Travelling to Infinity (45 page)

As I recounted the same old story of our wearisome struggle to keep going and to find a way through the obstacle course that our lives had become, I was under no illusions: Dr White would listen
with the utmost sympathy but would be powerless to effect any improvement. Who could, even with the funds that Martin Rees had promised? I anticipated that he would say, as so many others had said
before, “Well, I’m terribly sorry, but I don’t know what to suggest.” I was scarcely inclined to take him seriously, therefore, when with unusual perception he thoughtfully
suggested two courses of action. First, he said, he would prescribe some medication for me and, secondly, he would get in touch with a male nurse on his list who did some private nursing and might
be able to arrange a regular roster of care for Stephen.

The hope that these proposals held out was too beguiling not to be considered briefly, even if with a well-worn scepticism. There was just a chance that the hurdle of finding suitable nurses
might be overcome as a result of this chance encounter, and the last hurdle – and undoubtedly the highest – Stephen’s resistance, might also yield in the face of this initiative,
since it was being imposed by an outside authority. The blame for this most detrimental of steps would not fall entirely on my shoulders. Within days Martin Rees had found a provisional source of
funding to finance some nursing care for Stephen on his return home – but, as I feared, it took longer for Chester to get in touch with his nursing contact. That prospect, it seemed, was
after all no more than another of those deceptive will-o’-the-wisps, a glimmer of hope extinguished before it had even been ignited. Perhaps it was just as well: in my heart, I disliked
conspiring against what I knew to be Stephen’s wishes, however intolerable the situation might be.

Then, one morning towards the end of January, Dr White’s contact, Nikki Manatunga, the nurse, materialized out of the blue. A quietly spoken, hard-working Sri Lankan who had settled with
his wife and two children in a village outside Cambridge, he showed no disquiet at my account of the difficulties and the requirements. On the contrary, he was confident of being able to put
together a team of nurses from among his colleagues at Fulbourn Hospital, the local psychiatric hospital where he worked. A week later, when he came for his first shift, Stephen adamantly refused
to look at him or to communicate with him in any way, except by running over his toes with the wheelchair. I apologized to Nikki who persevered with a smile, unperturbed. “It’s all
right,” he said, “we’re used to dealing with difficult patients.” The next week he brought and introduced another nurse to the system and then another. An established nurse
came with each new recruit and passed on the details of the routine so that there was always a smooth changeover with minimal intervention demanded of us, the resident carers. Slowly
Stephen’s irritation subsided as he grew to accept the presence of these dedicated, patient people, and eventually he realized that he could call upon them for help outside the strict hours
of their terms of employment. He could take the nurses on trips abroad and be independent of his students and colleagues, even of his family. No longer would he have to rely on a small group of
intimates for help with his personal needs. A new era was dawning for the master of the universe and, by extension, for the rest of us.

In lifting the weight of Stephen’s nursing care from our shoulders, Nikki’s team allowed us as a family to start living life rather than just struggling through it.
Caring for Stephen was relatively easy by comparison with the previous routine, especially since Jonathan was usually with us most evenings and all day at weekends, helping to feed Stephen, take
him to the bathroom and lift him in and out of the car. He too was a helpless witness of the terrifying choking fits, which at every meal seemed to be squeezing the last lungfuls of breath out of
their victim. We would wait hoping that the fit would pass, ready to call the emergency services, knowing that at these critical times the thread by which Stephen clung to life was at its most
tenuous. The fit would pass eventually, and after a few sips of warm water he would resume his meal, discarding whatever item he suspected of irritating his throat. Then just as we were all
beginning to relax, he would fall prey to another attack.

