Now a major motion picture starring Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking and Felicity Jones as his wife Jane. It chronicles their relationship, from his early development of ALS to his success in physics
In this compelling memoir, Jane Hawking, Stephen Hawking's first wife, relates the inside story of their extraordinary marriage. As Stephen's academic renown soared, his body was collapsing under the assaults of motor-neuron disease, and Jane's candid account of trying to balance his twenty-four-hour care with the needs of their growing family will be inspirational to anyone dealing with family illness. The inner strength of the author and the self-evident character and achievements of her husband make for an incredible tale that is always presented with unflinching honesty; the author's candour is no less evident when the marriage finally ends in a high-profile meltdown, with Stephen leaving Jane for one of his nurses, while Jane goes on to marry an old family friend.
In this exceptionally open, moving and often funny memoir, Jane Hawking confronts not only the acutely complicated and painful dilemmas of her first marriage, but also the fault lines exposed in a relationship by the pervasive effects of fame and wealth. The result is a book about optimism, love and change that will resonate with readers everywhere.
1
Wings to Fly
The story of my life with Stephen Hawking began in the summer of 1962, though possibly it began ten or so years earlier than that without my being aware of it. When I entered St Albans High School for Girls as a seven-year-old first-former in the early Fifties, there was for a short spell a boy with floppy, golden-brown hair who used to sit by the wall in the next-door classroom. The school took boys, including my brother Christopher in the junior department, but I only saw the boy with the floppy hair on the occasions when, in the absence of our own teacher, we first-formers were squeezed into the same classroom as the older children. We never spoke to each other, but I am sure this early memory is to be trusted, because Stephen was a pupil at the school for a term at that time before going to a preparatory school a few miles away.
Stephen’s sisters were more recognizable, because they were at the school for longer. Only eighteen months younger than Stephen, Mary, the elder of the two girls, was a distinctively eccentric figure – plump, always dishevelled, absent-minded, given to solitary pursuits. Her great asset, a translucent complexion, was masked by thick, unflattering spectacles. Philippa, five years younger than Stephen, was bright-eyed, nervous and excitable, with short fair plaits and a round, pink face. The school demanded rigid conformity both academically and in discipline, and the pupils, like schoolchildren everywhere, could be cruelly intolerant of individuality. It was fine to have a Rolls Royce and a house in the country, but if, like me, your means of transport was a pre-war Standard 10 – or even worse, like the Hawkings, an ancient London taxi – you were a figure of fun or the object of pitying contempt. The Hawking children used to lie on the floor of their taxi to avoid being seen by their peers. Unfortunately there was not room on the floor of the Standard 10 for such evasive action. Both the Hawking girls left before reaching the upper school.
Their mother had long been a familiar figure. A small, wiry person dressed in a fur coat, she used to stand on the corner by the zebra crossing near my school, waiting for her youngest son, Edward, to arrive by bus from his preparatory school in the country. My brother also went to that school after his kindergarten year at St Albans High School: it was called Aylesford House and there the boys wore pink – pink blazers and pink caps. In all other respects it was a paradise for small boys, especially for those who were not of an academic inclination. Games, cubs, camping and gang shows, for which my father often played the piano, appeared to be the major activities. Charming and very good-looking, Edward, at the age of eight, was having some difficulty relating to his adoptive family when I first knew the Hawkings – possibly because of their habit of bringing their reading matter to the dinner table and ignoring any non-bookworms present.
A school friend of mine, Diana King, had experienced this particular Hawking habit – which may have been why, on hearing some time later of my engagement to Stephen, she exclaimed, “Oh, Jane! You are marrying into a mad, mad family!” It was Diana who first pointed Stephen out to me in that summer of 1962 when, after the exams, she, my best friend Gillian and I were enjoying the blissful period of semi-idleness before the end of term. Thanks to my father’s position as a senior civil servant, I had already made a couple of sorties into the adult world beyond school, homework and exams – to a dinner in the House of Commons and on a hot sunny day to a garden party at Buckingham Palace. Diana and Gillian were leaving school that summer, while I was to stay on as Head Girl for the autumn term, when I would be applying for university entrance. That Friday afternoon we collected our bags and, adjusting our straw boaters, we decided to drift into town for tea. We had scarcely gone a hundred yards when a strange sight met our eyes on the other side of the road: there, lolloping along in the opposite direction, was a young man with an awkward gait, his head down, his face shielded from the world under an unruly mass of straight brown hair. Immersed in his own thoughts, he looked neither to right nor left, unaware of the group of schoolgirls across the road. He was an eccentric phenomenon for strait-laced, sleepy St Albans. Gillian and I stared rather rudely in amazement but Diana remained impassive.
“That’s Stephen Hawking. I’ve been out with him actually,” she announced to her speechless companions.
“No! You haven’t!” we laughed incredulously.
“Yes I have. He’s strange but very clever, he’s a friend of Basil’s [her brother]. He took me to the theatre once, and I’ve been to his house. He goes on ‘Ban the Bomb’ marches.”
Raising our eyebrows, we continued into town, but I did not enjoy the outing because, without being able to explain why, I felt uneasy about the young man we had just seen. Perhaps there was something about his very eccentricity that fascinated me in my rather conventional existence. Perhaps I had some strange premonition that I would be seeing him again. Whatever it was, that scene etched itself deeply on my mind.
The holidays of that summer were a dream for a teenager on the verge of independence, though they may well have been a nightmare for her parents, since my destination, a summer school in Spain, was in 1962 quite as remote, mysterious and fraught with hazards as, say, Nepal is for teenagers today. With all the confidence of my eighteen years, I was quite sure that I could look after myself, and I was right. The course was well organized, and we students were lodged in groups in private homes. At weekends we were taken on conducted tours of all the sights – to Pamplona where the bulls run the streets, to the only bullfight I have seen, brutal and savage, but spectacular and enthralling as well, and to Loyola, the home of St Ignatius, the author of a prayer I and every other pupil at St Albans High School had had instilled into us from constant repetition:
Teach us, O Lord,
to serve Thee as Thou deservest,
to give and not to count the cost…
Otherwise we spent our afternoons on the beach and the evenings out down by the port in restaurants and bars, participating in the fiestas and the dancing, listening to the raucous bands and gasping at the fireworks. I quickly made new friends outside the limited St Albans scene, primarily among the other teenagers on the course, and with them, in the glorious, exotic atmosphere of Spain, experimented with a taste of adult independence away from home, family and the stultifying discipline of school.
