by Jane Hawking
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.
7
In Good Faith
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.
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.
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br /> 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 her
self 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.