Travelling to Infinity (8 page)

The novel idea of admitting a cosmologist to their midst must have appealed to the Fellowship Committee, while for us the appearance of Stephen’s name in the list of Fellowship awards was
a cause for jubilant celebration. Everything was working out just as we had dared hope, and the date for our wedding could be fixed, as planned, for mid-July. Oblivious to the gloom of medical
prognosis and ecstatic in the happiness of love and the promise of success, we glided into that summer through a series of further celebrations, with only a cluster of small bothersome clouds, such
as my second-year exams, the question of accommodation and the hitherto unfamiliar evil of income tax, gathering on the horizon.

To our indignation, an unseasonably chill wind of hostile reality blew one of these small clouds all too quickly across our path, temporarily dampening our elation. Flushed with the success of
his Fellowship application, Stephen went – within what we in our youthful impatience considered to be a reasonable lapse of time, a fortnight or so – to call on the Bursar of Gonville
and Caius (generally pronounced in Cambridge as Keys, the name of the second founder of the College, but written Caius because of the Latinizing tendencies of the Renaissance). The Bursar coldly
informed the newly appointed Research Fellow that, as he was not due to take up his post until the following October, it was highly presumptuous of him to seek a consultation six months in advance.
As to Stephen’s query, a matter which was uppermost in our minds, he certainly was not disposed to tell him how much salary he could expect to earn from the Fellowship. For good measure he
decreed categorically that the College did not, furthermore, consider it a duty to provide accommodation for its Research Fellows. Smarting from such high-handed treatment, we were left to surmise
roughly what Stephen’s income would be and to find somewhere to live. Since there were plenty of married Research Fellows in Cambridge, we assumed that they managed somehow. As for
accommodation, we rather liked the look of some new flats which were being built near the market square, and put our name down for one of those with the agent.

So confident were we in ourselves, and so impatient for our future to begin, that we did not allow such mundane problems to bother us for long. Indeed the attitude of the Bursar and those of his
ilk simply confirmed Stephen’s healthy disrespect for pompous middle-aged authority, a disrespect to which I was becoming a willing convert. We well knew that in our idealism we were
deliberately defying common sense and all that was cautious, conventional and ordinary. We were certainly not going to allow our grand schemes to be thwarted or our convictions undermined by
petty-minded officialdom. Tilting at such bureaucratic windmills quickly became our personal version of Sixties’ rebellion. By contrast, our main battle was with the forces of destiny. In
this lofty undertaking, we could afford to ridicule the minor stumbling blocks put in our way by officious college bursars.

When one battles with destiny only the major issues – life, survival and death – are of real significance. So far the forces of destiny seemed to be either dormant or on our side,
for in spite of the obstacles our foreseeable future in the Cold War atmosphere of the mid-Sixties was beginning to look as secure as anybody else’s. For Stephen, the prospect of marriage
meant that he had to get down to work and prove his worth in physics. In my simplicity I believed that faith also had a hand in determining our way forwards. In a sense, we both shared a faith, an
existential faith, in our chosen course, but I, encouraged by my mother and by my friends, reached out to a faith in a higher influence – God perhaps – who appeared to be responding to
my need for help by strengthening my courage and determination. On the other hand, while I was well aware that the Hawkings, for all their traditional Methodist background, professed themselves to
be agnostics if not atheists, I found their tendency to sneer at religious matters unpleasant. Stephen and I spent our first Christmas together just two months after our engagement. The fact that
he came to Morning Service with my family produced raised eyebrows and snide comments on our return to 14 Hillside Road. “So do you feel holier now?” Philippa quietly enquired of
Stephen in a tone laden with sarcasm, and I sensed a tinge of inexplicable hostility towards me. He laughed in reply while his mother remarked, “He should certainly be holier than thou,
because he is now under the influence of a good woman.” It was difficult to know how to take these remarks – it was not easy to make light of them, because they smacked of conspiracy
and seemed targeted at an essential element, my faith, on which I would depend implicitly in the task before me. This cynicism was very different from the mirth in which I wholeheartedly shared
when we analysed the various forms of the marriage service. I was appalled to find that, according to the marriage service of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, I was expected to become a
“follower of godly and sober matrons”. I opted instead for the 1928 version, where that ugly phrase did not appear.