On my return to England, I was whisked away almost immediately by my parents who, relieved at my safe return, had arranged a family holiday in the Low Countries and Luxembourg. This was yet another broadening experience, one of those holidays in which my father specialized and which he had been arranging for us for many years – ever since my first trip to Brittany at the age of ten. Thanks to his enthusiasms we found ourselves in the vanguard of the tourist movement, travelling hundreds of miles along meandering country roads across a Europe in the process of emerging from its wartime trauma, visiting cities, cathedrals and art museums, which my parents were also discovering for the first time. It was a typically inspired combination of education, through art and history, and enjoyment of the good things of life – wine, food and summer sun – all intermingled with the war memorials and cemeteries of Flanders’ fields.
Back in school that autumn, the summer’s experiences lent me an unprecedented feeling of self-assurance. As I emerged from my chrysalis, school provided only the palest reflection of the awareness and self-reliance I had acquired through travelling. Taking my cue from the new forms of satire appearing on television, I, the Head Girl, devised a fashion show for the sixth-form entertainment, with the difference that all the fashions were constructed from bizarrely adapted items of school uniform. Discipline collapsed as the whole school clamoured for entry on the staircase outside the hall, and Miss Meiklejohn (otherwise know as Mick), the stocky, weather-beaten games mistress on whose terrifyingly masculine bark the smooth running of the school depended, was for once reduced to apoplexy, unable to make herself heard in the din. In desperation, she resorted to the megaphone – which usually only came out for a blasting on Sports Day, at the pet show, and for the purpose of controlling those interminable crocodiles we had to form when marching down through every possible back street of St Albans for the once-termly services in the Abbey.
That term long ago in the autumn of 1962 was not supposed to be about putting on shows. It was supposed to be about university entrance. Sadly it was not a success for me in academic terms. However great our adulation for President Kennedy, the Cuban missile crisis that October had well and truly shaken the sense of security of my generation and dashed our hopes for the future. With the superpowers playing such dangerous games with our lives, it was not at all certain that we had any future to look forward to. As we prayed for peace in school assembly under the direction of the Dean, I remembered a prediction made by Field Marshall Montgomery in the late Fifties that there would be a nuclear war within a decade. Everyone, young and old alike, knew that we would have just four minutes’ warning of a nuclear attack, which would spell the abrupt end of all civilization. My mother’s comment, calmly philosophical and sensible as ever, at the prospect of a third world war in her lifetime, was that she would much rather be obliterated with everything and everyone else than endure the agony of seeing her husband and son conscripted for warfare from which they would never return.
Quite apart from the almighty threat of the international scene, I felt that I had burnt myself out with the A-level exams and lacked enthusiasm for school work after my taste of freedom in the summer. The serious business of university entrance held only humiliation when neither Oxford nor Cambridge expressed any interest in me. It was all the more painful because my father had been cherishing the hope that I would gain a place at Cambridge since I was about six years old. Aware of my sense of failure, Miss Gent, the Headmistress, sympathetically went to some lengths to point out that there was no disgrace in not getting a place at Cambridge, because many of the men at that university were far inferior intellectually to the women who had been turned away for want of places. In those days the ratio was roughly ten men to one woman at Oxford and Cambridge. She recommended taking up the offer of an interview at Westfield College, London, a women’s college on the Girtonian model, situated in Hampstead at some distance from the rest of the University. Thus one cold, wet December day, I set off from St Albans by bus for the fifteen-mile journey to Hampstead.
The day was such a disaster that it was a relief at the end of it to be on the bus home again, travelling through the same bleak, grey sleet and snow of the outward journey. After the uncomfortable exercise in the Spanish Department of bluffing my way through an interview which seemed to hinge entirely on T.S. Eliot, about whom I knew next to nothing, I was sent to join the queue outside the Principal’s study. When my turn came, she brought the style of a former civil servant to the interview, scarcely looking up from her papers over her horn-rimmed spectacles. Feeling exceedingly ruffled from the fiasco of the earlier interview, I decided it was better to make her notice me even if in the process I ruined my chances. So when in a bored, dry voice, she asked, “And why have you put down Spanish rather than French as your main language?”, I answered in an equally bored, dry voice, “Because Spain is hotter than France.” Her papers fell from her hands and she did indeed look up.
To my astonishment, I was offered a place at Westfield, but by that Christmas much of the optimism and enthusiasm that I had discovered in Spain had worn thin. When Diana invited me to a New Year’s party which she was giving with her brother on 1st January 1963, I went along, neatly dressed in a dark-green silky outfit – synthetic, of course – with my hair back-brushed in an extravagant bouffant roll, inwardly shy and very unsure of myself. There, slight of frame, leaning against the wall in a corner with his back to the light, gesticulating with long thin fingers as he spoke – his hair falling across his face over his glasses – and wearing a dusty black-velvet jacket and red-velvet bow tie, stood Stephen Hawking, the young man I had seen lolloping along the street in the summer.
Standing apart from the other groups, he was talking to an Oxford friend, explaining that he had begun research in cosmology in Cambridge – not, as he had hoped, under the auspices of Fred Hoyle, the popular television scientist, but with the unusually named Dennis Sciama. At first, Stephen had thought his unknown supervisor’s name was Skeearma, but on his arrival in Cambridge he had discovered that the correct pronunciation was Sharma. He admitted that he had learnt with some relief, the previous summer – when I was doing A levels – that he had gained a First Class degree at Oxford. This was the happy result of a viva, an oral exam, conducted by the perplexed examiners to decide whether the singularly inept candidate whose papers also revealed flashes of brilliance should be given a First, an Upper Second or a Pass degree, the latter being tantamount to failure. He nonchalantly informed the examiners that if they gave him a First he would go to Cambridge to do a PhD, thus giving them the opportunity of introducing a Trojan horse into the rival camp, whereas if they gave him an Upper Second (which would also allow him to do research), he would stay in Oxford. The examiners played for safety and gave him a First.