Jonathan was by nature susceptible to hardship and struggle, sensing where and how he was needed, helping with all those necessary domestic chores which formerly I had always done unaided: he
brought in sacks of potatoes, emptied rubbish bins, changed light bulbs, checked air pressures in tyres and filled the cars with petrol. Now there was someone to help me drag home the mountains of
weekly shopping from the market and from Sainsbury’s. For years I had struggled across the Backs either pulling the heavy bags in a trolley behind me or carrying them on the pram, slung from
the handle and squeezed into the tray underneath. Together we looked after the three children, but it was usually Jonathan who provided the taxi service to ferry Robert and Lucy to and from their
various engagements, and it was Jonathan who indulged the baby’s favourite activity: Timmie liked nothing so much as being thrown high in the air, up to the ceiling, abandoning himself,
open-mouthed and wide-eyed, to that split second of suspense before coming back to earth and falling into the safety of Jonathan’s arms.

Throughout the early Eighties, Stephen’s ambitions and his successes continued to know no bounds. The catalogue of institutions, universities and scientific bodies vying with each other to
shower sonorously named medals upon him – the Albert Einstein Award, the Einstein Medal, the Franklin Medal, the James Clerk Maxwell medal – and other honours, notably honorary degrees,
read like Leporello’s list of Don Giovanni’s female conquests in Mozart’s opera. Unlike Don Giovanni however, Stephen’s conquests were not all restricted to Europe. There
was no shortage of award-giving ceremonies in Britain, however, and when they were near to home, I took Stephen to them myself. On one memorable occasion we drove over to Leicester for a degree
ceremony at the University, where the Chancellor was Sir Alan Hodgkin, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge; he had formerly been the President of the Royal Society when Stephen was made a
Fellow in 1974. Genial and unassuming, with a beaming smile, even when standing on the platform attired in full black and gold regalia, he welcomed Stephen into the ranks of the honorary doctors of
the university by firmly pressing his hand – the hand which Stephen was using to control the wheelchair. That pressure sent Stephen, the wheelchair and Sir Alan Hodgkin – who was still,
so to speak, attached to the apparatus – off into a whirling pas de deux, bringing the ensemble of ceremonial robes, mortar boards, bodies and wheelchair perilously close to the edge of the
stage. I leapt to my feet and switched off the joystick control just in time to avert a horrible catastrophe.

Most of the ceremonies were in the United States, however, and it was fortunate that Nikki and his team were willing travelling companions. Thanks to them, Stephen was able to take advantage of
every award-giving ceremony on the other side of the Atlantic – for which his fare and theirs would be paid. Then he would go on to the serious purpose of his trip – scientific
discussions with his colleagues in other more interesting venues elsewhere. At this time he was particularly involved in the production – often as joint editor with Werner Israel – of
several tomes of essays and conference proceedings concerning relativity and attempts to reconcile it with quantum physics. The conferences – or rather “workshops” –
recorded in these tomes were Stephen’s new passion, for he found that his international renown and his distinguished position as Lucasian Professor afforded him an advantage in attracting
funding to the Department, though one of his pet complaints was
still
the lack of money for science. We had been used to receiving and entertaining regular seminar and conference delegates
for years on a modest scale. These days Stephen could invite his colleagues – even his adversaries – to Cambridge on a grander scale and preside over all their deliberations as the
ultimate authority. The workshops grew into much larger and much more prestigious affairs, with money not only to invite the most eminent speakers and delegates, but also to provide dinners and
entertainments. Consequently my role as conference hostess was mercifully diminished. The days were over when I found myself putting on buffet dinners for forty or more people; under the new
system, the workshop dinners were usually held in the college where the delegates were staying. My involvement was generally limited to hosting receptions, and the tea parties on the lawn, for
which plates of cucumber sandwiches were, as usual, ordered from Caius kitchens. Otherwise, dinner parties at home were more intimate affairs for the band of our closest friends from abroad.

The lion’s share of the complex administrative arrangements for these workshops – the delegates’ travel, the accommodation, the venues, the methods of payment and all the
printed material associated with the conference – as well as typing up the proceedings after the event, fell to Stephen’s hard-working secretary, Judy Fella, although she was in theory
only employed part-time. This was all in addition to her regular workload as the secretary to the Relativity Group. Her children were about the same age as Robert and Lucy, but she often worked
long into the night, sometimes having to resort to the more advanced, experimental technology – installed by the fluid-dynamicists down in the basement of the Department – to produce
camera-ready copy of the hieroglyphic signs and diagrams of the conference proceedings. Although Stephen appreciated her dedication, many of her secretarial colleagues failed to understand the
unconventional pressures under which she laboured, and made life very uncomfortable for her.

