Travelling to Infinity (9 page)

In the midst of this confusion, I was tussling with Napoleon III, the Paris Commune of 1871 and my final French exams. Shortly before the wedding, Stephen attended his first General Relativity
conference, which that year was conveniently held in London. I joined him for the official government reception in Carlton House Terrace, where I met many of the physicists who were subsequently to
play significant roles in his career: Kip Thorne, John Wheeler, Charles Misner, George Ellis and two Russian scientists. Many of them were to become lasting friends to both of us. It was at that
conference that the world’s relativists, including Stephen, were first seized by the fever of excitement at the black-hole research (at that stage known much less graphically by the more
pedestrian description of collapsing stars) that was to grip them for decades.

After the civil-marriage ceremony on 14th July, intoned by the Registrar among the filing cabinets and artificial flowers of the Shire Hall, my mother-in-law came up to me and with her wry smile
said, “Welcome Mrs ’awkins, because that’s how you’ll be known from now on.” The next day, St Swithin’s Day, Stephen’s best man Rob Donovan skilfully
manoeuvred us and our near and dear through the marriage service and the festivities in the precincts of Trinity Hall without mishap. This was quite a remarkable feat, if only because of the number
of elderly relatives present and the immense width of Philippa’s hat, to which she had attached a superabundant display of foxgloves, delphiniums and poppies, rivalling the College gardens in
their herbaceous exuberance. It was a happy day, despite the grey skies and intermittent drizzle. At last, in the early evening, at the end of the reception in the College hall where my father had
publicly thanked Stephen for taking me off his hands, Rob Donovan dropped us off on the outskirts of Cambridge. There in a side street he had parked our recently acquired red Mini, complete with
L-plates, well out of the way of my brother’s mischievous designs. I settled myself into the driver’s seat and, with Stephen beside me, cautiously pulled away from the kerb, heading in
the direction of Long Melford in Suffolk and the Bull Inn.

All too soon that first idyllic week of marriage was but a halcyon memory – a memory of winding Suffolk lanes and lush gardens, musty country churches and half-timbered
villages. At the end of it, as we sat waiting for take-off to New York, having boarded the plane long in advance of the other passengers, that blissful week with daytime outings to sleepy hamlets,
country houses and the coast was quickly superseded by the inexorable advance of science, the synthesized traditions and the pace of the New World.

At Kennedy Airport, we were joining the queue of passengers at passport control when a tall, neatly dressed air hostess approached us, intently examining the file she was carrying. “What
are your names?” she asked, looking down a list. “Jane and Stephen Hawking,” we answered, not expecting any special messages. “Oh,” she said in some surprise, “I
don’t have your names on my list. How old are you?” Now it was our turn to register some surprise. “I’m twenty-one and he’s twenty-three,” I replied for both of
us. “Gee, I’m so sorry,” she gushed, “I thought you were unaccompanied minors!”

Indignant at the insult to our maturity and our married status, we pulled ourselves up to our full height and passed through US customs to the helicopter which was to fly us over New York City
to La Guardia airport for the connecting flight to Ithaca in upstate New York. Our first view of New York was depressing. As we flew just above the level of the skyscrapers through a dense smog,
the buildings loomed out of the haze like giant javelins poised to spear us on their tips. It was hard to believe that human beings lived and worked down there in that inferno. My suspicions that
we had landed in a modern Brobdingnag were confirmed when we were ushered to the limousine that had been sent to collect us from Ithaca airport and take us to Cornell University. Everything –
the cars, the roads, the buildings – was ten times larger than anything I had ever seen; even the wide expanse of pleasant green countryside seemed to roll on for ever. Yet for me, a linguist
used to the challenge of a foreign language only twenty-three miles away across the Channel, the most baffling aspect was that we had travelled thousands of miles only to find ourselves among
people who spoke the same language as we did, even if, like the rest of their country, the language had suffered a bout of inflation on the way.