Stephen went on to explain to his audience of two, his Oxford friend and me, how he had also taken steps to play for safety, realizing that it was extremely unlikely that he would get a First at Oxford on the little work he had done. He had never been to a lecture – it was not the done thing to be seen working when friends called – and the legendary tale of his tearing up a piece of work and flinging it into his tutor’s wastepaper basket on leaving a tutorial is quite true. Fearing for his chances in academia, Stephen had applied to join the Civil Service and had passed the preliminary stages of selection at a country-house weekend, so he was all set to take the Civil Service exams just after Finals. One morning he woke late as usual, with the niggling feeling that there was something he ought to be doing that day, apart from his normal pursuit of listening to his taped recording of the entire Ring Cycle. As he did not keep a diary but trusted everything to memory, he had no way of finding out what it was until some hours later, when it dawned on him that that day was the day of the Civil Service exams.
I listened in amused fascination, drawn to this unusual character by his sense of humour and his independent personality. His tales made very appealing listening, particularly because of his way of hiccoughing with laughter, almost suffocating himself, at the jokes he told, many of them against himself. Clearly here was someone, like me, who tended to stumble through life and managed to see the funny side of situations. Someone who, like me, was fairly shy, yet not averse to expressing his opinions; someone who unlike me had a developed sense of his own worth and had the effrontery to convey it. As the party drew to a close, we exchanged names and addresses, but I did not expect to see him again, except perhaps casually in passing. The floppy hair and the bow tie were a façade, a statement of independence of mind, and in future I could afford to overlook them, as Diana had, rather than gape in astonishment, if I came across him again in the street.
2
On Stage
Only a couple of days later, a card came from Stephen, inviting me to a party on 8th January. It was written in a beautiful copperplate hand which I envied but, despite laborious efforts, had never mastered. I consulted Diana, who had also received an invitation. She said that the party was for Stephen’s twenty-first birthday – information not conveyed on the invitation – and she promised to come and pick me up. It was difficult to choose a present for someone I had only just met, so I took a record token.
The house in Hillside Road, St Albans, was a monument to thrift and economy. Not that that was unusual in those days, because in the postwar era we were all brought up to treat money with respect, to search out bargains and to avoid waste. Built in the early years of the twentieth century, 14 Hillside Road, a vast red-brick three-storey house, had a certain charm about it, since it was preserved entirely in its original state, with no interference from modernizing trends, such as central heating or wall-to-wall carpeting. Nature, the elements and a family of four children had all left their marks on the shabby façade which hid behind an unruly hedge. Wisteria overhung the decrepit glass porch, and much of the coloured glass in the leaded diamond panes of the upper panels of the front door was missing. Although no immediate response came from pressing the bell, the door was eventually opened by the same person who used to wait wrapped in a fur coat by the zebra crossing. She was introduced to me as Isobel Hawking, Stephen’s mother. She was accompanied by an enchanting small boy with dark curly hair and bright blue eyes. Behind them a single light bulb illuminated a long yellow-tiled hallway, heavy furniture – including a grandfather clock – and the original, now darkened, William-Morris wallpaper.
As different members of the family began to appear round the living-room door to greet the new arrivals, I discovered that I knew them all: Stephen’s mother was well known from her vigils by the crossing; his young brother, Edward, was evidently the small boy in the pink cap; the sisters, Mary and Philippa, were recognizable from school, and the tall, white-haired, distinguished father of the family, Frank Hawking, had once come to collect a swarm of bees from our own back garden. My brother Chris and I had wanted to watch, but to our disappointment he had shooed us away with a gruff taciturnity. In addition to being the city’s only beekeeper, Frank Hawking must also have been one of the few people in St Albans to own a pair of skis. In winter he would ski down the hill past our house on his way to the golf course, where we used to picnic and gather bluebells in spring and summer and toboggan on tin trays in winter. It was like fitting a jigsaw together: all these people were individually quite familiar to me, but I had never realized that they were related. Indeed there was yet another member of that household whom I recognized: she lodged in her own self-contained room in the attic, but came down to join in family occasions such as this. Agnes Walker, Stephen’s Scottish grandmother, was a well-known figure in St Albans in her own right on account of her prowess at the piano, publicly displayed once a month when she joined forces in the Town Hall with Molly Du Cane, our splendidly jolly-hockey-sticks folk-dance leader.
Dancing and tennis had been just about my only social activities throughout my teenage years. Through them, I had acquired a group of friends of both sexes from various schools and differing backgrounds. Out of school we went everywhere in a crowd – coffee on Saturday mornings, tennis in the evenings and socials at the tennis club in summer, ballroom-dancing classes and folk dancing in the winter. The fact that our mothers also attended the folk-dance evenings along with many of St Albans’ elderly and infirm population did not embarrass us at all. We sat apart and danced in our own sets, well out of the way of the older generation. Romances blossomed occasionally in our corner, giving rise to plenty of gossip and a few squabbles, then usually faded as quickly as they had bloomed. We were an easygoing, friendly bunch of teenagers, leading simpler lives than our modern counterparts, and the atmosphere at the dances was carefree and wholesome, inspired by Molly Du Cane’s infectious enthusiasm for her energetic art. Fiddle on her shoulder, she called the dances with authority, while Stephen’s grandmother, her corpulent frame upright at the grand piano, applied her fingers with nimble artistry to the ivories, not once allowing the sausage bang of tight curls on her forehead to become ruffled. An august figure, she would turn to survey the dancers with a curiously impassive stare. She, of course, came downstairs to greet the guests at Stephen’s twenty-first birthday party.
