by Jane Hawking
During the course of the next year, the ructions over the Mastership crisis subsided as the new Master, Joseph Needham, tearing himself reluctantly away from his gargantuan task of compiling the history of science in China, guided the College back to stability. Although I found him terse, apart from one memorable occasion when over port in the Combination Room after dinner he expansively warned me never to drink sweet French wine – Barsac and suchlike – because of its high disulphide content, his distinguished wife Dorothy was to give me invaluable help in securing a foothold for myself in Cambridge academic circles. She, notwithstanding all her scientific brilliance, was one of the most modest, likeable academics I ever met.
10
A Winter Break
On the strength of his thesis, Stephen was gaining a reputation for himself as a prodigy in his field. In response to his share in the coveted Adams Prize with Roger Penrose that winter, for an essay in mathematics entitled Singularities and the Geometry of Space-Time, his supervisor Dennis Sciama assured me that he was sure Stephen had a career of Newtonian proportions ahead of him and that he would do all he could to encourage its progress. He was as good as his word. For all his ebullience, Dennis Sciama selflessly promoted his students’ careers rather than his own. His desire to understand the workings of the universe was more passionate than any personal ambition. By sending his students off to conferences and meetings, whether in London or abroad, and by making them scrutinize and report back on every relevant publication, he dramatically increased his own fund of knowledge as well as theirs, and succeeded in nurturing a generation of exceptional cosmologists, relativists, astrophysicists, applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists. The distinction between these various terms was never quite clear to me, except that the identities changed according to the titles of the conferences: they would all become astrophysicists if the next conference was a conference of the Astrophysical Union or relativists if it was a General Relativity conference, and so on. That autumn the relativists of the July conference in London began, chameleon-like, to adopt the trappings of astrophysicists in preparation for the next conference, in Miami Beach in December.
It was fairly late in the term when Stephen learnt that funds were available for us both to go to Miami. I was doubtful about taking time off from Westfield, even though I would only be missing a couple of days at the end of term, but surprisingly Professor Varey raised no objections, so on a dull December afternoon, after a long wait for the fog to lift at London airport, we took off. It was already dark in Florida when we arrived, so it was not until the next morning that we discovered that our hotel room was right on the beach, looking out over the turquoise waters of the Caribbean. Having just stepped out of cold wet London after a hard term’s work, I marvelled at the unreality, the improbability of the situation, as though I had walked into a different dimension, through the looking glass perhaps. This impression was to grow as the stay progressed. The blue skies and sunshine were certainly welcome, especially since Stephen’s choking fits were becoming more frequent, and his sister Mary had earnestly advised me to take him away somewhere warm for the winter. At least by a happy chance we had the prospect of a week in the sun.
On the opening day, Stephen, together with his casually dressed colleagues, disappeared into the preliminary sessions of the conference, while I explored the venue. The hotel, built in a curve around the swimming pool, looked remarkably familiar. Was this a sense of déjà vu, I asked myself, for I was sure that I had seen it somewhere before. Suddenly it dawned on me that this was the hotel where the opening shots of Goldfinger, the James Bond thriller, were filmed. It was in a room in that hotel that the girl had died of asphyxiation after being covered from head to toe with gold paint! The Hotel Fontainbleau was a modern concrete structure with marble floors, plate glass and huge mirrors covering whole walls. In deference to its name, it was furnished in every nook and cranny with Louis XV-style furniture.
The furnishings were not the least of the incongruities, since the astrophysics conference was a major incongruity in itself. The smartly dressed hotel staff looked distinctly uncomfortable with the delegates, who were by no means models of sartorial elegance in their open-necked shirts, shorts and sandals. One day I ventured into the conference hall, intending to sit in for a while on one of the lectures. At first I was perplexed, not seeing any recognizable faces in the audience, then I noticed that the dress of the delegates bore no relation to the clothing the physicists had been wearing at breakfast, in that these people were all dressed in dark suits with ties, their hair neatly brushed and brilliantined, with not a trace of a beard anywhere. I listened to the speaker only for a moment before realizing that this was a conference of Jewish funeral directors promoting biodegradable plastic coffins.
