Travelling to Infinity (7 page)

Stephen could be highly critical of people other than his closest relatives. His self-confidence restored, he delighted in bringing his Oxford ways into any conversation, deliberately setting
out to shock with his provocative statements. His comment that Norwich cathedral was a very ordinary building profoundly upset my mild-mannered Grandma when I took him to stay with her for a
weekend. He considered my friends to be easy victims and had no compunction in monopolizing the conversation at parties with his controversial opinions, often dominating the social scene with
vociferous and tenacious arguments.

With me he would argue that artificial flowers were in every way preferable to the real thing and that Brahms, my favourite composer, was second-rate because he was such a poor orchestrator.
Rachmaninov was good only for the musical dustbin and Tchaikovsky was primarily a composer of ballet music. So far, my knowledge of composers was embryonic: all I knew about Rachmaninov and
Tchaikovsky was that their music had the power to move me profoundly and I knew nothing about Brahms’s orchestration. It was only later that I found out, to my silent amusement, that although
Wagner had despised Brahms, the feeling was mutual.

While I applauded Stephen’s refusal to be drawn into small talk, I was nervously aware that his arrogance was in poor taste and was putting me in danger of losing me my friends, if not my
relations. There came a stage when I even feared that he was jeopardizing my chances of any future academic activity. I was content to abandon all my budding hopes of a career in the Foreign Office
for his sake, but I was unhappy about letting him destroy whatever opportunity I might have had for pursuing some sort of research. When I took him to meet my supervisor, Alan Deyermond, who was at
that time encouraging me to think about doing a PhD in medieval literature, Stephen really excelled himself. Waving his sherry glass around as if the point he was making was so obvious that only a
fool could disagree with it, he revelled in the opportunity to tell Alan Deyermond and all my contemporaries that the study of medieval literature was as useful an occupation as studying pebbles on
the beach. Fortunately, as Alan Deyermond was also an Oxford graduate, he willingly picked up the gauntlet thus offered and gave Stephen a good run for his money. The argument was inconclusive, and
both sides parted on remarkably amiable terms. When I protested on the way home in the car, Stephen shrugged. “You shouldn’t take it personally,” he said.

Stephen’s conviction that intellectual arguments were never to be considered a personal matter was tested during that same year. Professor Fred Hoyle, who had rejected Stephen’s
postgraduate research application, was at the time pioneering the use of television to popularize science to great effect. He had become a household name and his success was enabling him to put
pressure on the government to grant him his own Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. It was a foregone conclusion that if his demands were not met, he – like so many other British scientists
– would join the brain drain to the United States. He had power and popularity, and his recent theories were eagerly followed in the press, especially those which he was developing with his
Indian research student, Jayant Narlikar, whose office was near Stephen’s on the old Cavendish site in Cambridge.

In advance of publication, Hoyle’s latest paper, expounding further aspects of the theory of the steady-state universe which he had developed with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, was
presented to a distinguished gathering of scientists at the Royal Society. Then the forum was opened to questions, which on such occasions are usually fairly deferential. Stephen was present and
bided his time. At last his raised hand was noticed by the chairman. He, a very junior research student who as yet had no academic research of any note to his credit, struggled to his feet and
proceeded to tell Hoyle and his students as well as the rest of the audience that the calculations in the presentation were wrong. The audience was stunned, and Hoyle was ruffled by this piece of
effrontery. “How do you know?” he asked, quite sure that Stephen’s grounds for disputing his new research could easily be dismissed. He was not expecting Stephen’s response.
“I’ve worked it out,” he replied, and then added, “in my head.” As a result of that intervention, Stephen began to be noticed in scientific circles, and thus he found
the subject for his PhD thesis: the properties of expanding universes. Relations between him and Fred Hoyle however never advanced after that incident.

Arguments notwithstanding – scientific, impersonal or otherwise – everything we did in the course of that academic year contributed to a common purpose, our forthcoming marriage, for
which a date in July 1965 was set. As it was by no means certain that I should be allowed to stay in Westfield as a married undergraduate, my top priority was to win the consent of the college
authorities. Without it, the wedding would probably have to be postponed for another year, because we both knew that the promise my father had demanded of us on our engagement – that I would
complete my undergraduate course – was not to be taken lightly. Since a year was a long time in the course of an illness such as Stephen’s, as his father persistently reminded me, his
survival for that length of time could not be guaranteed. This unpalatable truth was a factor that I should have to bear in mind constantly whenever I looked to the future. In the first instance,
it was now up to me to persuade Professor John Varey, the Head of the Spanish Department, and Mrs Matthews, the Principal, that the situation was urgent. Professor Varey’s response, when I
tentatively broached the matter, was that the situation was most irregular, but that if the Principal gave her blessing, he would not object.

As my previous – and only – encounter with Mrs Matthews had been at the interview in 1962, I was not hopeful of a propitious outcome. At the time appointed by her secretary, six
o’clock one evening towards the end of the autumn term of 1964, I knocked with trembling hand at the green baize door which separated her flat in the Regency house from the administrative
area of the College. Mrs Matthews evidently sensed my nervousness from the moment I walked through the door. She bade me sit down and thrust a cigarette into one hand and a sherry into the other.
“What’s the matter?” she began, frowning and looking me straight in the eye with an anxious concern, “don’t worry, I’m not going to eat you.” I took a deep
breath and did my best to explain my relationship with Stephen, his illness, the prognosis and our plans to make the most of whatever time we had left to us. She never took her eyes off me and
betrayed very little emotion. When she had heard my tale through without interruption, she came straight to the point. “Well, of course, if you marry, you will have to live out of College,
you understand that don’t you?” My heart lifted slightly, aware that she had not vetoed our plans outright, and I was able to nod confidently because I had already done my homework on
that score. “Yes, I know that,” I replied, “I have found out that there is a room available in a private house in Platt’s Lane.” “Well, then, that’s
fine,” Mrs Matthews replied, staring fixedly at the embers in the grate. “Go ahead and make the most of the chance you have.” She paused and then, changing her tone to one of
uncharacteristic absent-mindedness, she confided that she herself had been in a similar situation. Her own husband had been severely disabled. She was only too well aware of how important it was to
do whatever one knew to be right. Equally she agreed with my father that I must complete my education. She warned me that the future I faced would not be easy. She promised to help in whatever way
she could – most significantly, by conveying her agreement to Professor Varey.

