Travelling to Infinity (36 page)

Where medical science had admitted defeat, the concern shown by friends brought an unexpected revival of strength, inspiring a spontaneous renewal of hope. John Sturdy, the Dean of Caius, and
his wife Jill came one evening, quietly and unobtrusively, to offer support through their prayers. Stephen’s students and colleagues were unwavering in their devotion, visiting regularly and
helping with his care, often through the night. Gradually, though still very frail and prone to choking attacks, Stephen began to improve until on Sunday 4th April he spent the whole day without
choking at all and managed to eat a little pureed food. But that night his condition deteriorated again, and the following day saw us sliding back to square one. Robert awoke that morning with a
high temperature, covered from head to foot in chickenpox blisters, and during the day he became delirious.

As my father was himself on the point of going into hospital in St Albans for an operation, my parents had returned home when Stephen first began to show signs of recovery. In their absence I
had to throw myself on my good friends for help with the children, especially on Joy Cadbury, who for several years had hovered in the background, always ready to help with the utmost sensitivity
when the need arose. In 1973 Robert had stayed with the Cadburys while we were in Russia and both he and Lucy always felt very much at home with their children, Thomas and Lucy Grace. They had
already spent a couple of nights with the Cadburys when Stephen was in intensive care and I was with him at the hospital. The magnanimity with which Joy offered to nurse Robert, bespeckled with red
blisters as he was, was quite beyond any call of friendship,
since
it was a foregone conclusion that both her own children would develop chickenpox within the next three weeks. I had no
option but to let Robert go as the demands on me were so great, and my own resources were so depleted, that I could scarcely register what was happening to us.

In Joy’s tender care Robert bounced back to health, though, of course, her children succumbed. My father came through his operation, and when, a day later, I managed to snatch an afternoon
for a flying visit to St Albans, I was glad to find him up and about, walking round the ward. Stephen’s recovery was slower and less predictable, mostly because he refused to take the
penicillin he had been prescribed. He sat silently in his chair, resting his head on his hand, in the same melancholy posture he had first adopted in the Sixties. He did not speak, he choked
frequently, and ate and drank in small, careful sips. He was not strong enough to go out, so the Department came to him and held its seminars in our living room. At last over the Easter weekend, he
began to show signs of gaining strength. Only then could we begin to sleep at nights and I could relax my guard a little. The children came home, and in the one remaining week of the school
holidays we looked forward to catching up on some holiday activities.

Stephen had other ideas. That Easter Monday, still in the early stages of convalescence, he summoned his students, commandeered the car and set off for a five-day conference in Oxford. As I
stood in the doorway watching them go, my disbelief at such recklessness condensed into a desperate urge to escape – as far away as possible. Dennis and Lydia Sciama, who were aghast at
Stephen’s foolhardiness, recommended a hotel in St Ives in Cornwall. In a daze of miserable incomprehension, scarcely knowing where we were going or why, driven by a manic desire to get away
from Cambridge, the children and I fled to London and boarded a train at Paddington for the West Country. The train whisked us further and further south. After Exeter it slowed down, crawling along
at a snail’s pace, snaking along winding branch lines. Oblivious to the slow passing of time, to the children’s games, to their laughter and chatter, I gazed blankly out of the window,
staring at the primrose-spattered fields of Cornwall without really seeing them, plunged into a stupor of exhausted dejection.

It was obvious: we were living on the edge of a precipice. Yet it is possible even on the edge of a precipice to put down roots that penetrate rock and stone, roots that
insinuate themselves into even the most meagre soils to form a sufficiently secure foundation for the branches above, stunted though they be, to produce foliage, flowers and fruit. At the end of
April, on our return from Cornwall and Stephen’s from Oxford, the children went back to school as if the nightmare of the Easter holidays had never happened. Quietly philosophical and
undemanding, Robert had always taken his father’s illness and disability in his stride, and fortunately he now went to a school which provided plenty of scope for doing all those physical
activities that he and his father could not do together. Since Lucy followed her brother’s lead in everything, she showed few signs of disturbance at the unconventional nature of her
background. Our lives appeared to have taken up their usual rhythms, though perhaps with an even greater determination to focus on each moment of each day. As Stephen and the children settled back
into their routines, I grasped every spare second to jot down a few thoughts on the thesis; I redecorated, yet again, the rented house owned jointly by Robert and his grandparents, upon which we
depended for paying part of his school fees; I attended the singing class whenever possible; and I cooked for dinner parties for the advancing hordes of summer visitors to the Department.

