by Jane Hawking
As the date of the baby’s christening approached, I could not keep this most painful of dilemmas from my parents. The christening party divided squarely into two opposing camps. In a situation which required extreme tact on all sides, the Hawkings stood in one corner of the living-room, ostracizing the rest of the gathering – my parents, Tim’s godparents and their families, and a few friends. The atmosphere was so unbearable that at one stage I left the room and took refuge in the bedroom. My father followed me, only too conscious of the intolerable pressure I was under. An intellectual match for the Hawkings but devoid of all affectation or snobbery, he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “Jane,” he said, “just have a look at this, will you? If you approve, I am going to send it to Frank Hawking.” As I read, gratitude for my father’s intervention flooded through me: the letter was a masterly resolution of the dilemma, without in any way jeopardizing my loyalty to Stephen. Quite simply it stated that we all wanted Stephen’s best interests, but that the Hawkings must be aware that the care of two young children and the new baby – their grandchildren – in addition to the burden of Stephen’s care, made it impracticable for me to travel to Texas. He suggested that if they were convinced of the efficacy of the treatment, they should consider accompanying Stephen to Texas themselves. Yet again my father, sometimes exacting, always honourable, always unpretentious, had by quiet, intelligent application behind the scenes come to the rescue. The letter was sent. He did not receive a reply.
After so many years of thinly veiled tolerance, they had expressed their dislike of me with caustic bluntness when I was at my lowest ebb, soon after the birth of my third child, while my eldest child was critically ill. Their dislike had emerged and spread into unconcealed hostility. It was stupid of me not to have recognized their animosity and resigned myself to it sooner; it was stupid of me to have lived in innocent hope of better things. As they were Stephen’s closest relatives, I had been bound to try to get on with them as best I could. In fact for this very reason, I was still obliged to maintain a veneer of civility. Whether I liked it or not, the close blood tie was the one invariable factor in this predicament.
The following winter news came that the Texan team were offering to send their treatment to Cambridge. However the consultant neurologist at Addenbrooke’s stated quite firmly that the treatment was untested, unproven and inappropriate for motor-neuron disease. He suspected that Stephen would be used as a guinea pig, and that the researchers were looking for the scientific respectability and publicity associated with his name, possibly to attract funding. The treatment would have to be administered in hospital and the time involved would be considerable, with minimal chance of a positive outcome even in the short term. Motor-neuron disease had already done its worst to Stephen; there was little more that it could do and it was a well-known fact of medical science that the body was not able to repair damaged nerve tissue. The greatest risk to his survival these days came from pneumonia, not motor-neuron disease per se. The proposed treatment would be a waste of Stephen’s precious time and scarcely more than one of those chimeras against which Frank Hawking had himself warned so decisively in the Sixties.
11
Turbulence
Perhaps I might have been less distressed at the behaviour of the Hawkings had I realized how implicitly I could rely on Jonathan’s family. With unassuming goodness, they dedicated themselves tirelessly to other people, whoever they were, whatever their origins. They made no distinction between family, friends, parishioners or strangers. Anyone in trouble, rich or poor, could arrive on their doorstep by day or by night and be assured of help and a sympathetic ear, and probably a filling meal into the bargain. I could not believe that any parents, however well-intentioned, would welcome the sort of family that their eldest son had become involved in. I was wrong. On our first visit to their rectory, they treated us, Stephen, the children and me, as if we were the most welcome visitors, as if they were really pleased to see us. Never did they pass even the slightest hint of judgement on us or on our situation.
Like Bill Loveless, John Jones had been a late ordinand. He had come to Cambridge to train for the ministry, after his first career as a dentist in Warwickshire. In this mid-life change of direction, he was encouraged unequivocally by his wife Irene, so like my own mother in her quietly assured faith. From their hilltop vantage point, just outside Cambridge, they tended to their flock in the surrounding fenland and worshipped with a practical tenacity which would have been extraordinary in a young incumbent, let alone in one of advancing years. Not only did John, with Irene’s assistance, look after the souls in his charge in Lolworth and its associated parishes, he also mended the fabric of the medieval building entrusted to him by an impecunious diocese. In the early Eighties the tower of Lolworth church was badly in need of repairs. As there were no funds available to repair it, John and Irene donned hard hats and overalls and set about removing several tons of bird droppings from the inside before relining and strengthening the structure themselves.
I found it unbelievable that these people, not related to us in any way, could find any good reason for wanting to welcome me and my family, nor could I understand why they should show such genuine interest in us and so much concern for us. They spread the light of kindness, sympathy and selflessness in darkness. It was not only Jonathan’s parents who took us to their hearts but, inexplicably, his entire family as well, his aunts, uncles and cousins, his brother Tim and sister Sara. Formerly a physiotherapist, Sara was blessed with the same sort of intuitive good sense as Caroline Chamberlain in her approach to severe disability; she knew the toll that a paralysing disease could exact on the immediate family as well as on the patient. Sara and I quickly became the closest of friends. We were more or less the same age and we had our babies at more or less the same time. Sara’s first baby, Miriam, was born in February 1979, two months before Timothy.