Having surmounted that major hurdle, all that remained was to arrange my accommodation in Platt’s Lane, which was easily done. Mrs Dunham, the landlady, readily agreed to let the attic
room on the third floor to me, and both she and her husband proved to be hospitable and patient landlords. “Patient” because never once did they complain about my monopoly of their
telephone in the study downstairs. Stephen had devised a way of ringing me for fourpence, the cost of a local call, via all the intermediate exchanges between Cambridge and London: this meant that
there was no time limit on our conversations every evening. Quite apart from the frenzied pleasure of daily communication and love-talk, we had plenty to discuss as we laid our plans for our
future. The illness assumed the proportions of a minor background irritant as we talked about job prospects, housing, wedding arrangements and our first trip to the United States, to a summer
school at Cornell University in upstate New York, due to start just ten days after the wedding.

Now that my immediate problems had been solved at a stroke, I was confident that in my final year I could finish my degree in London by commuting weekly from Cambridge,
especially since current social research suggested that married undergraduates consistently produced better results than frustrated, unmarried students. My father generously continued to pay my
allowance to help cover the rail fares, but the responsibility of finding a job and an income to support us both lay with Stephen. For his part, he was now taking his research seriously, realizing
that he would have to have a substantial piece of work documented, if not published, to enable him to apply for a Research Fellowship. To this end, he started to expand the ideas which had caused
such a stir at Hoyle’s Royal Society lecture. He also found by way of compensation for his efforts that his work was actually enjoyable.

Consequently it was with more than just the joyful expectation of a young fiancé awaiting the arrival of his beloved that he greeted me in his rooms, now for convenience in the main body
of Trinity Hall, one chilly morning in the February of 1965: he was in fact expecting that I would put my secretarial skills to good use by typing out a job application for him. The look of
horrified dismay that spread across his face as I walked into his room with my left arm bulging beneath my coat in a white plaster cast, dashed all my hopes of even the merest display of sympathy.
I was not wanting anything more than that, because the circumstances in which the fracture had occurred had been too embarrassing to confess over the telephone.

The truth was that the Westfield hops had livened up considerably with the arrival, the previous year, of male students into the College and the election of a more dynamic entertainments
committee on the Students’ Union. We now had proper bands playing Sixties’ music, the Beatles and the twist. I loved twisting, and at a midweek hop had indulged in an innocent bout of
twisting with someone else’s boyfriend. The floor was highly polished, my high heels skidded on the slippery surface and down I went, falling heavily onto my outstretched left hand. The
searing pain all too obviously indicated another broken wrist, this time from twisting rather than ice skating.

Still rather battered by this ordeal, I did not at first appreciate the reasons for the horror on Stephen’s face – not, that is, until he gestured to the borrowed typewriter and the
pile of pristine white paper neatly arranged on the table. Dolefully he explained that he had been hoping that I would type out his application for a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius
College, which had to be submitted by the beginning of the following week. Guilty on account of the twisting, I set to work with a will to write the application out in longhand, using my intact
right hand. The exercise took the whole weekend.

To have stayed overnight in Stephen’s rooms was unthinkable. On more than one occasion, according to Stephen, the eagle eye of Sam, the surly bedder and guardian of the College morals on Q
staircase, must have noticed a scarf or a cardigan of mine carelessly left hanging over the back of a chair in Stephen’s study. Scenting the whiff of scandal and a captive prey – for he
was no friend to young lady visitors – Sam would put his head round the door of Stephen’s bedroom in the early hours, hoping to catch me squeezed illicitly into Stephen’s narrow
single bed. But his expectations of a juicy scandal to report to the college authorities were constantly disappointed, because many of Stephen’s better-established friends regularly offered
me hospitality at weekends. Many of these friends already had houses and cars and were now in the process of producing offspring which, for our generation, was the expected progression of events.
Ours was the last generation for whom the prime goals were quite straightforward: the ideals of romantic love, marriage, a home and a family. The difference for Stephen and me was that we knew that
we had only a brief space of time in which to achieve those goals.

Against all odds, the Fellowship application was actually delivered on time, and Stephen then waited to be called to an interview. It was not however to be quite as simple as that. On the
strength of the notoriety of his startling intervention in the Hoyle lecture, Stephen had approached Professor Hermann Bondi at the end of one of the regular fortnightly seminars at King’s
College, London, to ask him if he would be willing to act as a referee for the Fellowship application. As Hermann Bondi was a neighbour in Hampshire of Stephen’s Aunt Loraine and her husband
Rus, the Harley Street dentist, a formal letter did not seem necessary. Some weeks later, however, Stephen received an embarrassed message from Gonville and Caius College. In reply to the
College’s request for a reference for Stephen Hawking, Professor Bondi had disclaimed all knowledge of any candidate of that name. Given the circumstances and the casual nature of
Stephen’s approach to him, it was perhaps understandable that he should have forgotten. The situation was rectified by means of hasty phone calls, and Stephen was duly summoned for an
interview, where he had plenty of scope for impressing the members of the committee with his powers of intellectual argument, the more so since none of them were cosmologists, however eminent their
reputations in other disciplines.