In midsummer, a BBC television crew came to make a film about Stephen, as part of a two-hour documentary on the origins of the universe. By chance, the producer, Vivienne King, had been a
student at Westfield in the same year as me. Although she had studied maths, she did not adopt a hardline scientific approach to the filming but wanted to present Stephen sympathetically, as a
rounded figure set against the background of his family life. This image appealed to me because I feared that a hardline scientific approach could well present him as a sinister character, like the
malevolent wheelchair-bound Dr Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s film. The finished product, the first and best of its kind, contained the elements of a poetic idyll – albeit in a
scientific context. Stephen was, of course, seen at work in the Department, interacting with his students, conducting seminars, expounding his latest theories. He was also interviewed at home
against the backdrop of the two children playing in the summer sun among the flowers in the garden. When the film was broadcast worldwide the following winter as part of a major BBC documentary
–
The Key to the Universe
– a school friend of Lucy’s, the daughter of a visiting scholar, watched it back home in Japan. The mother wrote to tell us that her daughter
had stood transfixed in front of the television screen when she saw Lucy sitting on her swing under the apple tree. “Lucy, Lucy...” was all that she could say as the tears poured down
her cheeks.

This was certainly the image of self-sufficiency to which we continued to aspire, though that image and the sweet illusion of success were becoming less easy to sustain. Alan Lapedes was so
exhausted on his return from the Oxford conference after Easter, that he had to go away for a couple of weeks to recover. After all, he had been ill with a chest infection too, but no one had given
a moment’s thought to his state of health, because his help had been urgently required in caring for Stephen. He had unstintingly helped throughout the critical period – and beyond,
because when Stephen decided to go to Oxford, he had had no choice but to go with him.

Stephen’s valiant attempts to appear fit and well may have stood him in good stead in the Department, but at home his spirits were alarmingly low and his constitution was dangerously
weakened. He spoke only to voice his demands, and no sooner had one need been met, one command fulfilled, than another would arise, stretching me to the limit of my endurance. We needed help more
than ever but no help was forthcoming, in spite of our doctors’ concerted appeals to the National Health Service. In any case, Stephen still absolutely refused to accept any outside nursing
help. My doctor applied to the local authority for a home help to assist with the domestic chores, since all our spare income was spent on augmenting Robert’s school fees and did not run to
the luxury of a daily help. No help materialized, however, because when the social worker came to assess us, one glance at our surroundings was enough to disqualify us from any benefits. She was
only one in a long line of people who failed to distinguish between the gilded illusion that we struggled to maintain and the brutal reality at the core of our situation.

Help, when it came, assumed a form which, in its innocence, was so precious that although it eased the physical strain, it increased a hundred times my guilt at being unable to cope on my own.
Robert, at nearly nine years old, stepped out of his childhood and began to fetch and carry, lift and heave, feed and wash, and even take his father to the bathroom when I was overwhelmed with the
weight of other chores, or just too exhausted to respond. In Stephen’s pragmatic philosophy of survival, Robert’s arms and legs were as good a substitute for his own as anyone
else’s, and certainly better than having a nurse in the house, even temporarily. It disturbed me greatly that Robert’s childhood, that unrepeatable period of freedom, was being brought
to such an abrupt conclusion.

For the week of half-term at the end of May, I arranged the family holiday that we had not had at Easter – five relaxing days in our favourite hotel, the Anchor at Walberswick, only two
and a half hours’ drive from Cambridge. Despite all the efforts of the hotel staff to cater for all our needs, including the diet, the holiday was a disaster. Stephen choked from beginning to
end, but took umbrage at the suggestion that he might prefer to eat his meals in the privacy of our own chalet. Consequently every mealtime was an ordeal, as his convulsive wheezings ricocheted off
the walls and distracted the other guests from their food. He subsided into a depressed lethargy and built a wall around himself, communicating only to express his needs in a morbid game of
“Simon says...”. Robert’s help was called for again and again when I reached breaking point – as I did often since this situation demanded more stamina and courage than I
possessed.