From the exotic colours and summer sun of Miami we flew into autumn – to Austin, Texas, a small university town which in the mid-Sixties was trumpeted in the press as the home of the brightest and best in cosmology. George Ellis, who travelled with us from Miami, was spending a year in Austin with his wife, Sue, whom I had met briefly at our wedding. As we were to stay with the Ellises for a week, this was my opportunity to get to know them both better and forge the beginning of a lifelong friendship which would survive the vicissitudes of many turbulent episodes in all our lives. Pensive and reserved, George was the son of a much respected former editor of the Rand Daily Mail, a paper acclaimed for its resistance to apartheid in South Africa. It was at Cape Town University that Sue, the daughter of a traditional Rhodesian farming family, had met George. Both George and Sue were fierce opponents of apartheid and had become self-imposed political exiles from South Africa, insisting that they could never think of returning to live there. Where George was thoughtful and introverted, Sue was outgoing without being overpowering, vivacious yet sensitive to the needs of others. A talented artist and sculptor, she bubbled with warmth and creativity, qualities which she was putting at the disposal of a school for deprived children near Austin. Among her pupils were not merely the victims of broken homes and physical abuse, some were even tiny black child prostitutes who had been rescued from the Chicago slums and brought to Texas for rehabilitation. It was not hard to imagine what an asset Sue must have been to that particular school, for she had a way of making a fascinating artefact out of the smallest twist of paper, length of wire or handful of matchsticks, and her caring friendliness made her instantly popular among children who from an early age had learnt to mistrust adults.
In creating a structure to her life in Texas, Sue appeared to be the exception rather than the rule among science wives. For them there was little of any interest apart from the Max Beerbohm manuscripts and cartoons in the university library, and the gridlike streets of opulent houses in a landscape dominated by black-billed crane-like oil pumps, nodding up and down as they extracted the liquid gold from the yellow earth. The feeling of remoteness from the rest of civilization was overwhelming in an environment where even radio reception was a chancy thing. This sense of isolation was reinforced by the length of time, all of twenty hours, it took Stephen and me to get back to London via Houston and Chicago, where we were stranded for hours by snow on the runway.
Though Stephen may have harboured ambitions of joining the physics group in Austin, one salutary experience made me more than glad to put America, for all the advantages of its southern climate, behind us once more. We were visiting friends of the Ellises one Sunday afternoon when Stephen had a bad fall, which resulted in his coughing up a spot of blood. As his worst fear was brain damage, he insisted on our hosts calling a doctor. Their consternation was remarkable. They were embarrassed that their guest had had a fall, but it was truly unheard of for doctors to home-visit, especially on a Sunday afternoon, and they doubted very much whether they would be able to persuade any doctor to come. After a long succession of telephone calls, they were finally put in touch with a general practitioner who, as an exception, agreed to come and inspect Stephen. When he arrived he received right
royal treatment. As he conducted his tests, which indicated nothing amiss, I concluded that America was a fine place for the healthy and successful, but for the strugglers and the infirm, for the people who, through no fault of their own but through accidents of birth, prejudice or illness were less able to help themselves, it was a harsh society where only the fittest survived.
11
Learning Curves
Our return to England from Texas on Christmas Eve heralded yet another change in our lives. After Christmas in St Albans, we went back to Cambridge to resume residence, not at number 11 Little St Mary’s Lane but at number 6. Our tireless supporter, Thelma Thatcher, had rung the absentee owner of the empty house at number 6, a Mrs Teulon-Porter (“such a strange lady, my dears”) impressing upon her that it was an absolute disgrace that her house should be vacant at a time of “desperate housing shortage for the young”. Mrs Teulon-Porter responded to the urgent call by catching the first bus to Cambridge from her home in Shaftesbury. Despite the misgivings about her strange personality, she was offered generous hospitality at the Thatchers’ while she attended to her empty property.
