of his own hard work and of his own success in physics.

Transport for the children was another problem. I took Lucy to school on the back of my bike every morning, but Robert’s school was some distance away. Thanks to a relative newcomer to
Cambridge, John Stark, Robert got to school on time. Jean and John Stark and their two children had come to Cambridge from London in the early Seventies when John took up the post of chest
consultant at Addenbrooke’s Hospital; they had moved into the house that Fred Hoyle had built for himself a decade earlier. John kindly picked Robert up on his way to work, and dropped him
together with his own son Dan, off at the Perse Preparatory School. I returned the Starks’ help by collecting the boys in the afternoon and taking Dan home. I would occasionally stay and talk
to Jean while the children played. A graduate of the London School of Economics, she found the male-chauvinist attitudes prevalent in Cambridge, and the domination of all walks of life by the
University, cramping and discouraging. We shared our frustration at a system which had educated us to compete with men until the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, and then had summarily consigned us
to second-class status. Not for one moment did we regret our roles as wives and mothers, but we did resent the low esteem which society, particularly Cambridge society, accorded those essential
roles.

It was Jean who insisted that I should take up the thesis again, though I thought it foolish even to contemplate such a hopeless enterprise. It had been a presence in my life, sometimes welcome,
sometimes much resented, for nearly ten years. I had completed only one third of the whole project, although I had amassed a vast amount of material, and I could not envisage ever finishing it. The
only free time at my disposal was the sparse intervening period between Stephen’s departure at midday and a quick round of the shops in the early afternoon, before picking Lucy up from school
at a quarter past three – two and a half hours at the most. Nevertheless, thanks to Jean’s insistence – and to the extraordinary example of Henry Button, one of my father’s
old Civil Service colleagues who had begun his research on the German
Minnesänger
in 1934 and finished it on retirement forty years later – the prospect began to appear less
ludicrous.

As the three areas and periods of my research were so clearly defined, the return to it was less challenging than I had feared. I had already documented my ideas on the earliest lyrics, the
Mozarabic
kharjas
, and could now turn my attention to the second area of medieval lyrical flowering – Galicia, the northwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula. There the language
was more akin to Portuguese than Castilian, and the city of Santiago de Compostela had attained international renown and commercial success on account of the shrine of St James, whose coffin,
according to one local legend, was said to have been washed up on the Galician coastline in 824. By the thirteenth century the songs of the Galician troubadours had ousted the waning poetry of
Provence as the favourite amusement at the Castilian court, and their composition developed into yet another of the full-scale industries of that remarkable king, Alfonso the Wise. Among many
widely disparate compositions is a large group, the
cantigas de amigo,
which consist of love songs voiced by women and which contain many of the themes and features of the
kharjas
– the lovers often meet at dawn, the girl confides in a mother figure or her sisters, the lover is often absent. They also exhibit folkloric elements in their style and language, which appear
to hark back to traditional antecedents. In those few hours at my disposal each day, it was my task to sift out the traditional elements from the five hundred and twelve
cantigas de amigo
,
evaluate any salient stylistic and linguistic features which they shared with the
kharjas
, compare their language with that of learned classical or biblical precedents and situate them
against a more general European background.

I found many similarities between the
kharjas
and the
cantigas de amigo
, which were possibly the result of Mozarabic migrations northwards, away from later waves of fanatical
Arab oppression. I also found striking differences, in that the
cantigas
do not contain any of the clear-cut radiance of
kharja
imagery or any sense of urgent anticipation. The
imagery derives from the natural background of the mountains and streams of the northwestern corner of the Peninsula, exposed to the turbulence of the Atlantic winds, and is identified with the
emotions of the protagonists. Cultured poets would have read classical and biblical allusions into this imagery of wind and waves, trees, mountains and streams, where stags come to trouble the
waters. But much more persuasive in the search for the origins of this poetry is the influence of a distant pagan past, veiled in the mists of a much earlier time than the confident Christian
certainties of the
kharjas.