I was desperate for help and asked myself frequently where I could find it, almost always drawing a blank. Our friends were all keen enough to help in the short term, but they had their own
families, their own lives to lead. There was no one who could spare the time or the energy to give us the undertaking, the dedication we needed so badly – above all to relieve Robert of the
premature burdens and responsibilities that were being placed on his young shoulders. In my despair I approached Stephen’s parents, since they were the only people I could turn to. My own
parents had given us huge amounts of help throughout our marriage and were wonderful grandparents, but there was little that they could do in this extreme situation where medical intervention was
often required, nor did I feel that it was fair to ask them. Stephen’s father had promised to help in any way possible in that euphoric period before our wedding in 1965. Indeed Frank Hawking
had painted the bathroom for us when we first moved into Little St Mary’s Lane; he and Isobel had paid for my stay in the nursing home when Robert was born, and they had also paid for us to
have a cleaner once a week when Robert was a small baby. They had given us quite a large sum of money to help us buy our house, and had generously handed on a couple of family antiques to grace our
living room. Isobel had come to look after Stephen when the children were born, and she had also been prepared to fly off with him to conferences across the world when small children and flying
phobia kept me grounded. On our annual trip to the cottage in Wales, she and Frank could be relied upon to help with Stephen’s care; she, with controlled good nature, often calming her
husband’s impatience, for clearly it took a considerable emotional effort and self-discipline for him to reconcile himself to the time-consuming restraints of Stephen’s severe
disability. Although their own property was so dauntingly unsuitable for a disabled person in a wheelchair, they were curiously meticulous about reconnoitring castles and beauty spots for
excursions, counting steps and registering any other hurdles in advance of our arrival.

Their visits to Cambridge however were always much more formal than my parents’. Mum and Dad were demonstrative and passionate grandparents, involving themselves in every aspect of the
children’s lives and our own, whereas Stephen’s parents behaved like guests rather than close relations – and of late I had begun to sense a distancing in their attitude, as if
the veneer of normality we struggled to maintain was so convincing that no more involvement was required on their part. On our return from Walberswick, I wrote a despairing letter to them, begging
them to bring their minds and their medical knowledge to bear on the situation to help ease the overwhelming difficulties which were threatening us. My promise to Stephen had not altered, but, with
the best will in the world, it was becoming much more difficult to sustain, particularly in the face of the unrelenting stress, all day and every day and much of the night as well. If anything the
pace of life had accelerated since Stephen’s recent chest infection, with a major conference in Cambridge, more dinners, more sherry parties and more receptions. I was at breaking point, but
still Stephen rejected any proposals to relieve either the children – especially Robert – or me, of the strain. His constant rejection of our need for more help was an alienating force,
wearing away the empathy with which I had shared every dispiriting stage in the development of his condition. In his reply to my letter, Frank Hawking promised to confer with Stephen’s doctor
about the medical aspects of the case and said that there would be ample opportunity to discuss other matters at greater length during our forthcoming summer holiday in Llandogo.

There was actually very little opportunity to discuss these matters in Wales because of the characteristic Hawking reluctance to discuss anything of a personal nature. Dutifully Frank helped
with Stephen’s care every morning and then, usually clad in boots, waterproofs and a sou’wester, he disappeared into the wilderness to attack the weeds which were making a mockery of
his attempts to grow vegetables in the rainforest conditions of the steep east-facing hillside. Isobel valiantly did her best to organize interesting excursions for us, dodging the showers in the
afternoons – a teddy bears’ picnic, a visit to Goodrich Castle, a hunt for four-leaf clover – all pleasant, sociable family outings, conducted without any reference to the
underlying problems and tensions. One morning she came to me and in a tone of flustered defiance said, “If you want to talk to Father, you had better see him now.” She pointed outside
to where Frank stood in the pouring rain. I donned my raincoat and joined him under the dripping trees. We walked along the road, not speaking, splashing across the rivulets that were rushing
straight down the hill to swell the river in the valley below. My thoughts and emotions were churning in such a chaotic whirlpool that they would not be so easily channelled into a coherent flow. I
was afraid of appearing disloyal to Stephen, yet I had to persuade his family that all was not well, that ways and means had to be sought, and if necessary imposed, to lighten the burdens. If
nothing else, it was essential to relieve Robert of the tasks that were oppressing him.