Jane remembers that being unable to assist with his children or play with them in an active way was difficult for Stephen. She taught Robert, and later Lucy and Timmy, to play cricket (’I can get them out!’ she gloated), and she teased her husband that, unlike other wives, she was not surprised or disillusioned when he proved useless around the house and with the children.
Hawking’s practical uselessness became one of the positive side effects of his illness. It might take him a long time to get up and go to bed, but he didn’t have to run errands, do home repairs, mow the grass, make travel arrangements, pack his suitcase, draw up lecture schedules or serve in time-consuming administrative positions in the DAMTP or at Caius. Such matters were left to colleagues and assistants and to his wife. He could spend all his time thinking about physics, a luxury which his colleagues envy him.
Jane had anticipated that an overwhelming proportion of these day-to-day responsibilities would fall to her. She had decided even before they were married in the 1960s that only one of them would be able to have a career, and it would have to be her husband. In the 1970s, perhaps partly because attitudes about the role of women were changing, that sacrifice became more difficult for her to accept. She’d thought that providing Stephen with the encouragement and assistance he so badly needed would give her life purpose and meaning. What it was not giving her was an identity. Motherhood wasn’t doing that either. As she put it, although she adored her children and ‘would not have wanted to farm them out to anybody else, Cambridge is a jolly difficult place to live if your only identity is as the mother of small children’.5
To be fair to the university community, whenever you mentioned the name Hawking in Cambridge someone was likely to comment that Jane Hawking was even more remarkable than Stephen. However, Jane Hawking didn’t feel that was her reputation. As she saw it, in Cambridge ‘the pressure is on you to make your way academically’.6 That of course was the reason she had decided to go back to university to earn her Ph.D., but her drafts for that thesis were far too often languishing on the shelf.
Jane had much to be proud of in the 1970s. Robert and Lucy were turning out well; Hawking’s career as a physicist was skyrocketing; his reputation as a remarkably tough and good-humoured man when the odds were against him was becoming legendary; and she was beginning to make her own mark academically. At the same time she felt increasingly that her enormous and burdensome role in Hawking’s success went largely unnoticed. Hers was a problem which is not unusual for persons with a talent for making things look easy: others begin to assume that things are easy for them and fail to appreciate the sacrifice and effort involved. Both Jane and her husband knew that none of his success – probably not even his survival – could have happened without her, but she was allowed to share little of the triumph. In photos of him she was sometimes cropped out, thought to be a nurse pushing his wheelchair. Nor could she follow his mathematical reasoning and share his pleasure in that. Nevertheless, ‘the joy and excitement of Stephen’s success were tremendous’,7 she says. She did not regret the decision she made to marry him, but the rewards ‘didn’t alleviate the heartrending difficulties of coping day after day with motor neurone disease’.8
In spite of the difficulties there were many pleasures the Hawkings shared. Both of them were devoted to their children. They loved classical music and attended concerts and the theatre together. At Christmas they took Robert and Lucy to the pantomime. They also loved entertaining. Don Page, who as a postgraduate researcher would live with the Hawkings for three years as Hawking’s assistant, remembers that Jane Hawking was ‘very outgoing … a great professional asset’ to her husband.9 It wasn’t unheard of to find her in the market shopping for a party of sixty people. The Hawkings became renowned for their hospitality.
Both of them were also deeply interested in increasing public awareness of the needs of disabled people and the possibility that they might expect to live normal, even brilliantly successful and active lives. This was not so much a part of our culture in the 1970s as it is becoming today. Britain had passed its Chronically Sick and Disabled Person’s Act in 1970, but that was very slow in implementation. Occasionally, Jane Hawking felt indignant enough to protest. She wrote a letter to the board of the National Trust when Anglesey Abbey, a house and gardens open to visitors near Cambridge, insisted the Hawkings park in a car park half a mile away, not near the house.10 Jane was soon adding campaigning for the rights of disabled people to her already over-long list of activities.