It was in the Department rather than at home that a new wave of pressures, in the shape of the world’s media, first made its appearance. For some time Stephen’s discoveries had been
well documented in the British and the American scientific press; the attitude was always one of deference in the strictly scientific context, with little or no reference to his physical condition.
In the early Eighties the popular press began to take a more active interest in the phenomenon of the man himself. The contrast between the restrictions placed on him by his shrunken frame and his
croaking speech on the one hand, and the power of his mind which allowed him to roam the outer reaches of the universe on the other, provided a fertile source for many imaginative flights of
fanciful prose. Moreover the subject himself was far from averse to publicity; indeed was a willing interviewee, despite the incursions that interviews made into his already overloaded timetable.
Judy took the extra demands posed on her schedule by the influx of journalists and television crews – not just from national networks but from all over the world – in her stride, though
there were quite a few academics in the Department who understandably objected to finding that their tea room had been turned into a television studio yet again.

Stephen enjoyed bewildering the visiting journalists. He would apologize for not being able to bring a four-dimensional model of the universe into his office to demonstrate his theories, or,
when asked about infinity, would reply that it was rather difficult to talk about it as it was such a long way off. Quite openly he would admit to disappointment that black holes had so far evaded
detection, since proof of their existence would assure him of a Nobel Prize. The journalists made what they could of these witty, often cryptic responses to their questions and then went away to
compile reverential articles from their baffling assortment of notes. Very few of them managed to achieve a balance in their reporting. Often their attempts to describe Stephen’s physical
presence lacked sensitivity, while their accounts of the science, perhaps understandably, relied on the interpretations of Stephen’s students and colleagues.

The most insensitive journalist of all was a television producer from the BBC’s
Horizon
team. The earlier snatch of film made some six years previously by my college friend,
Vivienne King, had been a resounding success; she had shown Stephen in context and had avoided the pitfall – or the temptation – of depicting him as Dr Strangelove. It was still one of
my worst fears that, in the hands of the wrong producer, Stephen might be portrayed as some sort of grotesque, wheelchair-bound boffin, twisted both in body and mind, destructively intent on the
pursuit of science at all costs, and that is more or less what happened in the second
Horizon
film. When I asked if he would like briefly to include the family in the film, the producer
disparagingly observed that the children and I were nothing more than wallpaper in Stephen’s life, and when the film appeared six months later, the lunch scene in the University Centre at
which little Tim and I were present was dubbed with a voice-over spoken by one of Stephen’s students. He said, “Neither Mrs Hawking nor their son Timmie are particularly interested in
mathematics, so when they come to lunch, we try not to talk about work.” Afterwards, I learnt that, to his great embarrassment, the student in question had been commanded to read this by the
producer. My former supervisor, Alan Deyermond, gallantly wrote to the BBC in protest at the injustice of such a deliberate insult. Irony of ironies,
Professor Hawking’s Universe
opened with a shot of one of our wedding photos. The sole people to derive any tongue-in-cheek amusement from it were my parents, who featured in the wedding photo: overnight they became television
celebrities in St Albans.

Even before the
Horizon
programme, Stephen had become a household name. In the summer of 1981, Prince Philip, the Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, expressed his wish to meet
Stephen in the course of his rounds of the university departments. It seemed most appropriate to invite him to come for a private visit to the house, where he would be able to talk to Stephen
without background disturbance. Robert, definitely a budding scientist at the age of fourteen, interpreted his father’s replies to the Chancellor’s questions about the age of the
universe and the nature of black holes. As the visit on 10th June coincided with our guest’s sixtieth birthday, I made and iced a fruit cake, decorating it with half a dozen candles which
Timmie and Prince Philip blew out together before the royal visitor was precipitately whisked away to his next appointment.