The party consisted of a mixture of friends and relations. A few hailed from Stephen’s Oxford days, but most had been his contemporaries or near contemporaries at St Albans School and had contributed to that school’s success in the Oxbridge entrance exams of 1959. At seventeen, Stephen had been younger than his peer group at school, and consequently was rather young for university entrance that autumn, especially as many of his fellow undergraduates were not just one year older than him, but older by several years because they had all come up to Oxford after doing National Service, which had since been abolished. Later Stephen admitted that he failed to get the best out of Oxford because of the difference in age between him and his fellow undergraduates.
Certainly he maintained closer ties with his school friends than with any acquaintances from Oxford. Apart from Basil King, Diana’s brother, I knew them only by repute as the new elite of St Albans’ society. They were said to be the intellectual adventurers of our generation, passionately dedicated to a critical rejection of every truism, to the ridicule of every trite or clichéd remark, to the assertion of their own independence of thought and to the exploration of the outer reaches of the mind. Our local paper, The Herts Advertiser, had trumpeted the success of the school four years earlier, splashing their names and faces across its pages. Whereas I was just about to embark on my undergraduate career, their student years were now already behind them. They were, of course, very different from my friends, and I, a bright but ordinary eighteen-year-old, felt intimidated. None of this crowd would ever spend their evenings folk-dancing. Painfully aware of my own lack of sophistication, I settled in a corner as close to the fire as possible with Edward on my knee and listened to the conversation, not attempting to participate. Some people were seated, others leant against the wall of the large chilly dining room, where the only source of heat was from a glass-fronted stove. The conversation was halting and consisted mostly of jokes, none of which were even remotely as highbrow as I was expecting. The only part of it I can remember was not a joke, but a riddle, about a man in New York who wanted to get to the fiftieth floor of a building but only took the lift to the forty-sixth. Why? Because he was not tall enough to reach the button for the fiftieth floor…
It was some time before I saw or heard of Stephen again. I was busily engaged in London following a secretarial course in a revolutionary type of shorthand, which used the alphabet instead of hieroglyphs and omitted all vowels. Initially I accompanied my father to the station at a sprint to catch the 8 a.m. train every morning, until I discovered that I was not required to be at the school in Oxford Street quite so early. I could travel at a more leisurely pace than my dedicated, hard-working father, so I ambled to the station for the nine o’clock train and met a completely different commuting public from the jam-packed, harassed-looking, middle-aged breadwinners in dark suits. Rarely did a day go by when I did not meet someone I knew – unhurried and casually dressed, either going back to college after a weekend at home or going up to London for an interview. This was a welcome start to the day, because for the rest of it, apart from a short break for lunch, I was confined to the classroom, surrounded by the clatter of massed old-fashioned typewriters and the chatter of ex-debs whose main claim to distinction seemed to be the number of times they had been invited to Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace or Clarence House.
The revolutionary form of shorthand was easy enough to pick up, but the touch-typing was a nightmare. I could see the sense of the shorthand, for that was going to be useful for note-taking at university, but the typing was tiresome in the extreme and I was hopeless at it, still struggling to reach forty words a minute when the rest of the class had finished the course and mastered all the additional skills of the secretarial art. Actually the shorthand would be of short-term value while the typing skills would prove themselves over and over again.
At weekends I could forget the horrors of typing and keep up with old friends. One Saturday morning in February, I met Diana, who was now a student nurse at St Thomas’s Hospital, and Elizabeth Chant, another school friend, who was training to become a primary-school teacher, in our favourite haunt, the coffee bar in Greens’, St Albans’ only department store. We compared notes on our courses and then started talking about our friends and acquaintances. Suddenly Diana asked, “Have you heard about Stephen?” “Oh, yes,” said Elizabeth, “it’s awful, isn’t it?” I realized that they were talking about Stephen Hawking. “What do you mean?” I asked. “I haven’t heard anything.” “Well, apparently he’s been in hospital for two weeks – Bart’s I think, because that’s where his father trained and that’s where Mary is training.” Diana explained, “He kept stumbling and couldn’t tie his shoelaces.” She paused. “They did lots of horrible tests and have found that he’s suffering from some terrible, paralysing incurable disease. It’s a bit like multiple sclerosis, but it’s not multiple sclerosis and they reckon he’s probably only got a couple of years to live.”
I was stunned. I had only just met Stephen and for all his eccentricity I liked him. We both seemed shy in the presence of others, but were confident within ourselves. It was unthinkable that someone only a couple of years older than me should be facing the prospect of his own death. Mortality was not a concept that played any part in our existence. We were still young enough to be immortal. “How is he?” I enquired, shaken by the news. “Basil’s been to see him,” she continued, “and says he’s pretty depressed: the tests are really unpleasant, and a boy from St Albans in the bed opposite died the other day.” She sighed, “Stephen insisted on being on the ward, because of his socialist principles, and would not have a private room as his parents wanted.” “Do they know the cause of this illness?” I asked blankly. “Not really,” Diana replied. “They think he may have been given a non-sterile smallpox vaccination when he went to Persia a couple of years ago, and that introduced a virus to his spine – but they don’t really know, that’s only speculation.”
I went home in silence, thinking about Stephen. My mother noticed my preoccupation. She had not met him, but knew of him and also knew that I liked him. I had taken the precaution of warning her that he was very eccentric, in case she should come across him unannounced. With the sensible assurance of the deep-seated faith which had sustained her through the war, through the terminal illness of her beloved father and through my own father’s bouts of depression, she quietly said, “Why don’t you pray for him? It might help.”