Mrs Teulon-Porter was a small, wispy, grey woman, already advanced in years. As Fräulein Teulon, she had come to England in the 1920s, had bought number 6 Little St Mary’s Lane and then had married her next-door neighbour, the late Mr Porter. Both she and he were passionate historians of folklore and were closely connected with the Cambridge Folk Museum, which might have accounted for Mrs Thatcher’s conviction that they dabbled in the occult. Various items in the house testified to their shared interest: an Anglo-Saxon rune-stone, probably from the churchyard, was incorporated into the fireplace; the door screen was a slice hewn from the trunk of an elm; the offcut wood from a cartwheel had been converted to form a heavy, curved stool; and an eighteenth-century postillion’s box, made of oak, had been upended and attached to a wall to form a small cupboard.
Mrs Teulon-Porter seemed harmless enough to us – perhaps because she had been so well tutored by her hostess at number 9, but her house, despite all its quaint additions and its ideal location, struck us as very pokey and gloomy, musty-smelling and sticky with Dickensian grime. The façade in red brick and stuccoed pargeting suggested Edwardian renovations, while the front rooms on all three floors dated from the eighteenth century, charmingly so if one could overlook the dirt. The two flights of stairs were narrow and steep, but did not at that stage present any unsurmountable difficulties. The back of the house – looking out onto a dingy yard enclosed by other houses and a high back wall – appeared to be on the point of collapse, because the foundations had subsided so badly that the floor of the kitchen and, correspondingly, the kitchen ceiling and the floor of the bathroom above, sloped at an alarming angle. Mrs Teulon-Porter did not appear to consider this eccentricity at all hazardous. According to a plaque in the outside wall, John Clarke had masterminded this exemplary piece of engineering in 1770.
It required imagination and Mrs Thatcher’s no-nonsense approach to convince us that this really was our dream house. Certainly its situation was perfect. The front rooms, right opposite the old gas lamp, enjoyed a full view of the churchyard, wistfully poetic even in winter, and although the proportions of the ground floor were rather spoilt by the staircase of the house at number 5 butting into the party wall, the two bedrooms were quite sufficient for our requirements. “My dears, all it needs is a coat of paint, you’ll be surprised what a coat of paint can do,” Thelma Thatcher declared authoritatively, determined not to let her masterly scheme be upset by trivialities.
Thus persuaded, we entered into negotiations with the owner. Stephen boldly made her an offer of £2,000 for her property. Not surprisingly she turned it down, timidly averring with one eye on Mrs Thatcher that she would expect it to fetch at least £4,000 on the open market. She would however agree to let it to us for £4 a week until such time as we could raise the £4,000 needed to buy it. In the meantime we were virtually free to treat the house as our own and redecorate it at will. The arrangement was to everyone’s satisfaction. Mrs Thatcher shepherded her guest back to number 9 and there plied her with such liberal quantities of sherry, or possibly gin, that the next we heard was that Mrs Teulon-Porter, before departing for Shaftesbury, had agreed to have the dusty old coal shed and lean-to removed from the back yard and the outside of the house repainted.
Since the house was already vacant, Mrs Teulon-Porter was content to allow us to start redecorating inside before moving in. As Stephen’s thesis was now at the bookbinder’s, the time which I had previously spent typing it at weekends could now be devoted to my next occupation, that of house-painting. It was rewarding, but bore worryingly little relation to the Spanish studies which I was supposed to be revising for Finals. However, as the house was in a truly depressing state and as we could not afford to have it professionally redecorated, I had no choice but to do it myself. Armed with a collection of brushes and a plentiful supply of white emulsion, I attacked the grimy walls of the living room. My intention was to paint the two most important rooms, the living room and the main bedroom, before moving in, and then tackle the rest – the attic, the two flights of stairs, the kitchen and bathroom – more gradually over the ensuing months.