Our lodgings consisted of student accommodation in a twin-bedded room on the third floor of a new hall of residence on the Cornell campus. As we were both well used to the student way of life,
that was not a problem. What really unnerved us was that the third floor had been designated as family accommodation for the duration of the summer school, and we were thrown in to survive as best
we could among families with babies and small children who wailed all night or sat out in the corridor protesting while their parents held parties in the lounge area. This unforeseen circumstance
spelt an abrupt end to the honeymoon which we had intended to resume on the American side of the Atlantic. Although some of the toddlers were undeniably appealing, a stay in a mammoth nursery was
not what we had expected.

The problems were compounded by the logistics of the campus. For the able-bodied these would not have presented any difficulty, but since the hall of residence was the best part of a mile from
the lecture theatre and we had no transport, it was a struggle for Stephen to get to the lectures on time. He could walk alone, but progress was slow; he moved much more quickly if he had a helpful
arm to lean on, so gladly fulfilling my new role I went everywhere with him. Meals presented another problem. Living, as we still were, on student grants, we could not afford to eat all our meals
in the canteen, but as there was not a single utensil in the kitchenette on our floor, we did not have the wherewithal even to make ourselves a cup of tea. Eventually one of the conference
secretaries came to the rescue and offered to take me by car down into Ithaca to do some shopping at the nearest Woolworths. As we glided along in her enormous station wagon, I politely asked, by
way of conversation, if she had ever been to Europe. She did not mince her words. “No”, was her reply. “You see, I don’t like going places where they don’t have
bathrooms.”

Duly equipped with a saucepan, cutlery, mugs and plates, plus an electric fan to mitigate the heat – which, unlike Spanish heat, was sticky and humid – I set up an improvised home
base, for the first but by no means the only time in my married life, on the third floor of the hall of residence. Brandon Carter, who was a fellow research student with Stephen in Cambridge and
had been a guest at our wedding, was an invaluable help: drawing on his childhood experiences in the Australian bush, he taught me how to make tea by the billycan method – in a saucepan, the
same saucepan that was used for scrambled eggs, pasta, baked beans and all the other bedsit-type fare on which we depended in those weeks. Versatility was of the essence in this unforeseen
introduction to the joys of domesticity.

Much of my day was spent in walking with Stephen to and from the lecture hall and shopping in the nearby campus store. To fill the intervening hours, which were as short as the distances to any
other place were long, I resorted to my studies in the library. Then, to vary the monothematic diet of Hispanic studies, I hit upon the idea of borrowing a typewriter and a desk in the secretarial
office and began to type out the preliminary draft of the initial chapters of Stephen’s doctoral thesis. The universes in question may have been expanding, but they were littered with so many
incomprehensible hieroglyphic shapes and forms – as well as conventional numerals and all the normal mathematical signs – dancing above and below the line, that it soon became obvious
that this particular enterprise was going to become a typographical nightmare.

Although such a sudden encounter with the nitty-gritty of marriage to a physicist might not have been exactly what I had anticipated from the second week of the honeymoon, I was relieved to have
some useful occupation. I was also glad to be able to witness Stephen’s intense excitement at moving in international scientific circles where he was already becoming recognized. He was
particularly gratified at the increasing collaboration between himself and Roger Penrose, a slightly older British physicist, on a mathematical project known as the theory of singularities or
gravitational collapse. The theory proposed that any body undergoing gravitational collapse must form a singularity, a region in space-time where the laws of relativity cease to hold, probably
because the curvature of space-time becomes infinite. In the case of a star collapsing under its own gravity when its surface and its volume shrink to zero, Roger conjectured that the singularity
would be hidden in what was later to be called a black hole. Inspired by Roger’s theory and by the work of the Russians Lifshitz and Khalatnikov, Stephen was confident that these equations
could be reversed in time to prove that any expanding model of the universe must have begun with a singularity, thus providing the theoretical basis for the Big Bang. The equations would also
provide him with a momentous conclusion to his thesis.