I was astonished therefore when, a week or so later, as I was waiting for a 9 a.m. train, Stephen came sauntering down the platform carrying a brown canvas suitcase. He looked perfectly cheerful and pleased to see me. His appearance was more conventional and actually rather more attractive than on past occasions: the features of the old image which he had doubtless cultivated at Oxford – the bow tie, the black-velvet jacket, even the long hair – had given way to a red necktie, a beige raincoat and a tidier, shorter hairstyle. Our two previous meetings had been in the evening in subdued lighting: daylight revealed his broad, winning smile and his limpid grey eyes to advantage. Behind the owlish spectacles there was something about the set of his features which attracted me, reminding me, perhaps even subconsciously, of my Norfolk hero, Lord Nelson. We sat together on the train to London talking quite happily, though we scarcely touched on the question of his illness. I mentioned how sorry I had been to hear of his stay in hospital, whereupon he wrinkled his nose and said nothing. He behaved so convincingly as if everything were fine, and I felt it would have been cruel to have pursued the subject further. He was on his way back to Cambridge, he said, and as we neared St Pancras, he announced that he came home quite often at weekends. Would I like to go to the theatre with him sometime? Of course I said I would.
We met one Friday evening at an Italian restaurant in Soho, which in itself would have been a sufficiently lavish evening out. However Stephen had tickets for the theatre as well, and the meal had to be brought to a hasty and rather embarrassingly expensive conclusion to enable us to make our way south of the river to the Old Vic, in time for a performance of Volpone. Arriving at the theatre in a rush, we just managed to throw our belongings under our seats at the back of the stalls when the play began. My parents were fairly keen theatre-goers, so I had already seen Jonson’s other great play The Alchemist and had enjoyed it thoroughly; Volpone was just as entertaining, and soon enough I was totally absorbed in the intrigues of the old fox who wanted to test the sincerity of his heirs but whose plans went badly wrong.
Elated by the performance, we stood discussing it afterwards at the bus stop. A tramp came by and politely asked Stephen if he had any loose change. Stephen felt in his pocket and exclaimed in embarrassment, “I’m sorry, I don’t think I have anything left!” The tramp grinned and looked at me. “That’s all right, guv’,” he said, winking in my direction, “I understand.” At that moment the bus drew up and we clambered on. As we sat down, Stephen turned to me apologetically, “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “but I don’t even have the money for the fare. Have you got any?” Guiltily aware of how much he must have spent on our evening, I was only too happy to oblige. The conductor approached and hovered over us as I searched for my purse in the depths of my handbag. My embarrassment equalled Stephen’s as I discovered that it was missing. We jumped off the bus at the next set of traffic lights and fairly ran all the way back to the Old Vic. The main entrance to the theatre was closed, but Stephen pressed on – to the stage door at the side. It was open and the passage inside was lit. Cautiously we ventured in, but there was no one to be seen. Directly at the end of the passage we found ourselves on the deserted but still brightly lit stage. Awestruck, we tiptoed across it and down the steps into the darkened auditorium. In no time at all, to our joint relief, we found the green leather purse under the seat where I had been sitting. Just as we were heading back towards the stage, the lights went out, and there we were in total darkness. “Take my hand,” said Stephen authoritatively. I held his hand and my breath in silent admiration as he led me back to the steps, up across the stage and out into the passage. Fortunately the stage door was still open, and as we tumbled out into the street we burst into laughter. We had been on the stage at the Old Vic!
3
A Glass Coach
Some weeks after the Old Vic episode, as the speed-writing course was officially coming to an end, my mother met me on my return home one evening excitedly waving a message from Stephen, who had telephoned to invite me to a May Ball in Cambridge. The prospect was tantalizing. In the Lower Sixth at school, a girl had been invited to a May Ball, and the rest of us were green with envy lapping up every detail of a gala occasion which seemed to be the stuff of fairy tales. Now, unbelievably, my turn had come. When Stephen rang to confirm the invitation, I accepted with pleasure. The problem of what to wear was soon solved when I found a dress in white-and-navy silk in a shop near the speed-writing school in Oxford Street, which was just within my means.
The May Balls, which with typical Cambridge contrariness take place in June, were still some months away. In the meantime I had to start replenishing my funds, depleted by the purchase of the ball gown, for my travels around Spain later in the summer, so I signed on with a temporary-employment agency in St Albans. My first assignment was a one-and-a-half-day stint – Thursday afternoon and the whole of Friday – in the Westminster Bank in Hatfield, where the manager of the branch, Mr Abercrombie, a patient, kindly man, was a friend of my father’s. I was first directed to the telephone switchboard, but with no inkling of what to do, I panicked at the flashing lights and frantically pulled out some leads on the board while desperately trying to push others into the vacant holes. I succeeded only in cutting off all outside callers and in connecting up the telephones of people who were sitting opposite each other. After that, I gradually settled into a variety of temporary jobs as the spring advanced into early summer and the night of the May Ball approached.
When Stephen arrived one hot afternoon in early June to take me to Cambridge, I was shocked by the deterioration in his condition since that evening of the Old Vic escapade, and I doubted that he was really strong enough to drive his father’s car, a huge old Ford Zephyr. Built like a tank, it had apparently forded rivers in Kashmir when the family – minus Stephen who had stayed at school in England – had lived in India some years earlier. I feared that the snorting vehicle might well go much too fast for the present driver, a slight, frail, limping figure who appeared to use the steering wheel to hoist himself up to see over the dashboard. I introduced Stephen to my mother. She showed no signs of surprise or of alarm, but waved us away as if she were the fairy godmother, sending me off to the ball – with Prince Charming – in a runaway glass coach.
The journey was terrifying. It transpired that Stephen’s role model for driving was his father, who drove fast and furiously, overtaking on hills and at corners – he had even been known to drive down a dual carriageway in the wrong direction. Drowning out all attempts at conversation, the wind roared through the open windows as we sped at take-off speed past the fields and trees of Hertfordshire into the exposed landscape of Cambridgeshire. I scarcely dared look at the road in front while Stephen, on the other hand, seemed to be looking at everything except the road. He probably felt that he could afford to live dangerously since fate had already dealt him such a cruel blow. This however was of scant reassurance to me, so I secretly vowed that I would travel home by train. I was definitely beginning to have my doubts about this supposedly fairy-tale experience of a May Ball.
