by Jane Hawking
By the time we returned to New York, the Cornell experience had rapidly turned me – at the age of twenty-one – into a rather confused follower of sober, if not of godly, matrons. The demonic nature of the illness had announced its presence much more dramatically than in lameness, difficulty of movement and lack of coordination. As if that were not enough, I sensed that there was yet another partner lurking in our already overcrowded marriage. The fourth partner first appeared in the form of a trusted and quiescent friend, signalling the way to success and fulfilment for those who followed her. In fact she proved to be a relentless rival, as exacting as any mistress, an inexorable Siren, luring her devotees into deep pools of obsession. She was none other than Physics, cited by Einstein’s first wife as the correspondent in divorce proceedings.
New York City provided both a necessary respite from such sombre considerations and the opportunity to restore the balance of our relationship, away from the inveigling companionship of other physicists. A medical colleague of Frank Hawking generously offered us a room in his Manhattan apartment for the weekend. It was ideally situated for our sightseeing excursions to the Metropolitan Museum, the Empire State Building, Time Square and Broadway. Unfortunately Broadway had little to offer in August, so, bizarrely, we spent the Saturday evening in a cinema watching My Fair Lady. I had few regrets when we said goodbye to New York. As the bus drove into Kennedy Airport, I looked back over my shoulder to the solid line of clearly etched skyscrapers standing to attention in a grey mass on the horizon, and thought that I had never seen an apparition of such monstrous brutality. I was impatient to return to the manageable, if cramped, proportions and genuinely old-fashioned but less frenzied ways of the Lilliputian world where I belonged. My place was on a continent mellowed by history and a sense of poetic values, where I fondly thought there was greater stability and where people had more time for each other.
9
The Lane
My sentimental illusions about the stability of life on the European side of the Atlantic were quickly dispelled on our return to England, where I found that my parents were about to move to a house only thirty doors up the road from the home where I had lived since the age of six. The break with the past was now irreparably set in bricks and mortar. Although, when last heard of, the flat Stephen and I had reserved over the market place in Cambridge was not yet finished, we had to find a home of our own urgently if only to house all our wedding presents. Loading our luggage and presents into the red Mini, we set off for Cambridge and went straight to the estate agent’s. The flats were indeed finished, we were told, but, as the agent had no record of our names or of our booking, they were all already let to other tenants. The Old World was beginning to look distinctly unreliable after all.
We discussed our next move over a despondent lunch. Stephen decided to brave the Bursar of Caius once again in the vain hope that he might be persuaded to help, even temporarily. Together we bearded the ogre in his den. To our surprise, he had changed identity in the previous six months, and the new Bursar was also the lecturer in Tibetan. However that post was a sinecure, since there were never any students in Tibetan, so he had time on his hands in which to oversee the financial affairs of the College. Unlike his predecessor, he did not snap Stephen’s head off in indignation but listened gravely, even sympathetically, to his request, and then came up with a brilliant solution, which coaxed a glimmer of a smile from his dour face. “Yes,” he mused, “I think we might be able to help – only in the very short term of course, because you know that the College has a policy of not providing housing for Research Fellows, don’t you?” We nodded with bated breath. He consulted a list. “There’s a room vacant in the Harvey Road hostel: it’s twelve shillings and sixpence a night for one man so we will put another bed in and it will be twenty-five shillings a night for the two of you.” We had to suppress our outrage at such sharp practice because we had nowhere else to go, hotels being beyond our means, but vowed that we would minimize the amount of time we spent at Harvey Road.
Although the College authorities were harsh and ungenerous, the staff, particularly the housekeeper of the hostel, could not have been kinder. This proved to be characteristic of the college servants, whether cleaning staff, workmen, gardeners, porters or waiters. Unfailingly they revealed qualities of warmth and friendliness often conspicuously absent in the rarified atmosphere of the higher echelons. The housekeeper warmed our room, aired our beds, brought us tea and biscuits that first evening and breakfast in the morning. She even offered to do our washing for us, although that was not necessary as our stay was to be mercifully brief.
In the intervening day, Stephen’s supervisor, Dennis Sciama, had come speedily to the rescue by putting us in touch with a Fellow of Peterhouse, who wanted to sublet the house he had been renting from that College. The house was unfurnished, but it was available immediately and moreover it was ideally placed for us, in one of the oldest, most picturesque streets of Cambridge, Little St Mary’s Lane, within a hundred yards of Stephen’s department, which had recently moved to the building of the old Pitt Press printing works in Mill Lane.
Since number 11 Little St Mary’s Lane contained not a stick of furniture, we had to grit our teeth, dip deep into our funds, savings and wedding-present money, and go on a rapid spending spree to buy basic furniture, a bed and an electric ring. While we were waiting for the bed to be delivered, I went out to buy provisions, leaving Stephen propped up against the bare wall of the living room for want of a seat. To my astonishment, when I returned he was comfortably seated on a blue kitchen chair. He explained that a lady from down the road had come to introduce herself and, finding him leaning against the wall, had kindly brought him the chair, which we could borrow until we had more furniture. The lady in question was Thelma Thatcher, the wife of the former Censor, or Master, of Fitzwilliam House, who lived at number 9. Thelma Thatcher was to become one of the most benevolent and most entertaining influences in our lives over the next ten years. That evening we cooked our supper in the Cornell saucepan on the single electric ring, drank sherry from our crystal glasses and, using a box for a table, ate from our bone china, using our gleaming stainless-steel cutlery set. Stephen sat on the Thatchers’ kitchen chair while I kneeled on the bare white-tiled floor. No matter that it was somewhat improvised, we celebrated our good luck in having a roof over our heads for the next three months.