The arrival like a ship in full sail from her family home in Detroit of Roger Penrose’s wife, Joan, bearing one small child in a sling on her front and clutching another by the hand, while
her elderly mother brought up the rear, afforded some relief from the tedium of life on the third floor. Joan had majored in public speaking, a useful attribute in controlling a family of boys
– and an even more essential accomplishment, as I was beginning to realize, for making one’s presence felt in the world of physicists where wives – although there were plenty of
them with hordes of small children in tow – were scarcely noticed. Some were loud and loquacious, others were inhibited and reserved, others were positively sullen and morose; the handful of
wives who themselves had a background in maths or physics tended to adopt a more competitive, masculine style of behaviour, while those whose dormant, half-forgotten talents lay in other areas
tended to be prickly and mistrustful. Physics seemed to have taken its toll on all of them and, whether or not they liked each other or got on well with each other, they all had one thing in
common: they were already, to all intents and purposes, widows – physics widows.

There were a few memorable diversions. Every day, as we strolled across the campus, I grasped the golden opportunity to chat in Spanish to a Mexican couple who seemed as disoriented in Cornell
as I was. Then, one Saturday afternoon, some acquaintances of some friends of Stephen’s parents kindly invited us to join them at their summer house by a lake not far from Ithaca. Otherwise,
our evenings were spent humming ‘Waltzing Matilda’ over our single saucepan as it bubbled on the hotplate in the kitchenette on the third floor, while Brandon regaled us with lengthy
accounts of his adventures. These often concerned life in the Australian bush, but also touched on his interest in the mathematician James Clerk Maxwell and on a dramatic sailing trip which was to
have reached the Mediterranean through the Bay of Biscay but never got further than Cherbourg. When these topics were exhausted, the conversation normally lapsed into a sustained cosmological
argument between him and Stephen, while I washed up the saucepan and the plastic plates, wondering whether we were doomed to spend the whole period of the summer school confined to the campus of
Cornell University and the third floor of the hall of residence.

Just as I was beginning to resign myself to an unchanging routine, Brian and Susie Burns, an Australian couple who had previously spent some time in Cambridge, offered us a lift in their car to
Niagara. Our sudden first sighting of the Falls after the tedious drive through the endless, sulphurous suburbs of the city of Buffalo took our breath away. The might of the immense volume of dark
water constantly on the move, relentlessly tumbling over the edge of the precipice, transformed into a mass of white foam and rainbow filaments of cooling spray, was as mesmerizing as the
thundering roar was deafening. Our senses numbed, we stumbled across the bridge to the Canadian side to get a better view and stood hypnotized until it was time for us to take the short flight back
to Ithaca. Against a threatening sky, we boarded the small plane and took off amid thunder and lightning. For the first time in my life, I was afraid of flying.

The next weekend, Brandon and some friends arranged a sailing trip on Lake Ontario. We set out in a gentle breeze and, once out on the lake, the day slipped by. I swam in the green waters and
Stephen sat back deep in thought, enjoying the clear blue skies and the sound of the water gently lapping against the hull. By late afternoon, our companions had long since ceased to share our
pleasure at the peaceful conditions and talked anxiously of sending up flares and putting out distress signals – we were becalmed. Brandon helpfully remarked that this was not a situation he
had had to deal with in the Bay of Biscay as there you could always rely on the wind. Somehow, much later that evening, we managed to limp back into harbour as in a magnificent blaze the setting
sun, sinking from view on the blackened horizon, bathed our weary faces in its amber glow.

It was not until the last week of the summer school that someone – I think it was Ray Sachs, an extrovert Californian physicist, the father of four daughters – had the bright idea of
organizing a social event, a picnic in a field, for families. There we were introduced to more wives and more children, but the person who made the greatest impression on us was a quiet American
from Texas, Robert Boyer, with whom Stephen had already established a professional rapport. Robert included me in conversation in a natural, friendly manner, and talked about matters other than
physics. Indeed, it has to be said that individually many physicists could be quite charming, friendly and down-to-earth. In a group, however, their natural tendency was to slip inexorably into
interminable discussions and arguments, almost always about physics. But there was a rival topic of conversation which increasingly exercised the minds, not only of all academics but of all young
people: that topic, Vietnam, was liberally aired at that picnic. The growing menace of the war was regarded with fear and loathing; it threatened to cut a swathe through the nation’s youth
for a cause supported only by the military and the bigoted.