Defying all road-accident statistics, we actually arrived in one piece at Stephen’s lodgings, in a fine Thirties-style graduate house set in a shady garden, where the other revellers were busy with last-minute preparations. When I had changed in the upstairs room allotted to me by the housekeeper, I was introduced to Stephen’s fellow lodgers and research students, whose seemingly contradictory attitudes towards him baffled me. They talked to him in his own intellectual terms, sometimes caustically sarcastic, sometimes crushingly critical, always humorous. In personal terms, however, they treated him with a gentle consideration which was almost loving. I found it hard to reconcile these two extremes of behaviour. I was used to consistency of attitude and approach, and was perplexed by these people who confidently played devil’s advocate, arguing ferociously with someone – that is Stephen – one minute, and the next not only treating him as if nothing were amiss, but attending caringly to his personal needs, as if his word were their command. I had not learnt to distinguish reason from emotion, the intellect from the heart. In my innocence I had some hard lessons to learn. Such innocence, by Cambridge standards, was boring and predictable.
We all went off to a late dinner in a first-floor restaurant on the corner of King’s Parade. From where I sat, I gazed out at the pinnacles and spires of King’s College, the Chapel and the gatehouse, darkly silhouetted against the vast, luminous panorama of an East Anglian sunset. That in itself was magical enough. We returned to the house for last-minute adjustments before setting out on the ten-minute walk across the watery green spaces of the Backs to the old courts of Trinity Hall, Stephen’s College. He insisted on taking his tape recorder and collection of tapes across to the College to install in a friend’s room, put at our disposal when we needed a break from the jollifications, but he could not carry them himself. “Oh, come on,” one of his friends grumbled benevolently, “I suppose I shall have to carry them for you.” And he did.
Relatively small, unpretentious and tucked away from public view, Trinity Hall consists of a motley collection of buildings – very old, old, Victorian and, most recently, modern – enclosing lawns, flower beds and a terrace which overlooks the river. We approached the College from the other side of the Cam, standing briefly on the high arch of a new bridge which, Stephen seriously impressed upon me, had recently been built in memory of a student, Timothy Morgan, who had died tragically in 1960 having just completed his design for it. From that bridge we were regaled with a fairy-tale spectacle: it reminded me of the mysterious country house in one of my favourite French novels, Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier, where the hero, Augustin Meaulnes, chances across a brightly lit château in the dark depths of the countryside and, from being a bemused observer, finds himself drawn into the revelries, the music and the dancing, never quite knowing what to expect. Here in Trinity Hall, bands were sending their strains out on the night air, the lawn leading down to the river was decorated with twinkling lights, as was the magnificent copper beech in the centre, and couples were already dancing on a raised platform under the tree. In the marquee at the top of the lawn I was introduced to more friends of Stephen’s, and together we made a beeline for our ration of champagne, which was being served from a bath, then on to the buffet and to the various entertainments: to the tightly packed Hall where on a distant stage an inaudible cabaret was taking place, to an elegantly panelled room where a string quartet was attempting to compete with the Jamaican-steel band out on the lawn outside, and to a corner by the Old Library where chestnuts were being served from a glowing brazier. Our companions had drifted away, leaving us sitting up on the terrace by the river, watching the dancers writhe to the hypnotic rhythms of the steel band. “I’m sorry I don’t dance.” Stephen apologized. “That’s quite all right – it doesn’t matter,” I lied.
Dancing was not totally out of the question however, because later, after yet another buffet and more champagne, we discovered a jazz band secreted away in a cellar. The room was dark, apart from some weird blueish lights. The men were invisible except for their cuffs and shirt-fronts, which shone with a bright-purple luminosity, while the girls could hardly be seen at all. I was fascinated. Stephen explained that the lights were picking up the fluorescent element contained in washing powder, which was why the men’s shirts were so visible, but that, as the girls’ new dresses would not have been contaminated with Tide or Daz or any other detergent, they did not show up with the same ghostly light. In the darkness of the underground room, I persuaded Stephen to take to the floor. We swayed gently to and fro, laughing at the dancing patterns of purple light until, to our disappointment, the band packed up and went.
In the early hours of the morning, the other colleges which had been hosting May Balls traditionally opened their doors to all-comers. As day dawned, we staggered down Trinity Street to Trinity College where, in a spacious set of rooms, somebody’s extremely well-organized and mature girlfriend was preparing breakfast, but I just sank into an armchair and fell asleep. Some kind person must have led me back sleepwalking to the lodging house in Adams Road, where I slept comfortably until mid-morning.
The day’s programme for the May Ball partners had been planned with the efficiency of a modern tour operator, except that it was much more stimulating. As well as researching their PhDs in Chemistry, Stephen’s friends, Nick Hughes and Tom Wesley, were much involved, as editors, in the production of a guide to the post-war buildings of Cambridge, Cambridge New Architecture, which was to be published in 1964. Stephen shared their interest and acted as a part-time consultant in the project. They were all anxious therefore to show the objects of their deliberations to any interested parties. However sceptically these buildings are viewed today, in the Sixties they were the cause of great excitement, the assertive excitement of post-war development and expansion, unconcerned for old properties, meadows or trees which might inhibit the new wave of roads, buildings and university development. Conservation was not yet a popular concern.
With a zealous, pioneering fervour, our guides pointed out to us – their impressionably ignorant female guests – the features of a selection of new sites, either recently finished or still under construction. These included the Hugh Casson development of the Sidgwick Site, and Churchill College – the memorial to Sir Winston, whose concern at the lack of provision for scientists and technologists in this country led to the foundation of the College in 1958. We were also taken to Harvey Court, the Gonville and Caius development, which left even the contributors to Cambridge New Architecture lost for words. They described it hopefully as “an experiment which may eventually bully its occupants into enjoying the pattern of life it imposes”, and added in its defence: “and it is Cambridge’s most courageous attempt at finding some new ideal solution to the problems of college residence”. Little did I know that some twelve years later I would be living next door to this particular experiment in modern living. Finally, as a sop to tradition, we visitors from less richly endowed universities were allowed to take a quick peep inside King’s College Chapel.
