Travelling to Infinity

by Jane Hawking

  Thereafter a more subdued audience concentrated their attention on practical requests for laundry baskets, towel rails, adequate lighting, shelving and suchlike, and repairs to the potholes in the driveway. Judy and I took the opportunity to distribute the UK Council of Nursing’s code of conduct, and asked the assembly to give its fourteen clauses their attention. Those recommendations had as much impact as the concerns I had already voiced about keeping the home, our home, a happy and well-balanced environment for Stephen and the children alike.

  5

  Out of the Ashes

  Despite the mayhem wrought in the home by outside intervention, Stephen rose like a phoenix, and by early December 1985 he was well enough to attempt short sorties to the Department. At first I drove him there by car but, unless the weather was bad, he was soon wheeling himself in his chair over his usual route across the Backs, the only difference being that he was accompanied by a nurse instead of a faithful student. All expeditions took longer than before, involving much careful preparation of the patient before setting out. Many essential accoutrements had to be strung onto the back of the wheelchair, giving the whole contrivance an extraordinarily cumbersome appearance. Lumbering and festooned with eccentric appliances, rather like a tinker’s cart, the chair dwarfed its occupant who, small and wasted, drove it fearlessly into battle to reassert his sovereignty over his intellectual domain.

  It was unwise to dwell for too long on the Stephen’s vulnerability, though it was difficult not to fall into the snare of sentimental overprotection: many had fallen into that trap. Some of us had striven to achieve a balance between a deep concern for the minimal, evanescent, physical presence and a somewhat mischievous irreverence for the immense psychological and intellectual power. This delicate balance, so essential to a healthy family life where no one person should claim to be more important than anyone else, had become impossible to maintain. At best, it entailed nerve-racking attention to every detail of Stephen’s care, yet a healthy scepticism at some of his more outlandish and outrageous pronouncements. On a Sunday evening, for instance, Jonathan would bring in the usual takeaway curry. Though neurotic and mistrustful of the ingredients of my carefully prepared, guaranteed gluten-free home cooking, Stephen would on Sundays consume a huge plateful of curry with gusto, with never a thought as to the ingredients. The children and I considered this glaring inconsistency fair game for a little gentle teasing.

  These were also occasions for wide-ranging discussions. Private conversation had become impossible, but in the relaxed atmosphere of those Sunday evenings – sometimes too at Sunday lunch when Robert, who came back to study in Cambridge in 1987, would bring his undergraduate friends home for a square meal – questions of science and faith would form the basis of sustained, good-natured argument. Cecil Gibbons had pointed out in one of his sermons that scientific research required just as broad a leap of faith in choosing a working hypothesis as did religious belief. Stephen usually grinned at the mention of religious faith and belief, though on one historic occasion he actually made the startling concession that, like religion, his own science of the universe required such a leap. In his branch of science the leap of faith – or inspired guesswork – centred on which model of the universe, which theory, which equation one chose as the most appropriate object of research. Then this, at the experimental stage, had to be tested against observation. With luck, the guess – or leap of faith – might, in Richard Feyman’s words, prove “to be temporarily not wrong”. The scientist had to rely on an intuitive sense that his choice was right, or he might be wasting years in pointless research with an end result that was definitively wrong. Any further attempts to discuss the profound matters of science and religion with Stephen were met with an enigmatic smile.

  Insensitive to the subtleties of our relationship and unable to distinguish the mind from the body, the nurses, on the other hand, tended to smother Stephen in a blanket of sentimentality. This belied his strength of mind and undermined my attempts to keep the correct balance. For them he had become an idol, immune from criticism or even from the healthy scepticism which the psychiatric nurses had generated. They concentrated on the calamity of the illness rather than the victory over it, kowtowed to the patient’s every whim and interpreted any innocent bantering as an insult to their idol.

  The same sentimental mistake had been made earlier in 1985 by an artist commissioned jointly by the College and the National Portrait Gallery to paint Stephen’s portrait. The paintings, unveiled that summer, showed the pathos of the body, slumped disjointedly in the chair all too clearly, but failed to show the willpower and the genius, conveyed with such persuasion in the set of the face and the light of the eyes. I regarded the portraits as a travesty and said so – to the exasperation of the bodies who had commissioned them. However, in the early months of 1986, the light of determination returned to those eyes as Stephen recovered his mobility and with it his unassailable position in the Department. The effect of his period of illness was not unlike the effect that exile from Cambridge had on Newton when the University was closed because of the plague in 1665. In the isolation of the manor house at Woolsthorpe near Grantham, Newton had found time for the contemplation and calculation needed to develop his theory of gravity. In those months when he was too weak to leave home, Stephen had learnt to use the new computer with the same single-minded motivation which he had shown in memorizing lengthy equations when, in the late Sixties, he lost the ability to write.