The Hawkings won some battles for wheelchair access. After a lengthy bureaucratic dispute about who should pay for it, a ramp was built at the back entrance into the DAMTP building. The Arts Theatre began reserving spaces for wheelchairs. The Arts Cinema also made room. Elsewhere, the English National Opera at the Coliseum made access possible. Where there was no such access, anyone near at hand was likely to be conscripted to lift Hawking and his chair up and down stairs. At Clare Hall, a graduate college of the University of Cambridge, members of the Astronomy Group were regularly called upon for this duty before and after their meetings. It wasn’t always a safe procedure. Attendants at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden dropped Stephen while carrying him up a flight of stairs to otherwise inaccessible seats.11
Faith in God and the Laws of Physics
Looking back in the late 1980s, Jane Hawking attributed her ability to cope for so many years with their unusual and often difficult life – a life with no hope of a long or happy future – to her faith in God. Without that, she said, ‘I wouldn’t have been able to live in this situation. I wouldn’t have been able to marry Stephen in the first place, because I wouldn’t have had the optimism to carry me through, and I wouldn’t be able to carry on with it.’12
The faith which supported her so magnificently was not shared by her husband. It was shared by some of his physics colleagues, but the subject was not one she usually discussed with them. If there has been a religious or philosophical side to Stephen Hawking’s confrontation with disability and the threat of early death, he’s never spoken about that publicly. However, it seems evident from his books A Brief History of Time and The Grand Design that God is never far from Hawking’s mind. He told an interviewer in the 1980s: ‘It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the universe without mentioning the concept of God. My work on the origin of the universe is on the borderline between science and religion, but I try to stay [on the scientific] side of the border. It is quite possible that God acts in ways that cannot be described by scientific laws. But in that case one would just have to go by personal belief.’13 Asked whether he thought his science is in competition with religion, he answered, ‘If one took that attitude, then Newton [who was a very religious man] would not have discovered the law of gravity.’14
Hawking said he wasn’t an atheist, but he preferred to ‘use the term God as the embodiment of the laws of physics’.15 ‘You don’t need to appeal to God to set the initial conditions for the universe, but that doesn’t prove there is no God – only that he acts through the laws of physics.’16 However, Hawking definitely did not believe in a personal God who cares for human beings as individuals, relates to them in a powerful and transforming way, and performs miracles. ‘We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred thousand million galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence.’17 Einstein shared Hawking’s view. Others, including some of Hawking’s physics colleagues, would agree with Jane Hawking and call this a sadly limited view of God, pointing out that it’s equally difficult to believe that all the intelligent and rational people (a good many scientists among them) who say they have experienced a personal God are somehow deluded. This enormous difference in outlook could hardly have been illustrated more strikingly than in the views of Stephen and Jane Hawking.
‘I used to find Stephen’s assertion that he doesn’t believe in a personal God quite hurtful,’18 Ja
ne remembers. She would tell an interviewer in 1988: ‘He is delving into realms that really do matter to thinking people and in a way that can have a very disturbing effect on people. There’s one aspect of his thought that I find increasingly upsetting and difficult to live with. It’s the feeling that, because everything is reduced to a rational, mathematical formula, that must be the truth.’19 It seemed to her that there was no room in her husband’s mind for the possibility that the truth revealed in his mathematics might not be the whole truth. A year later she had changed her outlook somewhat: ‘As one grows older it’s easier to take a broader view. I think the whole picture for him is so different from the whole picture for anybody else by virtue of his condition and his circumstances … being an almost totally paralysed genius … that nobody else can understand what his view of God or what his relationship with God might be.’20
Truth might have to be mathematical, but physics, for Hawking, was not all there was to life. ‘Physics,’ he told an interviewer, ‘is all very well, but it is completely cold. I couldn’t carry on with my life if I only had physics. Like everyone else, I need warmth, love, and affection.’21
An Unusual Asset
In the late 1960s it had perhaps been generous of Hawking’s college and university departments to keep on a young physicist who hadn’t long to live, who might contribute little to his department in terms of lecturing and teaching. The DAMTP had from the beginning exempted Hawking from heavy teaching duties and allowed him to concentrate on his research and a few seminars and graduate students. By the mid-1970s Caius and the University had begun to realize that they’d done themselves a favour. He’d become a considerable asset.
However, at Cambridge extraordinary minds and personalities aren’t uncommon. They crop up in one university department or another on a regular basis. It’s a healthy environment for genius. No matter how much one is treated with awe in the wider world, within the university community it’s generally just business as usual. Even in the late 1970s, when Hawking had become something of a legend, he and all his specialized equipment – gadgets to turn pages for him, computer terminals with special controls so that he could use them like a blackboard – still shared a cramped office with another researcher.
His communication problems were growing more severe. Earlier in the 1970s it was still possible to carry on a normal conversation with Hawking. However, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, when his speech was so slurred that only his family and closest friends could understand him, the job of ‘interpreter’ frequently fell to a research student. Michael Harwood, who later interviewed Hawking for The New York Times, described the process: ‘Don Page, sitting beside him, leans close to hear the indistinct words, mouths each phrase to be certain he has caught it, often pauses and asks for a repetition, speaks a phrase back to Hawking sometimes to make certain, corrects himself.’22 Another interviewer recalls that he often thought Hawking had finished a sentence only to find with the ‘interpretation’ that he’d spoken just one word. Hawking wrote his scientific papers by dictating them in this tedious fashion to his secretary. But he was learning to state ideas in the fewest words possible and to get to the point in scientific papers and conversations.
What he was saying in those few words was receiving worldwide attention. The procession of awards and recognition had escalated soon after Hawking announced his discovery of exploding black holes. In the spring of 1974 he was inducted into the Royal Society, one of the world’s most prestigious bodies of scientists. At thirty-two he was young for the honour. During the rite of investiture, a ceremony dating from the seventeenth century, new Fellows walk to the podium to write their names in a book the earliest pages of which contain the signature of Isaac Newton. Those present when Hawking was inducted remember that the president of the society, Sir Alan Hodgkin, Nobel Prize winner in biology, broke tradition and carried the book down to Hawking in the front row. Hawking could still write his name with great effort, but it took him a long time. The gathering of eminent scientists waited respectfully. When Hawking finished and looked up with a broad grin, they gave him an ovation.
