by Jane Hawking
The only consolation was that Caius, as one of the richest, most solidly based colleges, could probably afford to lend us a couple of thousand pounds without the loan creating a blip in the college accounts. We were well aware that no building society would even begin to consider the house for a mortgage, but Stephen, undeterred by his previous encounters in the Bursar’s office, thought it perfectly reasonable to apply to the College for a loan so that we could improve our offer to Mrs Teulon-Porter. While he was with the Bursar, I sat waiting in the outer office and broached a matter of some delicacy to Mr Clarke, the white-haired bursarial assistant, much more amenable than the Bursar himself. My discussion began in the nature of a complaint. Why, I asked Mr Clarke, had he sent Stephen the application forms for a university pension a few weeks back when it was common knowledge that Stephen’s life was going to be so drastically foreshortened that, in all probability, he would not qualify? Was it not a bit heartless of him to have sent the forms? Stephen had taken one look at them and with a weary gesture had pushed them aside, not wanting to contemplate arrangements for a future that others might look forward to, but that was to be denied him.
Mr Clarke did not apologize for any insensitivity; quite the contrary, he shook his head as if unable to comprehend my problem. “Well, young lady, I just follow my instructions,” he said, turning his bright blue eyes on me from beneath busy white brows. “My instructions are to send out the forms to all new Fellows, as all new Fellows are by rights entitled to a university pension. Your husband is a new Fellow, so he is entitled to a university pension, just like the rest of them. All he has to do is sign the forms to establish his rights.” His words were still ringing in my ears when he added casually as an afterthought, “No need for any medical tests or anything of that sort, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
I could hardly believe what he was saying. This was an area which, in our ignorance, we had tacitly dismissed as inapplicable to us. Now I was being told that it could be resolved with a mere signature and, moreover, that it would assure us of a commodity which neither of us had ever thought about before – that is to say, security. For one afternoon’s business we had both been remarkably successful, and through our success had discovered this new goal in life, security, which suddenly assumed a comforting importance. Stephen had persuaded the Bursar to send the College land agent to inspect the house with a view to securing a loan, and I had secured Stephen’s rights to a pension. With a loan to buy the house and a pension, our well-being would gain two firm anchors in an otherwise uncertain world.
The College land agent came to survey the house one sunny spring morning, when the churchyard was bursting into a profusion of yellow blossom. Our optimism soon quailed before his dry, unsmiling exterior, and when he issued his verbal summary of his projected report, our hopes were dashed beyond recall. The agent gave us the strong impression that we were wasting his time, calling him out on such a nonsensical errand. Could we not see that the back of the house was falling down? And, as if that were not enough, the third-floor attic was a definite fire hazard. He would not risk sleeping up there, or even using it as a study himself, nor would he advise letting anyone else do so. A two-hundred-year-old house was not, in his opinion, a sensible purchase. In any case, there were so many road-building schemes in the offing that he would not be surprised if the whole lane were demolished to make way for a new access road to the city centre from the west. He could not possibly recommend the property as an investment to the College.
Stephen was infuriated at such a short-sighted verdict, but despite his vociferous protests the Bursar accepted the land agent’s report. Some time later, as we were driving past the land agent’s office on the other side of the city, Stephen spluttered indignantly as he pointed to the premises. Like our house, the building rose to three floors, but on a larger scale, a good ten feet higher than ours. The third floor was quite obviously, from the discernible lighting, being used as office or study space. Furthermore the whitewashed, gabled, timbered property bulged and leant picturesquely in the manner of a decrepit sixteenth-century building. It made our little eighteenth-century house appear positively modern and well-kept. There was no immediate solution to the problem, except perhaps to save as much money as we could to raise a deposit for a mortgage on a newer house. A system began to evolve whereby Stephen earned the money through salary, teaching and essay competitions, and I, running contrary to the national trend of reckless extravagance encouraged by the Macmillan government, attended to the family finances, paying the bills and saving as much as possible through careful housekeeping. Delicious scraps of streaky bacon came at one shilling and sixpence a pound from the old Sainsbury’s, with its marble counters and endless queues; duck livers from Sennit’s the poulterer’s were nourishing and cheap; the market proved a veritable cornucopia of fresh fruit and vegetables; and the local butcher introduced me to inexpensive cuts of meat – hand of pork and shoulder of lamb never costing more than five shillings – which proved no disgrace on the dinner table when we entertained our new friends from the College and the Department.
The Labour government elected in 1964 inherited from the Conservatives the dubious legacy of a nation engaged in a gigantic spending spree. In the spring of 1966, having exercised my right to vote for the first time, I joined the late-night crowds in the Market Square to greet the success of the Labour candidate in the repeat election, which had been called to increase the government majority. Sadly, our new MP, Robert Davies, died while in office and the Labour government was shackled by its mounting economic problems, frequent strikes and a constant preoccupation with the “balance of payments” crisis, the economic buzz phrase of the Sixties. With a failing currency, Britain was having to relinquish its role as a world power. Home news broadcasts were dominated as never before by economics, while the international background of the war in Vietnam and heightening tensions in the Middle East threatened to give rise to the anticipated superpower confrontation which would unleash the forces of the nuclear arsenals of both sides.