As I disliked the smell of paint, I usually worked with the front door wide open. The Thatchers were frequent and admiring visitors, plying me with cups of tea and encouraging comments. One day, Mr Thatcher paused as he was passing, bending his military frame slightly to peer in at the open door. “I say,” he exclaimed, “you look such a fragile little thing, but, by Jove, you must be tough!” From the top of the stepladder I smiled, flattered by this commendation from a veteran of the First World War who still bore the disfiguring marks of that conflict on his gaunt face. A few days later we were told that the Thatchers had decided to pay their odd-job man to paint the living-room ceiling for us: “Dear Billy’s housewarming present to our new neighbours,” was Thelma Thatcher’s way of describing her husband’s extraordinary generosity. The Thatcher’s odd-job man, a somewhat portly version of John Gielgud, was a retired artist who filled in his time with larger-scale painting while his wife ran a print shop on King’s Parade. He was an amiable man who, I suspected, derived much quiet amusement from my initial attempts at wielding a paintbrush. Indeed, under his benevolent tuition, I soon acquired many of the tricks of his trade, like starting a wall from the top, or applying the brush in a circular motion over an uneven surface, or using a hard edge to paint a window frame.
Stephen’s reputation in relativistic circles may have been rapidly ascending the ladder of fame on account of his pursuit of singularities, but my advance in learning was exhibiting an equally dizzying if more erratic series of highs and lows: propelled upwards by intensive doses of medieval and modern languages, philology and literature during the week, and brought to earth by a crash course in the skills of interior decorating on Saturdays. Finally, when I began to find the area of wall and ceiling still to be covered rather more daunting than I had anticipated, we calculated that we could just afford to ask the decorator to paint the kitchen for us, a particularly unpleasant task since the grime and grease were probably as old as the house.
Although my parents had only just moved to their new house, they and my brother Chris came to Cambridge one weekend early in 1966 to redecorate the top-floor bedroom and, in token of his willingness to help, Stephen’s father spared a day from his globetrotting to paint the bathroom while I applied a coat of enamel to the old chipped bath. Then, magically, fully justifying Thelma Thatcher’s convictions, our tumbledown eighteenth-century cottage acquired the air of a des res, and in the transformation the angles of its floors and ceilings had become simply eccentric curiosities. Our few pieces of furniture, which various colleagues of Stephen’s carried the five doors along the lane, fitted in perfectly – although, of course, when we bought them we had not given a moment’s thought to the possible proportions of their eventual resting place.
Proud of o
ur restoration of the little house, Stephen and I decided that the new Bursar of Caius was due for another visit, especially as Stephen was by now beginning to feel more sure of his place in the College hierarchy. Early in the New Year, we had braved the annual Ladies’ Night, Bishop Shaxton’s Solace, when wives were officially welcomed to the College precincts and treated to a banquet, as if in compensation for the contempt in which they were held for the rest of the year. Bishop Shaxton had, in the sixteenth century, bequeathed the munificent sum of twelve shillings and sixpence for the solace of every Fellow who had to spend Christmas at home rather than in the College. The equivalent in modern terms of twelve shillings and sixpence per head was sufficient to provide a lavish fiveor six-course dinner with unlimited quantities of the best wines for the Fellowship and their spouses. Typically the meal would consist of soup, a whole lobster, an undefined small game bird each – usually served complete with head and limbs – a substantial creamy pudding, a cheese savoury and then, of course, at dessert, the famous port – or claret – which tradition demanded should only ever be passed clockwise round the table. In theory it was a magnificent spread, but in practice college halls tend to be draughty places, and usually the food was cold before it reached the table. Our first experience of Bishop Shaxton’s Solace was a chill one, not only on account of the temperature of the food, the wine and the hall. We were seated on the same table as the former Bursar – the one who had so scathingly dismissed Stephen’s perfectly reasonable request for a job description before our marriage. That was bad enough, but our discomfort was compounded by finding ourselves placed out on a limb at the end of the table. After the meal, eaten in a frosty silence, an elderly band appeared from the shadows and struck up antediluvian foxtrots. I had never learnt the foxtrot, as the advent of the Beatles had cut short my brief flirtation with ballroom dancing, and now I could only watch in pensive, glum frustration as our tight-lipped dinner companions deserted us for the dance floor – looking like close-furled black umbrellas, they authoritatively steered their submissive, upholstery-clad wives round the hall, deftly exhibiting a precise, manicured display of ornamental footwork. I was twenty-one: all around me our dining companions were in their forties and fifties, if not their sixties and seventies. It was as if we had been propelled into a geriatric culture where our generation was deliberately snubbed as irrelevant.