  Through the loss of his voice, he discovered that he had gained a much improved method of communication. He could converse with anyone, not just the small band of family and students as in the past, and he was no longer dependent on having a student at hand to interpret his lectures for him. By turning up the volume on the speaker, he could address an audience as effectively, if not more so, as anyone else. His synthesized speech was slow, since it took time to select the vocabulary, but there was nothing unusual in that since his speech had always been measured. Stephen had always taken time to think before speaking to avoid cliché or inanity, and to ensure that the last word on any subject was his and his alone.

  Not only was he empowered to express his own thoughts directly, deliver his own lectures and write his own letters, he was also able to work again on his book. His former student, Brian Whitt, had over the past months begun to help him with the methodical organization of the material and continued to help, particularly with diagrams and seeking out research material; but the project was now firmly back in Stephen’s grasp. The book gave him the motivation to exploit the full potential of the computer, and the computer gave him the means of writing a revised version of the manuscript, incorporating the suggestions of the American editor. It began to look as if the book might become a reality: not only should we not have to repay the advance, we had, at long last, the prospect of financial security. The book might not make a fortune, but it might bring in a regular supplementary income, heralding the end of nearly a quarter of a century of economizing.

  At home I endeavoured to juggle my own interests, teaching, music and the children, with the tiresome demands of wayward nurses. With Judy’s stalwart help, I fended off impending chaos by conducting weekly interviews with new candidates and by attending to the requests for improvements from those already on the rota. We sensed that we had become the scapegoats for the frustrations which the nurses could not vent on Stephen himself. I discussed our predicament with an old school friend who lectured in nursing. She recognized the syndrome. “Nurses, like soldiers, are trained to act, not to think,” she said. “If there is a patient needing treatment, their first duty is to that patient to the exclusion of all else. They act at an intensely physical level, which does not involve the intellect. Imagination is not a quality that is prized in nursing.” This information certainly clarified the problem, but offered scant comfort, since it implied that nurses operated at the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum from the rest of us and, however much we might try to compromise, they
, by definition, were unable to do so.

  Meanwhile Stephen celebrated his return to normality. In the immediate short term, this took the form of a visit to the pantomime for his birthday and to the College Ladies’ Night two days later. In the long term, he was already planning his travels for the forthcoming year, rashly undaunted by the Geneva experience. Paris and Rome were on his itinerary for the autumn, to be preceded by an experimental trip abroad in June – to an island off the Swedish coast for a conference in particle physics. How all this was to be achieved was another matter, especially since the dates for the Swedish conference coincided with Lucy’s first O-level papers and I was reluctant to leave her at such a critical time.

  In fact attention shifted dramatically from Stephen to Lucy in the spring of 1986. In March, she set off with a school party to Moscow, but not, as we had all expected, under the exuberant auspices of her Russian teacher. Each year it was Vera Petrovna’s custom to dress up her charges like Michelin men, in layer upon layer of clothing acquired from second hand shops and jumble sales. In Moscow the girls would tour the city, visiting all her friends and relations, peeling off a layer of charitable clothing at each stop. However in 1986 she was refused a visa for the first time, so other non-Russian-speaking teachers had to accompany the party to Moscow and Leningrad. It was therefore a potential catastrophe when Lucy fell ill in Moscow with only her own knowledge of Russian to help her. Terrified of being abandoned in a Russian hospital, she told no one how ill she was feeling; she ate nothing and clutched her stomach for ten days. When she arrived home, she was too ill with a high fever and excruciating abdominal pain to go anywhere except straight to bed. The doctor came and diagnosed acute appendicitis. So there we were again – walking the all-too-familiar corridors of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, sitting on the same plastic chairs, though for a dangerously inflamed appendix rather than a dangerously obstructed respiratory tract. We were told the next day, when Lucy was already recovering, that she was very lucky not to have had a burst appendix in Moscow.

  Nevertheless, the arrival of warmer weather alleviated some of the tensions associated with winter susceptibilities, and life began to assume at least a thin veneer of its former hard-won normality. Defiantly determined that the home should still be worthy of that name, I tried to consign the complexities of full-time nursing attendance to the background, pretending, as we had so often in the past, that it was just another minor inconvenience. Once more we gave dinners and drinks parties for scientific visitors and participated in local activities at the schools and the church. Tim invited seventeen of his classmates to his birthday party, where a good, old-fashioned Punch and Judy show kept the guests enthralled for part of the time while, for the rest of the afternoon, my father, in time-honoured tradition at the piano, kept them amused with musical games.

  As Stephen’s health gradually improved, I ventured to take up some of my old activities, notably singing in the church choir and with the choral society which I had joined in the early Eighties. Since the latter’s weekly rehearsals took place in Caius College Chapel by kind permission of the Dean, John Sturdy, this activity was quite compatible with Stephen’s movements. He, accompanied by a nurse, would dine in the College while I sang – or tried to sing my way through an endless succession of colds – in the Chapel. Often he would call in at the Chapel after dinner to listen to the final stages of the rehearsal and we would then go home together. Lucy was adopting an increasingly independent lifestyle, which revolved more and more around the theatre and kept her out of the house.