Stephen meanwhile had discovered a way of earning more money and improving himself in the process. He had wanted to study mathematics at Oxford, but his father had been convinced, wrongly as it happened, that there would be no jobs in maths in the future. Aware that he had already disappointed his father by not showing any interest in medicine, Stephen had compromised by agreeing to study physics. When he came to Cambridge as a postgraduate student, therefore, he had only a basic grounding in mathematics. As he was now working with Roger Penrose, an exemplary mathematician, he felt himself at a disadvantage, but he hit upon the happy solution of getting paid for teaching himself the maths course by giving undergraduate supervisions in it for Gonville and Caius College. Thus he steadily worked his way through the syllabus of the Maths Tripos. Needless to say, his progress far outstripped that of his students, whose lack of application he found frustrating, as he pointed out in the end-of-term reports that I wrote down to his dictation. With Brandon Carter, he also attended some of the undergraduate lectures in mathematics, notably the course given by the genial Master of Pembroke College, Sir William Hodge. During the course of the term, the rest of the audience gradually drifted away, leaving Sir William lecturing only to three listeners, Stephen, Brandon and another colleague, Ray McLenaghan. They regretted that they had not taken the opportunity to slip away sooner, but since their absence would have been extremely conspicuous, they felt obliged to stay the course.
It must have been during my final year in London that an uncle of Stephen’s by marriage, Herman Hardenberg, a Harley Street psychiatrist, spent a long period in hospital in St John’s Wood, just down the road from Westfield, suffering from a heart condition. I used to call on him sometimes of an afternoon when the day’s lectures and seminars were over. Herman, the husband of Stephen’s aunt Janet, herself a doctor, was a charming, gentle, cultivated man who liked to talk about the subjects that interested me, particularly about the poetry of the Provençal trou
badours, the topic of my special paper in Finals. He had been reading C.S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, and naturally approached the tensions of the poetry – where the poet-lover languishes for his unattainable beloved – from the psychological angle. Then our conversation would turn to family topics: I told him about our life in Cambridge and our work on the house. “I hope the Hawkings are treating you well?” he once enquired cautiously, making little secret of his mistrust of that family. I confidently calmed his fears on my account. That the Hawkings were eccentric, even odd, was well known; that they were aloof, convinced of their own intellectual superiority over the rest of the human race, was also widely recognized in St Albans, where they were regarded with a mixture of suspicion and awe. There were upsets and outbursts and there had been tensions in the air at the time of our engagement and the wedding, but these I took as part of the general tenor of family life. I had no substantial reason to complain of the way they treated me. Indeed, as I told Herman, they always seemed delighted to see Stephen and me, and always welcomed us warmly to Hillside Road.
12
An Insignificant Ending
With the approach of summer, the trees and plants in the churchyard competed for the attention of residents and passers-by in a riotous display of colour and perfume. Successive groups of tourists, particularly Americans, would come sauntering down the lane. Many of them would press their noses to our windows in an attempt to peer through the net curtains into our quaint interiors. Not all were susceptible to the beauty of the surroundings: there was the small boy who announced in a loud voice to his parents as they strolled along: “Gee, Momma, I wouldn’t like to live here: the Holy Ghost might come up and get yer!” I could not allow myself to dwell on the newly revealed beauties of our surroundings. Apart from a brief celebration for Stephen’s PhD in March, my every precious spare moment was spent revising – in London in the College library during the week, in Cambridge with my books spread out around me in the attic at weekends or, that Easter, in St Albans, where we spent the holiday quietly with my parents.
The Hawking household, on the other hand, was in some distress. Stephen’s younger sister, Philippa, had recently been taken into hospital in Oxford for reasons which were not disclosed to me. I shared Stephen’s concern for her and wanted to visit her, naively hoping that perhaps at last she and I would be able to settle some of those shadowy disturbances which lay between us as sisters-in-law. Because I loved Stephen, I wanted to get on well with his family, to like them and to be liked by them, and I could not understand why this particular relationship should be so difficult. On the day appointed for our visit, however, Stephen’s mother told me in no uncertain terms that Philippa wanted to see only Stephen, not me, explaining that no one, least of all Philippa, wanted to upset “this thing (presumably our marriage) between Stephen and you”. As Stephen said nothing to mitigate the effect of his mother’s bluntness, I was on the point of going home in tears to my parents, but then the old Ford Zephyr would not start and, in a sudden twist of events, I found myself driving Isobel and Stephen to Oxford in our Mini.