That same spring, the Hawkings enthusiastically accepted an invitation from the California Institute of Technology, where Kip Thorne was a professor, to spend the academic year 1974–5 there.23 Hawking would be a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar. The offer included an excellent salary, a house, a car and even a new electric wheelchair. All medical expenses would be covered (the British National Health did not cover expenses out of the country) as well as schooling for Robert and Lucy.
In the spring when that offer came, it had been almost four years since the Hawkings had purchased and renovated their house in Little St Mary’s Lane. Stephen’s trips up and down the stairs, by this time accomplished by grasping the posts that held up the banister and using only the strength of his arms to pull himself up step by step to the second floor, had for a time been good physical therapy. They were finally proving impossible. Caius College chose to be more helpful with housing than they had been when the Hawkings were newlyweds. There was a new bursar, who offered them a spacious ground-floor flat in a college-owned brick mansion on West Road, not far from the back gate of King’s College. The arrangement in this house, with a faculty family having the rather elegant although sometimes a bit run-down-around-the-edges lower floors, with graduate students in rooms above, was not unusual at that time in Cambridge. The flat Caius offered had high ceilings and large windows and required only a little modification and renovation to make it more suitable for the family and convenient for a wheelchair. This work could be completed while the Hawkings were in California. They would be able to move in when they returned. Except for a gravel parking area in front, the house was surrounded by gardens tended by Caius College gardeners, who were also willing to listen to suggestions and gardening plans from Jane Hawking. It would be an ideal childhood home for the Hawking children.
Even though he had given up on stair climbing, Hawking could still feed himself and get into and out of bed, but these actions too were becoming increasingly difficult. Jane was still managing without outside help, working on overdrive to try to keep his life as normal as it could be with his worsening condition, make it possible for him to continue his work, and at the same time see that Robert and Lucy weren’t robbed of a normal childhood. She had also occasionally been finding time to work on her thesis. But the Hawkings both knew that something had to change.
Planning ahead for the trip to California, Jane, over the Easter holiday, suggested a new solution for caring for Stephen – one that he could accept without feeling it represented a concession and courage-sapping defeat. They would begin a custom of asking a graduate student or a postdoctoral research student to live and travel with them. In return for free accommodation and extra attention from Hawking, the student would help him get ready for bed and get up. When the Hawkings departed for California, one of his graduate students, Bernard Carr, would go with them.
Jane Hawking booked flights and, with Bernard Carr’s help, packed and moved belongings, two small children, husband and specialized equipment across the world to southern California with an efficiency that awed her friends.
A Place in the Sun
In August 1974, Kip Thorne met the Hawkings at Los Angeles airport in a gleaming new American station wagon that would be theirs for the length of their stay. It had been a long flight, over the North Pole from London, but the family revived in the languid air of southern California as Kip manoeuvred the freeways through the sprawling city with its skyscrapers and amazingly tall palm trees to Pasadena, ten miles north-east of downtown Los Angeles.24
They arrived, just at dusk, at the house that had been arranged for them – a lovely home with white weather-boarding, lights gleaming in every window. The house was across the street from the Caltech campus and had a view of the mountains. Jane described it in a letter she wrote on that first day to her parents back in England: ‘It is as elegant inside as it is pretty ou
t. These people must think we are used to an astronomical standard of living. If only they knew!’25
Stephen, Jane and their children discovered hummingbirds on the patio, a huge climbable California oak tree in the garden, a television and several bathrooms. There was a swimming pool nearby on campus. You could easily drive to Disneyland. Stephen’s new, state-of-the-art electric wheelchair was waiting for him. Like a racing car driver testing a new, faster, more manoeuvrable model, Hawking zoomed around, finding out what it could do, stopping to allow engineers to make adjustments.
As the Hawkings settled into their California life, a new and rather disturbing experience, which they had known to expect, was the frequent tremors and occasionally a rather startling earthquake. Their neighbours and Hawking’s colleagues at Caltech seemed to take these in their stride and assured Jane and Stephen that small, frequent tremors made it less likely there would be a big, dangerous quake. The house and its occupants would make it through the year with no damage.
Robert’s and Lucy’s school was the Pasadena Town and Country School. Three-year-old Lucy liked it so much the first day that she made up her mind she would stay the full day rather than the half-day she was assigned. She was nowhere to be found when her mother came to fetch her. A panicked staff discovered Lucy having her lunch calmly in the lunch room with the older children. Robert found a new role, making himself invaluable to his mother as a master navigator of the Los Angeles freeways with, seemingly, a detailed map in his seven-year-old head. Bernard Carr dived into Caltech student life with a passion and went out to parties nearly every evening after getting Hawking to bed. After the parties he sat up the rest of the night watching horror movies. Fortunately Stephen also was not fond of getting up early in the morning.
Stephen Hawking, His Life and Work Page 11