  Three nurses and a doctor were engaged for Stephen’s trip to Sweden, stretching the MacArthur budget to its limit. It was however a profitable investment, since Murray Gell-Mann, one of the trustees of the MacArthur Foundation, was also a participant at the conference. He could see at first hand just how dire Stephen’s circumstances were and just how much costly professional care was needed to sustain his life and his contribution to physics. In my next application to the Foundation in September of 1986, I was able to refer to our meeting with Murray Gell-Mann and to report that Stephen’s health, though much more stable, continued to require the same degree of professional nursing: I predicted that it would be required indefinitely. Thereafter, the MacArthur Foundation agreed to support Stephen’s nursing expenses on an indefinite basis and accepted my explanation that the National Health Service provided only a fleeting morning visit from the District Nurse to check the supplies, a weekly visit from the GP, one eight-hour shift out of the twenty-one, and additional help with bathing on a couple of mornings a week.

  The small, traffic-free island of Marstrand off the west coast of Sweden proved to be the most delightful and suitable place for a convalescent physicist to flex his intellectual muscles. While Stephen and his comrades explored the universe by means of the trajectories of elementary particles, I relaxed, cherishing peace and solitude in the rocky coves and walking along the woodland tracks where daffodils still bloomed in June and the sun shone late into the night. The freedom of those few days in Sweden was a rare luxury, but one which just occasionally came my way thanks to the unexpectedly helpful intervention of Stephen’s mother after the death of his father in March 1986. Stephen’s father was not an easy patient in his final illness; the frustration of immobility was too burdensome for one who in earlier years had thought little of driving single-handed across Africa to enlist for service at the beginning of the Second World War, and who habitually in his late seventies would spend whole weeks camping and walking in the Welsh mountains. His funeral marked a sad end to a distinguished but inadequately recognized career in tropical medicine. I suspected that I was not the only person whose feelings towards him were decidedly ambivalent. I admired him and respected him, for he could be sensitive and considerate, even appreciative, but he could also be cold, harsh and distant.

  After his death, Isobel’s formerly stringent inflexibility appeared to mellow as she showed signs of greater compassion. She seemed anxious to share the stresses of our family life in a new way and became popular with the children for her coolly sardonic sense of humour and for her apparently easygoing nature, which made few demands of them. She also showed a surprising and benevolent tolerance of my relationship with Jonathan, as if she had finally come to realize that he was not intent on destroying the family but was genuinely supportive of us all, including Stephen. I was grateful for her help and grateful for her understanding, especially when she offered to keep house so that we could resume our camping holidays on the Continent. If I could reliably look forward to a couple of weeks’ summer holiday away from the strains of a half-life in a house where I was on duty in every capacity for seven days a week for a minimum of forty-nine weeks a year, juggling all my roles, trying to be all things to all the inhabitants, I felt that I could summon the strength to continue, however onerous those duties might be. At the end of the allotted time, I returned without question to Stephen.

  Having spread his phoenix wings in Sweden without mishap, Stephen was eager to use them again and again. In September, the travelling circus – which now included a young physics graduate as Stephen’s personal assistant – set off for Paris for a conference at the Observatoire de Paris at Meudon, where Brandon Carter worked. I was delighted to be able to spend time with Lucette, bringing her up-to-date on the events of the past year, and there I also discovered a new role for myself – as chauffeur and interpreter for the party. At least the nurses could hear, if not see, that I was good for something.

  Only a month later we found ourselves again in Rome, where Stephen was to be admitted by the Pope to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, despite the heresies he was still preaching about the universe having neither a beginning nor an end. Tim came too, as did the retinue of nurses and the young personal assistant whose responsibility it was to attend to the workings of the computer and the mechanics of Stephen’s lectures. We tried to choose nurses whom we knew to be Catholic and who would appreciate the significance of the occasion. We were lucky
in that two of the most reliable and pleasant nurses on the rota, Pam and Theresa, were both Catholic and were overjoyed to be invited. We needed three nurses however, and not all were as keen as Pam and Theresa. It was only at the last minute that Elaine Mason agreed to come with us: she did so only on the understanding that she would not have to shake hands with the Pope, as such a gesture would be against her principles.

  The second visit to Rome was more formal than the first in 1981. The weather was better, and so were the provisions made for us: we stayed in a much more comfortable hotel, closer to the Vatican, and special tours of the art treasures of the Vatican were put on for wives and children while the scientists conferred in the Renaissance headquarters of the Academy. The climax of the visit was an audience with Pope John Paul II, to which all members of Stephen’s party were admitted. With his hand gently resting on Tim’s head, the Pope talked quietly to Stephen and me, pressing our hands and giving us his blessing. He then shook hands with the others, none of whom resisted. I was moved by the genuine warmth of his personality, the softness of his big hands and the holiness of the light in his bright blue eyes. I had no religious prejudices, and had come to Rome with an open heart and mind. The Pope touched my heart and my mind, for – politics and dogma apart – I sensed that he sincerely cared about the people he met and kept them in his prayers.