After lunch we all went out for a ride in a punt, and then the question of the return journey loomed. “I think it would be better if I went by train,” I hesitantly suggested to Stephen, but he would not hear of it. Anxious not to offend him, I took my place once again in the passenger seat of the dreaded Zephyr. The journey home was every bit as terrifying as the outward journey, and by the time we reached St Albans, I decided that, much as I appreciated the May Ball, I did not want to subject myself to that sort of dodgem ride ever again. My mother was in the front garden when we drew up at the gate. I tersely said “thank you and goodbye” to Stephen, and, with never a backwards glance, marched into the house. My mother followed me in and reprimanded me severely: “You’re not going to send that poor young man away without even a cup of tea are you?” she said, shocked at my indifference. Her words pricked my conscience. I ran out of the house to try and catch Stephen. He was still there, parked at the gate, trying to start the car. Slowly the car began to roll back down the steep hill, because he had let the brake off before getting the engine started. He jammed the brake on and, with alacrity, came in for tea, sitting with me in the sun by the garden door. As we excitedly recounted the events of the ball to my mother, he was attentive and charming. I decided that I really rather liked him and could forgive his road madness providing I did not have to experience it too often.
4
Hidden Truths
A couple of weeks later we temporarily acquired an addition to our family as my parents had responded to a call for accommodation for visiting French teenagers and were taking care of a sixteen-year-old girl whose best friend, by an uncanny coincidence, was lodging with the Hawkings. One Saturday in June, not long after the May Ball, Isobel Hawking invited the two French girls and me to join her on a visit to Cambridge. To my relief, she drove sensibly, talked in a jovially concentrated intellectual fashion and brought a splendid picnic – “a cold collation” she called it – which we ate on the veranda of Stephen’s ground-floor room in Adams Road. Thus my family and I were brought into closer and more regular contact with the Hawkings, and when Stephen came back to St Albans for a weekend, my parents invited him to dinner. They treated him with faultless hospitality, outwardly unperturbed by his appearance. He had reverted to his old Oxford ways. His lank, straight hair was longer than ever, and the black-velvet smoking jacket and the red bow tie had become a uniform, adopted to defy the very conformity which my parents represented. They, for their part, may have taken comfort from the fact that this was to be our last meeting for some time, as I was on the point of setting off yet again for Spain.
Early one morning in July 1963, my father drove me to Gatwick for a student flight which was due to leave at 9 a.m. and arrive in Madrid at one o’clock, but take-off was delayed while repairs were carried out to an engine. I was not at all concerned by the delay, nor by the need for repairs, nor by the fact that, after take-off, water – which eventually turned to icicles – dripped through the roof of the aircraft. Nor was I worried by the discovery that the captain and his co-pilot were happily enjoying a glass of beer when we students were invited to look into the cockpit. Bill Lewis, an acquaintance of our local GP, who was meeting me in Madrid, was much more anxious. “I thought you must be coming via the North Pole!” he joked when, at last, I emerged from customs at five in the afternoon. He took me home to meet his wife, who assured me of a warm welcome at their apartment every evening from six onwards, and then he delivered me to the lodgings he had found for me. Pilar, the landlady, was a small, vivacious, sharp-nosed, black-haired single lady who lived in a extraordinarily large, well-appointed flat just round the corner from the Lewises. Pilar’s other lodger, Sylvia, was also English and worked at the British Embassy. Sylvia was not happy about some of Pilar’s friends, who would turn up at all hours of the day and the night, and when she told me her concerns I hastened to lay my plans for leaving Madrid at the earliest opportunity, but not before taking advantage of every precious moment in the capital city and its environs to visit the Prado Museum and join many a tourist bus to the royal palaces at Aranjuez and the Escorial. Of course I also went to Toledo, the medieval city perched on a rock above the river Tajo, where in the thirteenth century Jews, Arabs and Christians had worked in perfect harmony in the pursuit of learning, and where in the seventeeth century El Greco executed some of his finest paintings. With a group of students I went on the pilgrimage to the Valley of the Fallen, el Valle de los Caídos, supposedly the monument to the dead of both sides in the Civil War but in fact a burial place only for the Fascists – and eventually Franco himself – constructed by Republican prisoners of war. I began to realize that the many mutilated beggars on the streets of Madrid were the tragic, living remnants of the Civil War, revealing an ugly, schizoid streak to Spain. In the mid-twentieth century, the country still bore out the disturbing contrasts depicted by Goya in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century paintings and drawings I had seen in the Prado.
Back in Pilar’s establishment, Sylvia and I had the uncomfortable sensation that things were coming to crisis point. We had persistently refused to go out with her in the evenings and, just as regularly, saucepans were now clattering through the air in the kitchen, while meals and mealtimes became a matter of chance. Feeling slightly guilty at leaving Sylvia in the lurch, I took evasive action and set off by air-conditioned train for the safety of Granada, where I settled in for a protracted stay at an international student hostel which housed a stimulating and unpredictable crowd, particularly the Spaniards among them, whose discussions could range from politics to poetry in the space of a single breath. To preserve my own sanity, I would sometimes have to escape from the intensity of their arguments to wander the streets of Granada in the heat of the day, watching the gypsy children at play in front of their caves, or to stroll through the Moorish palace, the Alhambra and the gardens of the Generalife, astounded at the sheer extravagant beauty of the place.
Lulled into a dreamy slumber by the perfume of the roses and the playing of the fountains, I would sit alone for hours under the arches in the courtyard of streams, in the Generalife, and from there would gaze across to the forbidding walls which concealed the intricate, creamy lacework of the inner courtyards of the Alhambra. Dazzling in the sun, the city lay at my feet, its glare broken only by the tall bottle-green spikes of the cypresses and the violent purple and pink patches of bougainvillea tumbling over reflecting white walls. A beautiful city but also a very cruel city. What other city could claim to have murdered its own most famous son? It was in Granada at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War that the rebellious right-wing Francoist forces slaughtered the greatest Spanish poet of the twentieth century, Federico García Lorca, the poet who, through the colour, rhythm and vision of his verse, had introduced me to Andalucía long before I had set foot on its soil.