Guarded at its entrance by two churches standing sentinel – the Victorian United Reform Church on the right and the medieval Church of Little St Mary on the left – the lane is hidden from the public gaze. Tourists discover it only by chance. These days the lane is closed to through-traffic thanks to a campaign by the residents, including Stephen and me, so visitors to the two big complexes on the river front, the Garden House Hotel and the University Centre, have to gain access via Mill Lane, which is not residential. Number 11 is the last of the main terrace of three-storeyed cottages on the right-hand side of the street, some of which probably date back to the sixteenth century. When we took up residence in 1965, the house had been recently renovated by Peterhouse, a college which, unlike Caius, did provide its Research Fellows with accommodation.
Iron railings on the south side of the lane enclose Little St Mary’s churchyard, a wild overgrown garden which, that September, was ablaze with reddening hips and haws and heavy with the scent of autumn roses. The few gravestones which were still standing were so weather-beaten that their inscriptions had become illegible, despite the spreading branches of the towering sycamore trees and the gnarled stems of the wisteria which sheltered them from the worst ravages of the elements. Here Nature had gently absorbed the dead of previous centuries back into her bosom, resurrecting them in a profusion of blossoms which trailed over the railings and reached out to caress the crooked old gas lamp which lit the street at night with its sulphurous glow.
Thelma Thatcher was the self-appointed warden of the lane. She had planted many of the rose bushes in the churchyard, where she exer
cised Matty, her King Charles spaniel, wrapping each of her paws in plastic bags in wet weather. As a matter of course, she took it upon herself to keep an eye on the well-being of all her neighbours, whatever their age or circumstances. Scarcely had a week gone by than she had lent us more chairs, tables, pots and pans, found us a gas cooker to borrow – from Sister Chalmers, the Peterhouse nurse who was moving into a fully equipped college flat – set about finding us somewhere else to live on the expiry of the present tenancy and served us innumerable glasses of sherry in the elegant, highly polished, antique-filled living room of her fine, whitewashed old house.
In 1965 she must already have been in her seventies, though with her straight back, dark hair and stately figure she could easily have passed for ten years younger. She combined the sparkle of a gifted raconteur with intense practicality: once, she told us, in a moment of inspiration at a Quaker wedding, she stood up and announced that the helpers had forgotten to light the gas under the tea urn. In a manner which would have done justice to Joyce Grenfell, she delighted in playfully deflating the pompous egos of many Cambridge academics. Her style was aristocratic and assertive, but always supported by deeply held and sincere Christian values. A self-professed pillar of the establishment, representing everything that Stephen despised, she found her natural target in woolly-minded liberals. In her, however, Stephen met his match, and he had to respect her for her goodness and generosity even if, politically, she and he were poles apart.
In the next few months, Thelma Thatcher took us under her wing like a mother hen. She kept a kindly eye on Stephen when I was away in London, as well as attending to the needs both of her elderly husband who – according to her, had snatched her out of her cradle – and of her lively, independent daughter Mary, who was assembling a film archive on the domestic lives of the British in India.
All too soon, I had to return to my final year at Westfield. Parting from Stephen each Monday was desperately painful, and the regime was hard for both of us. Stephen was just sufficiently capable of looking after himself to be able to live in the house, but every evening, unless invited out elsewhere, he had to make the long, hazardous trek down King’s Parade on his own to eat in College. Our Australian friend, Anne Young, unfailingly kept an eye out for him as he passed her window on the other side of the road, and generally one or other of the younger Fellows would see him home after the meal, when he would ring me to report on the day.
My routine was exhausting. I would leave for London on Monday mornings, spend the week in Westfield and then on Friday afternoons join the commuters once again. In my anxiety to get home to Cambridge, to Stephen – and to Nikolaus Pevsner’s Friday evening course of lectures on Renaissance architecture, which we attended together – I would bite my nails as I watched the minutes tick by on the Underground, wondering how long the train would sit in the tunnel, fearing that I was going to miss the connection from Liverpool Street. For years afterwards, my worst nightmares were dreams of being stuck in a tunnel on the Underground.