Thus I no longer had to look to the Hawkings for support. Instead, I began to foster the cool detachment that they had shown for years. Surprisingly, other more distant relatives of Stephen’s stepped into the vacuum left by their absence. Michael Mair, a cousin of Stephen’s who had been an undergraduate in Cambridge in the late Sixties when Robert was a new baby had returned to work in the eye department of Addenbrooke’s Hospital. He and his South African fiancée, Solome, a radiographer, were enthusiastic cooks. Every so often they would bring a delicious, ready-prepared, calorie-rich meal for the whole family. In anticipation of their arrival, Robert and Lucy would stand in the porch, peering through the glass door and salivating long before they drew into the driveway. Never were those meals-on-wheels more welcome than in the months after Timothy’s birth, as we struggled to get back onto an even keel, desperately weary from the gruelling effort of steering our little boat through turbulent seas.
The truth was that one adult minder was required to attend fulltime to each one of the less able members of the family. Disabled to the point of not being able to do anything for himself – except handling the simple joystick controls of his wheelchair and of the computer which he had bought in celebration of Timothy’s birth – Stephen had to have a well-known person, whether me, Don or Jonathan, in constant attendance. The baby, previously so docile, had begun to assert himself, responding to all the attention lavished on him with huge captivating smiles, so wide that they could have swallowed us up, but he protested loudly when our attention was deflected elsewhere. On these occasions my mother would laughingly point out his resemblance to his father. He had certainly inherited Stephen’s cherubic dimples, but also like Stephen his mouth had the comical habit of drooping downwards at the corners to express affronted indignation, especially when he was hungry. In other respects, though a larger baby, he was the exact image of his older brother. I called them my twins – twins nearly twelve years apart. Indeed more than once, passing acquaintances would glance at Tim and cheerily call “Hello, Robert!” then in some bafflement would think they must have fallen into a time warp before th
ey realized their mistake.
Luckily we were now able to afford the luxury of a nanny on a couple of mornings a week, so that I could see to all the administration involved in the production of the four bound copies of the thesis demanded by officialdom. My helper, Christine Ikin, later christened Kikki by infant Tim, was also the mother of three children. She came in from the country as regularly as the unpredictable bus service would allow, and cheerfully hoovered and cleaned and looked after the baby, while I contacted typists, proofread the results of their labours, collated hundreds of pages and sought out bookbinders. My association with medieval Spanish poetry had run its course and was coming to a grand finale. Since the thesis did not hold out the promise of any very obvious career, I had already reconciled myself to its being an end in itself rather than the means to greater advancement. In any case, a career was completely out of the question since ninety-nine per cent of my attention had to remain focused on the home and the family. Somehow I had to divide that attention fairly between the children and their father while still finding time to keep my brain alive.
Robert and Lucy were both finding it hard to adjust to new circumstances. Lucy now found herself in an uncertain situation in the middle of the family as neither the eldest nor the youngest child, and not until Robert went away to another scout camp later in the summer did she show any interest in the baby. Then she was suddenly called upon to fetch and carry bottles, nappies, pins and powder – chores that Robert had previously undertaken. At first she resisted defiantly, and then she burst into tears. At that moment I realized how badly she too had been affected by the trauma we had undergone since little Tim’s arrival. Lucy had been left to fend for herself when in fact she needed as much reassurance as anyone else. I hugged her and told her that I had not stopped loving her just because there was another person in the family to care for. She warmed to her little brother straight away, as if in all those miserable weeks she had been longing to show her true feelings but had not known how. She fetched and carried just as willingly as Robert had done, and thereafter no one could have been more devoted to Tim or more susceptible to his winning ways.
Robert had been very ill, and although he had made a good recovery and was back at school, he often seemed subdued and forgetful. Dyslexia was still a severe handicap in his schooling. The school arranged a few sessions with an educational psychologist, who tried to instill into him techniques for coping with dyslexia, but she failed to identify the true extent of the problem. It was not until many years later that I discovered that at the root of it lay an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. From a very early age he had become aware that his father was a scientific genius and that people, in particular his teachers rather than his parents, had expectations of him that he knew he could not fulfil. His belief in himself swamped by self-doubt, his solution was not to bother with his studies at all since he felt himself doomed to failure in the eyes of the world, however hard he tried. The saddest part of it was that from as young as seven years old, when he first became aware that his father was a genius, he felt himself to be inferior. Robert had the doubtful advantage of a quick, scientific intelligence which destined him for a scientific career without achieving his father’s fame. As for Lucy and Tim, they were later to suffer for not being scientific, and they were both acutely humiliated when told how disappointed their teachers were in them. Really all three children were in a no-win situation. But although their teachers’ prejudices cast a passing shadow over their education, Lucy and Tim did not suffer as badly as Robert, for whom the expectations of society in general cast the long shadow of his father’s reputation.