Success has a knack of breeding success, and soon we were celebrating again. Another Saturday had been spent in Stephen’s rooms writing out another application, this time for a prize, the
Gravity Prize, endowed by an American gentleman who in his wisdom believed that the discovery of anti-gravity would cure his gout. It is unlikely that any of the essays submitted ever provided any
relief for the poor man’s suffering, but his generous prizes provided great financial relief to many a struggling young physicist. Over the years Stephen won the whole range of Gravity
Prizes, culminating in the first prize in 1971. Although, to our vexation, Stephen’s first entry missed the post that Saturday in 1965, his efforts were nevertheless to be crowned with a very
timely degree of success when some weeks later I was urgently called down from my attic in Hampstead to take a call from Stephen. He was ringing from Cambridge – as usual, for fourpence
– to tell me that he had been awarded a Commendation Prize, worth £100, in the Gravity competition. I danced round Mrs Dunham’s kitchen in raptures. Stephen’s hundred pounds
– added to the two hundred and fifty pounds which my father had been accumulating for me in National Savings and which he had promised to give me on my twenty-first birthday – would
enable us to pay off Stephen’s overdraft and buy a car. Later that summer, just before the wedding, Stephen’s close friend in Trinity Hall, Rob Donovan, negotiated a very favourable
deal for us with his father, a car dealer in Cheshire. We had the choice of two vehicles: one, a gleaming, red-painted, open-topped 1924 Rolls Royce, was tantalizing but quite impractical and
rather beyond our means; at the other end of the scale, there was a red Mini on offer. Reluctantly Stephen had to concede that the Mini was better suited to our purse and to our requirements,
especially since one of those small clouds looming on my horizon was ominously marked “driving test”.

As all my previous attempts had ended in failure, I did not suppose that turning up for the next test in a 1924 Rolls would endear me to the crusty, humourless examiner who, when last I
encountered him, had failed me yet again. Drily he had commented, as he clutched his heart, that my driving was not that of a beginner but of a hardened driver; it was alarmingly carefree and much
too close to the speed limit. He should have been grateful that, given my recent experiences, I did not exceed the speed limit, overtake on bends or hills and attack dual carriageways from the
wrong direction. Ironically, considering his known driving techniques, Stephen still held a valid driving licence, although he was no longer able to drive, so it was within the bounds of the law
for me to drive on a provisional licence while he sat beside me. When finally in the autumn of 1965 I passed the dreaded test, it may have been because my bête noire, the chief examiner, was
reported to be in hospital.

All those successes and celebrations in the early months of 1965 clearly marked our way forwards, with the result that my concerns became more intensely focused on Cambridge and the wedding.
Inevitably a distance was developing between me and my friends and contemporaries, both my student friends in Westfield and my old dancing and tennis friends in St Albans. The last time that I saw
many of those early friends was either when we worked together in the sorting office at the Post Office before the Christmas of 1964, or at my twenty-first birthday party: this Stephen’s
parents kindly agreed to host in their large, rambling house, which was much more spacious than my parents’ semidetached.

It was a glorious day, hot and sunny with bright, clear spring skies, and my happiness was complete. Stephen’s present to me, recordings of the late Beethoven Quartets, could only be
interpreted as the ultimate expression of our depth of feeling for each other. That birthday was happily very different from the previous year, when Stephen had given me a record of the complete
works of Webern and later taken me to a drama about the use of the electric chair in the United States. That afternoon my whole family, including Grandma, had sat in a silent circle in our living
room listening to Webern’s entire opus. Stephen sat solemnly in an armchair while Dad buried his head in a book, Mum immersed herself in her knitting and Grandma dozed off. With great aplomb
my family managed to appear totally unmoved by the assorted atonic clashes, lengthy inconsequential pauses and grating dissonances of the music, while I, sitting on the floor on the verge of
hysterics, had to hide my face in a cushion.

In 1965, however, my twenty-first birthday party went with a swing in the warm spring air under the coloured lights on the terrace. It was as magical as a fairy tale, although as in all fairy
tales it masked a perceptibly hostile element. Again I sensed an ill-disguised frisson of resentment in Philippa’s attitude towards me which I was at a loss to understand. Was it because I
had been allowed to take over her home for my party just for one evening? Or was it because she regarded me as intellectually inferior, and “feminine” – a term of abuse in the
Hawking lexicon – as well? She clearly found my faith ridiculous. “Don’t take it seriously,” was Stephen’s answer when I told him of my anxieties on that score, but
this glib reaction was not sufficient reassurance.