A girl, closely identified with the beauty and whiteness of the dawn, gets up early and goes to wash tunics in the stream, a stream dedicated perhaps to one of the ancient Celtic fertility gods
or goddesses of Galicia whose stones and inscriptions still survive:

In some of these dawn poems she is interrupted by the playful antics of the wind – in pagan terms, the vehicle of evil spirits – in others by the mountain stag. The
stag stirring up the water is symbolic both of the lover’s presence and of their passionate activity, yet conceals any explicit reference to sexuality:

The appearance of the stag at the fountain as a biblical reminiscence recalls the Song of Songs and the Psalms, but, at the popular level, it could well be a vestige of the
persistent pagan fertility rites condemned by several scandalized bishops in the fourth and fifth centuries

Many of the poems conveyed a bleakness and a melancholy which set them apart from the bright immediacy of the
kharjas.
Here the obstacles to true love are fickleness, unfaithfulness and
rejection, as well as the practical realities of warfare or social convention, and they find expression through the medium of trees, birds and fountains. Surveying the emotional wasteland that her
life has become, the lovelorn girl calls to her negligent lover, reminding him how the birds used to sing of their love. She accuses him of destroying the landscape of their love through his
cruelty. The repeated refrain,
leda m’ and’ eu
, expresses her longing for the happiness she has lost.

Although the return to the thesis revived my intellectual morale, it was lonely work, sitting at a desk in the library, surrounded by yellowing tomes, trying to evaluate the
relative importance of each of the numerous influences which had contributed to the composition of these poems. Stephen’s attitude to medieval studies had not mellowed with the years. In his
opinion they were still as worthless as gathering pebbles on a beach. The medieval seminar, formerly such a source of encouragement and enthusiasm, had been disbanded; my links with the Cambridge
Spanish Department had never been more than tenuous, and although my mother still loyally came to look after the children on Friday afternoons, I felt out of touch with the London seminars.

The plangent voices of the
cantigas
filled my inner world and accompanied me in my solitary activities. They were with me as I went about my household chores, they occupied my mind
while I sat feeding Stephen his interminable meals – diced to small morsels, spoonful by spoonful, mouthful by mouthful – and whenever an opportune moment, however brief, presented
itself, I would dash to my table in the bay window of the living room and jot down a few notes, a few ideas, a few references. Yet, studying those songs, annotating them, analysing them was not
enough. I passionately wanted to be able to express those emotions myself, through song, the song of any period. After my introduction to vocal music in California, I longed to be able to sing
well. Vocal technique was portable, unlike the piano, and could be practised anywhere at any time, even at the kitchen sink.

Although Stephen’s contempt for medieval studies was unrelenting and his devotion to grand opera, especially Wagner, continued unabated, he did, nevertheless, encourage my new interest.
Just once a week he and a student would come home early to babysit, so that I could go out for an hour to an evening class in vocal technique, which was taken by a distinguished baritone, Nigel
Wickens, who was both a singing teacher and a performer. His tall, erect figure was made all the more imposing by his domed cranium, and on initial acquaintance he was not a little intimidating,
particularly on account of the exaggerated precision of his diction. This, however, was but one of the features of his expansive personality. Well-versed in the arts of performance, he could hold
his class in awed subjection one minute – and the next send them into convulsive laughter. A veritable musical magician, Nigel would open his box of tricks every week and reveal a wealth of
glittering gemstones, displaying all the shades and colours of the emotional spectrum and encapsulating the rich legacy of a succession of musical geniuses, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms,
Fauré, Mozart... geniuses whose songs touched the inner self, reaching in to tap the core of the soul, expressing hopes and fears, sadness and a sense of tragedy for which words alone were
inadequate. Sometimes the sadness of the songs and the ill-defined sense of longing that they evoked were so painful as to be unbearable. After a couple of classes, I knew that I wanted to learn to
sing properly, to train my voice from scratch and create my own instrument.