In the autumn of 1979 Stephen’s reputation was enhanced very publicly in Cambridge by his appointment to the coveted Lucasian Chair in Mathematics. The chair, endowed in 1663 with one hundred pounds by Henry Lucas, was one of the most prestigious professorships in one of the most prestigious universities: it was Newton’s chair. Stephen was now unequivocally ranked with Newton. He celebrated his elevation to the dizziest of academic heights by availing himself of the opportunity to give an inaugural lecture, a custom which had fallen into disuse, at least among scientists. A student stood beside him on the stage of the Babbage lecture theatre and interpreted his speech, which had become so faint and so indistinct that only a handful of students, colleagues and family could even begin to understand it. The rapt audience of scientists, many of them young hopefuls, strained to catch his utterances. The words were not designed to offer them the comfortable prospect of a secure future, for Stephen gleefully predicted that the end of physics was in sight. The advent of faster and more sophisticated computers meant that by the end of the century, in a mere twenty years’ time, all the major problems in physics would have been wound up, including the unified field theory, and there would be nothing left for physicists to do. He, himself, would be all right, he declared jovially, as he would be retiring in the year 2009. The audience loved the joke, though I could not see that they really had much to laugh about...
Nor in fact did Stephen have much to laugh about. In summarily predicting the end of physics he had well and truly made himself a hostage to fortune, and his own Nemesis, the affronted goddess of Physics, caught up with him very quickly. Just a few weeks later, the new decade opened very inauspiciously for us all, especially for Stephen. After Christmas we all went down with bad colds, including the baby. By the New Year, the cold had settled on Stephen’s chest, racking his body with harrowing choking fits at every sip of water or every spoonful of finely chopped food, even at every breath. These fits would come on at the end of the day and would last well into the night. Using the techniques I had learnt in yoga, I would try to encourage him to relax his throat muscles by quietly and monotonously repeating calming phrases. Sometimes I would succeed and would register the change from gasping panic to regular breathing, as sleep took over his sad, persecuted frame. Sometimes the sheer boredom of repetition would send me off into an interrupted doze while he continued to cough and wheeze beside me into the early hours. We would both be drained by the next morning, though he with true courage would never admit as much and would embark on his normal schedule undeterred by the events of the previous night. While we all feared a repetition of the 1976 bout of pneumonia, Stephen himself predictably would not let me call the doctor, nor would he take any patent medicines, since he was still scared that the sweetener in cough linctus – even in sugar-free linctus – would irritate the lining of his throat and the cough-suppressant ingredients would either befuddle his brain or plummet him into a comatose state. So he coughed and choked, and choked and coughed, day and night, while the baby snuffled and wailed with a blocked nose and I panted for breath, since I was feeling none too well myself.
As ever my mother promptly came over from St Albans to run the household, while Jonathan, Don and I tried against the odds to care for its ailing occupants. Mum insisted on sending me to bed, at least in between the various tasks that I had to attend to. Bill Loveless paid me a visit on the following Saturday afternoon. I lay on the bed prostrate from tiredness and breathlessness while Stephen, the real patient, sat reading the newspaper in the kitchen, determined to sit out the crisis. I poured out my troubles to Bill. I still passionately wanted to care for Stephen, to give him a happy home life, to make all things possible for him within reason. Sometimes, as at present, his demands were totally in excess of all that was reasonable and the wall of his obduracy was making life unbearable. In consequence I was becoming more and more dependent on Jonathan to preserve my sanity, to share my burdens, and to make me feel loved. That dependency only increased my burden of guilt.
Bill took my hand in his. “Jane,” he said, thoughtfully but firmly, “there is something I want you to know.” If I was nervously expecting a stern rebuke, I was much mistaken. Gently he went on, “In the sight of God all souls are equal. You are just as important to God as Stephen is.” So saying, he left me to ponder this surprising revelation, and went to talk to Stephen. Later that day
Dr Swan called and recommended a short spell in the local nursing home for Stephen who, although ferociously indignant, reluctantly accepted his advice. I knew in a sense that Stephen was right because in the nursing home he was not known. The nurses there did not understand his speech nor were they versed in the very precise techniques required for looking after him. As soon as word spread that the Lucasian Professor had been removed to the nursing home, there was no shortage of offers of help. Once more the loyal students and colleagues, particularly Gary Gibbons, Stephen’s former research student, established an attendance rota so that Stephen should never find himself unable to communicate his needs to the nurses. Robert’s headmaster, Antony Melville, remembering similarly tragic circumstances in his own family, spontaneously offered to take Robert into his own home, should the need arise. John Casey, a Fellow of Caius who concealed genuine sympathy behind a somewhat mannered façade, decided that the College should pay Stephen’s nursing-home expenses and undertook to persuade the governing body and the Bursar. Perhaps that task was less insuperable than it sounds since, it should be noted, the Bursar, a retired Air Vice-Marshal, Reggie Bullen, was the most humane Bursar ever to hold that office in the College.