From Mary, the elder of the two sisters, I received a more good-natured response. According to his mother, Stephen had found it hard to forgive his sibling for coming into the world barely
seventeen months after his own birth. Mary, shy and gentle by nature, had found herself in an unenviable position in the family, poised between two exceptionally intelligent, determined
personalities, Stephen and Philippa. In self-defence, she had forced herself into a fiercely competitive intellectual mould, when really her talents were much more creative and practical. With an
intense loyalty to her father, she had taken up medicine, and it was with her father that she communicated most freely. Although my parents had heard first-hand accounts through various friends in
St Albans of Frank Hawking’s blunt, abrasive behaviour towards his staff in the Medical Research Laboratory at Mill Hill, towards me he was chivalrous and considerate. It was unfortunate that
he did not present himself in a better light to the outside world, since he was a sensitive man who possessed generous and honourable qualities. Repeatedly, with endearing Yorkshire directness, he
impressed upon me how genuinely delighted he and his family were at our engagement, sincerely promising to help in any way possible. Understandably he was devastated by the diagnosis of his
son’s illness and, notwithstanding his pleasure at our marriage, his medical background forced him to take a strictly orthodox and pessimistic view. My father had come across information
about a Swiss doctor who claimed to be able to treat neurological conditions by means of a controlled diet, and he had offered to pay for Stephen to go to Switzerland for a course of treatment.
With the doubtful advantage of superior medical knowledge, Frank Hawking dismissed the Swiss claims as unfounded. He, for his part, was only able to warn me that Stephen’s life would be
short, as would be his ability to fulfill a marital relationship. Moreover he advised me that if we wanted to have a family, we should not delay, assuring me that Stephen’s illness was not
genetically inherited.

Stephen’s mother, who confided in me that she was convinced that the first symptoms of Stephen’s condition had appeared in an unexplained illness when he was thirteen, also thought I
should be fully informed of all the horrific developments that could be expected to occur as Stephen’s condition degenerated. However, if the only treatments available were to be dismissed,
rightly or wrongly, as crank quackery, I did not see much point in having whatever natural optimism I could muster destroyed by a litany of doom-laden prophecies without any palliative advice. I
replied that I would prefer not to know the details of the prognosis, because I loved Stephen so much that nothing could deter me from wanting to marry him: I would make a home for him, dismissing
all my own previous ambitions which now were insignificant by comparison with the challenge before me. In return, with all the innocence of my twenty-one years, I trusted that Stephen would cherish
me and encourage me to fulfil my own interests. I trusted too in the promise that he had made my father when he had asked for my hand: that he would not demand more of me than I could reasonably
accomplish, nor would he allow himself to become a millstone round my neck. We had both promised Dad that I would finish my degree course.

The plans for the wedding proceeded apace, attended by much to-ing and fro-ing between St Albans and Cambridge and by the sort of disagreements typical of weddings everywhere: Stephen, supported
by his father, refused to wear morning dress, although my father and brother insisted on maintaining a proper sense of style. Similarly Stephen refused to wear a carnation in his buttonhole, since
he thought them cheap and vulgar, although for me they were redolent in their colour and perfume of Spain. Roses provided a satisfactory compromise. My father thought that no wedding was complete
without a few token speeches, at which Stephen baulked and refused to say anything. The question of bridesmaids came and went unresolved, leaving a gap which on the day was ably filled by
nine-year-old Edward as an impromptu pageboy. Happily it was agreed, without audibly dissenting voices, that we should be married in the Chapel of Trinity Hall by the Chaplain, Paul Lucas. The
religious service on Thursday 15th July would have to be preceded by a modest civil ceremony in the Shire Hall in Cambridge the day before, as colleges are not licensed for marriages, and the cost
of a special licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury at £25 was deemed an unnecessary expense. Having deliberately chosen a small venue, we were then hard-pressed to accommodate all the
guests. Some friends and relations had to be axed from the list altogether, while others were consigned to the organ loft.