While the rest of the party went hospital-visiting, I spent the afternoon in the waiting room, revising the great medieval epic poem based on the exploits in exile of the hero, el Cantar de Mío Cid. The time passed quickly as I became absorbed in the sophisticated psychology of the late twelfth-century poem, which deftly interweaves two main thematic strands into its texture: the public image of the invincible warrior and the private face of the devoted husband and father. When the Cid goes into exile, the poet describes his distress at parting from his family as “tearing the nail from the flesh”. Later the poet documents how the eponymous hero’s many attempts to be generous and encouraging to his cowardly sons-in-law are misconstrued and turned against him. This epic tale, like a distant voice whispering down the centuries, told of the complexity and the unpredictability of the human mind. Even in the twelfth century, the poignant distinction between the hero’s private life and his public image was seen as an authentic concept.
On our return from Oxford, no further reference was made to the morning’s episode. In the family tradition, it was brushed under the carpet with many other dusty remnants of psychological and emotional detritus, regarded as being too insignificant to merit any consideration in that rarified atmosphere where emotional issues were never discussed because of the threat they might pose to the intellect. It was therefore a surprise, just before the onset of Finals, to receive a letter from Philippa, addressed to me in a minuscule hand. She regretted the differences that there may have been between us but looked forward to a better relationship in the future, assuring me that she respected my desire “to try to love Stephen”. Although I responded wholeheartedly to this olive branch, I was as perplexed by that comment as my mother had been some months earlier when the rumour had reached her ears that the Hawkings were thinking of moving to Cambridge to set up a home there for Stephen. Did they not expect the marriage to last, she asked indignantly. I was confused by these undercurrents and wondered why Stephen’s family, of all people, seemed so intent on undermining our relationship and our happiness, especially when he was dependent on me for so much of his everyday existence.
As if to confound the doubters, we were closer than ever in the week of Finals. Stephen came to London to give me moral support and stayed in my top-floor room working on the singularity theorems, and occasionally dipping into translations of the great works of Spanish literature – among them Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina, the downmarket prototype of Romeo and Juliet with its old procuress, Celestina, one of the most entertaining characters in medieval Spanish literature – while I went out each morning to the examination hall. After the afternoon session, Stephen and I would make off to Hampstead Heath or to the gardens and house of Kenwood in search of respite from writer’s cramp and mental constipation. We also visited my much-loved Great Aunt Effie, as irrepressible as ever in her late seventies, still living alone in her large house in Tufnell Park. By the end of the week I was just beginning to get into my stride, but the exams were already nearly over. I felt a huge sense of anticlimax rather than relief. The topics I had revised had proved elusive in the extreme, and I knew that the First which was expected of anyone bearing the name of Hawking would prove just as elusive.
With the last flourish of the pen on the last page of the last Finals paper, I irrevocably signed away my student days. The Beatles record, Revolver, which Stephen had given me for my birthday, seemed sadly incongruous. There were no parties, no celebrations, just a few hasty goodbyes before I stepped definitively into my other existence and we set off in the car to meet Roger Penrose, who was to guide us out to his home at Stanmore for dinner with his family. We stopped in the car park of Stanmore station for Roger to collect his car, an elderly blue Volkswagen. Undeterred on finding every tyre flat, Roger drove to a garage round the corner where he pumped them all up. When we reached his single-storey house at the end of a cul-de-sac, tucked away from the stockbroker mansions, we were given an enthusiastic welcome by Joan and by their two small sons, Christopher and Toby, who had been a babe-in-arms at Cornell the previous summer. Now, at eighteen months, he was fully mobile and expressed his infectious joie de vivre by racing the length of the living room at full pelt, biscuit in hand, leaving a trail of crumbs across the navy blue carpet. Soon he was hurling his small person into an armchair, clambering onto the arm of the chair and then jumping off, the while declaring, “Don’t do that, don’t do that!” Blissfully unconcerned by such antics, Roger and Stephen lapsed into the inevitable discussion about the mathematics of physics.
The Finals results were more or less as expected, not brilliant but good enough to allow me to start working for a PhD. From my observations of the dynamics of life in Cambridge, I could see that the role of a wife – and possibly a mother – was a one-way ticket to outer darkness, and that it was essential to preserve my own identity. Even though there were moves afoot to admit women to certain of
the more enlightened men’s colleges, there were many well-qualified but unhappy wives in Cambridge whose individual talents had been totally disregarded, spurned by a system which refused to acknowledge that wives and mothers might be capable of an intellectual identity of their own.
My weekly commuting to London had come to an end none too soon, for Stephen needed my help more and more. As he had to lean on my arm wherever he went, I walked round to the Department with him every morning, took him home for lunch, which – like every other meal – had to consist of meat and two vegetables to satisfy his enormous appetite, and collected him again in the evening. All thoughts of a career in the Foreign Office had long been consigned to the past, but even a simple job or a teacher-training course was out of the question, as my presence was so obviously constantly required in the small circle of the Department of Applied Mathematics, Little St Mary’s Lane and the kitchen. A doctorate seemed to be the ideal solution. I could easily adapt my hours of study in the University Library and my work at home to Stephen’s schedule. Furthermore, I was eligible for a student grant, which was a welcome bonus.