During the week, the pressure was on: translations into and from Spanish, essays and seminar papers all had to be submitted within deadlines, and the only time I had for doing them was in the evening. Weekends were taken up with shopping, washing, housework and typing Stephen’s thesis, parts of which he would have written out in a scrawly, all but illegible longhand during the week, and parts of which he dictated to me as I sat typing at our shiny new dining table in the otherwise bare living room. The trials of that pre-university secretarial course were now bearing fruit. The shorthand had been moderately useful for taking notes in lectures, but the dreaded typing was proving to be a godsend in tabling the laws of creation, since it saved us a mint of money in professional fees. The thesis first glimpsed at Cornell – with its equations and signs, symbols and coefficients, Greek letterings, numbers above and below the line, and infinite and non-infinite universes – drove me to distraction. However, since it was a scientific thesis, it was blessedly short. Furthermore I derived some small satisfaction from the knowledge that my fingers were consigning the beginnings of the universe to paper. The thought that all these mysteriously coded numbers, letters and signs were penetrating the secrets of that deep, black infinity was awe-inspiring. Dwelling on the poetic immensity of the topic for too long was counterproductive, though, as it distracted concentration from all the little dots and hieroglyphs above and below the line, any of which if misplaced could have thrown the beginnings of the universe into dire disarray and upset the whole order of creation.
I was not a little proud, too, to be able make a contribution of my own, other than the purely mechanical one of typing. Stephen’s use of English left much to be desired. His speech was scattered with expressions such as “you know” and “I mean”, and his written style showed little concern for the English language. As the daughter of a dedicated civil servant, I had been taught from an early age to use the language precisely, with appreciation for its clarity and its richness. Here was an area where in joining forces with Stephen I could assist him on an intellectual rather than just the physical plane, and also help bridge the gap between the arts and the sciences.
The weekends were also the time for buying more equipment and furnishings, for exploring Cambridgeshire and for seeing friends. We spent the whole of one Saturday afternoon in an electrical shop trying to decide whether we could afford the extra five pounds for a larger fridge than the one we had budgeted for. Considering that Stephen’s salary, as we had at last found out, was eleven hundred pounds a year, while our weekly rent and housekeeping when we were both at home – not counting numerous other outgoings – was ten pounds, an extra five pounds on any purchase was a major expenditure. On Sunday afternoons, if the Mini could be extricated from the Caius communal garage, we would tour Cambridgeshire, visiting villages and churches, always looking out for a suitable house or plot of land to buy. Sometimes our expeditions had to be abandoned before they had begun because the Mini was so impossibly hemmed in by ageing Bentleys and Rovers in its corner of the garage that it would have taken a crane to get it out.
One Sunday afternoon, having manoeuvred the Mini out of the garage, we tried to visit the local National Trust property, Anglesey Abbey. As the car park was a good half mile from the house, I drove up along the leafy avenue to the main entrance, expecting a sympathetic welcome for my partially disabled passenger. In fact we were met with rude intolerance and sent away. We went straight home, and I penned my first letter in furious protest, not only at the lack of facilities for the disabled in Britain but also for the scant respect with which they were treated, thus initiating a role for myself as a campaigner for the disabled.
Often, on our Sunday afternoon jaunts, we would happen to be in the vicinity of some of our married friends at teatime and, clinging to the illusion of a spontaneous student lifestyle, we would drop in on them. Slightly older than us, many of these friends had already had their first babies. Consequently we found ourselves drawn more and more into their pattern of domesticity, especially when I became the fascinated and slightly bemused godmother to two of the said babies. Stephen was also being drawn into other circles: those of the Fellowship of Gonville and Caius. One Saturday evening in early October, I accompanied him as far as the College Chapel for the service for the induction of new Fellows. At the suggestion of the Chaplain, I watched the service from the organ loft and then he invited me, a mere wife dressed in my housecleaning clothes, to dine at High Table. This was an unprecedented break with the past, as it was a long established rule in Cambridge colleges that wives – especially wives – were banned from High Table. High Table was the preserve of the Fellows who cultivated self-importance with the same exquisite care that lesser mortals might be expected to lavish on a prized stamp collection or a breed of racing pigeons. Their conversation revolved around the finer details of the most abstruse subjects – their own subjects naturally, about which they could expatiate at length while avoiding the embarrassment of having to discuss su
bjects about which they knew little or nothing. Mistresses were preferred to dull, silly wives. Indeed a Fellow might invite any woman to dine provided she was not his wife. It went without saying, of course, that, together with wives, undergraduates were also banned from High Table. Unbeknown to the College authorities, their renegade Chaplain had breached both hallowed rules.
Stephen’s induction was soon followed by his first attendance at a meeting of the governing body of the College. Before he had time to understand what was happening that Friday afternoon, he found himself deeply embroiled in College politics. To his confusion, he seemed to have walked right into a re-enactment of the C.P. Snow novel, The Masters. The only minor difference was that in the novel the wrangling over the Mastership was deemed to have taken place in Snow’s own college, Christ’s, whereas the scenes that Stephen was witnessing were taking place in Caius. Here was life imitating art in the most extraordinary manner. As Stephen discovered after the event, the charge against the incumbent Master, Sir Nevill Mott, was that he was using his position to favour his own protégés. At the time it was impossible to tell what was happening. The governing body was in an uproar, tempers were flaring and immoderate accusations were being flung about. As a result of a quick calculation, Stephen had the uncomfortable sensation that the votes of the new Fellows might be decisive – indeed his own vote might be the casting vote – but as they had little idea of what they were voting for, their voting pattern was inevitably arbitrary. Stephen’s introduction to college politics came to a dramatic end with the resignation of the Master that very afternoon.