During these long periods of solitary contemplation in a setting of such dramatically haunting beauty, I found myself overcome by waves of loneliness. In the past I had known moments of extreme dejection without being able to identify a precise cause. The reason for them was now becoming apparent and it was natural enough: I longed to have someone with whom to share my experiences. Moreover, I realized that the person I most wanted to share them with was Stephen. The early rapport between us had held much promise of harmony and compatibility. Because of his illness, any relationship with him was bound to be precarious, short-lived and probably heartbreaking. Could I help him fulfil himself and find even a brief happiness? I doubted whether I was up to the task, but when I confided in my new-found friends of all nationalities they urged me to go ahead. “If he needs you, you must do it,” they said.
Competing against this inner turmoil, the strong pull of adventure finally tore me away from the brooding magic of Granada and deposited me on a hot, smelly bus, crowded with market vendors and their wares – mostly still alive and flapping and squawking – on the slow crawl over the hills to Málaga. I was waiting in the bus station for the connection to La Línea, the last Spanish outpost before Gibraltar, when a man came up to me and asked if I would like to train as a Spanish dancer. To my surprise he explained that I had the right looks and figure. Although I was by now an old hand at fending off the predatory Spanish male, I was flattered. Despite my misgivings, the man appeared genuine. He was neither oily nor ingratiating, but quite straightforward in his approach. He handed me a card bearing the address of his dance studio. I was weighing up his offer when the bus for La Línea lumbered into view and hauled me out of temptation’s way. Sometimes I have a faint twinge of regret at how that bus broke all known records for timekeeping in Spain by arriving on schedule. Who knows what my story might have been, had it arrived just a few minutes later?
From La Línea I passed through the very physical border between Spain and Gibraltar, a barricade of green iron railings about twenty feet high with a gate at the customs post. Gibraltar, with all its incongruous trappings of British colonialism, was a convenient stepping stone for my one and only trip to Africa, to Tangiers for my first encounter with the descendants of the people who had invaded Spain in 711 and stayed there for more than seven hundred years – the Arabs. I liked them. They treated me, a young English girl travelling alone, with great courtesy and, unlike the Spaniards, who automatically harassed any passing foreign female, they showed no such disrespect. They were a dignified people, proud of their artistic skills, which were everywhere on display in the booths of the Kazbah. They were also gentle and hospitable, curious to learn about life in Europe, as I discovered over many glasses of the hot, sweet mint tea with which they plied me whenever I bought the smallest item in their shops.
Quite a few saucepans had been flung around in Madrid during my absence, according to Sylvia. Pilar was more and more dissatisfied with the return that she was getting from her paying guests, having doubtless anticipated sizeable bonuses of one sort or another, and had turned Sylvia out of her room, so she was now sharing with me. This we decided was a good thing, because there was safety in numbers, but it was no good for Sylvia as a long-term prospect, since I would shortly be leaving and she could not possibly stay in the house on her own. I had deliberately refrained from telling the Lewises the truth about the lodgings they had kindly found for me, as I did not want to appear ungrateful for their help or their hospitality, but the time had now come to apprise them of the goings-on at la casa de Pilar. Sylvia came with me to the Lewises’ six o’clock cocktail hour, and together we told them about the succession of decidedly repulsive male visitors to the apartment – for, albeit on a small scale, Pilar was running a disorderly house and was intent on procuring nice English girls for some of the flabby, ageing men of her acquaintance. We recounted how they attempted to grab us when we returned home at night, usually sheltering behind the sereno, the nightwatchman, who kept the keys to the front doors of all the apartment houses in the street and who would appear at a clap of the hands to open the main door. We lightly glossed over the shenanigans which went on all night in the other rooms in the flat, and the ominous rattlings of the locked bedroom door handle.
As Sylvia and I recounted these tales to the captive audience of British expatriates on my final evening in Madrid, Mrs Lewis spluttered over her gin and tonic, while her other guests grinned in amusement. Immediately the tendrils of the local grapevine started reaching out to find new lodgings for Sylvia as a matter of urgency. Most of the Lewis regulars, like Sylvia, worked at the British Embassy, though she had not met any of them before. They were amusing but modest, a good advertisement for the Diplomatic Service, which began to beckon as an exciting career prospect. I returned to England the next day, by student flight, sad to have left behind so many experiences, sights, sounds, acquaintances and intrigues, but dazzled at the array of contrasting, maybe even conflicting, possibilities that were opening up before me.
5
Uncertain Principles
My attempts to get in touch with Stephen on my return home from Spain were unavailing. According to his mother, he had already gone back to Cambridge and was not at all well. I was busy preparing to leave home to embark on a new stage of my life in London and, for the next few weeks that autumn, my attention was totally absorbed as I was drawn into the academic and social whirl of the Westfield scene in particular, and London in general. Concerts, the theatre and the ballet were all within easy reach. This was how I came to be travelling on the London Underground with a group of friends when we glimpsed the headlines announcing President Kennedy’s assassination. It was at about that time, November 1963, that I heard from Stephen again. He was coming to London for dental treatment and asked if I would like to go to the opera with him. This was a much more enticing prospect than any of the Freshers’ hops, which despite Beatlemania were dire occasions where the boys stayed stuck to the walls until the last dance. Though I had loved music since early childhood, I had had little formal training and had been to the opera only once – with the school to a performance of The Marriage of Figaro at Sadler’s Wells. My single attempt to learn an instrument, the flute, had been quickly aborted at the age of thirteen, when I broke both arms trying to ice-skate on the frozen lake in the park at Verulamium, the site of the Roman city on which St Albans was founded.
One Friday afternoon that November, I met Stephen in Harley Street, where Russell Cole, his Australian uncle by marriage, had his dental practice. He walked haltingly, lurching from side to side, making taxis an expensive necessity for journeys of any great distance. Curiously, as his gait became more unsteady, so his opinions became more forceful and defiant. On our way to visit the Wallace Collection, only a short distance from Harley Street, he announced quite adamantly that he did not share the general hero-worship of the assassinated President. In his opinion, the manner of Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis could only be described as foolhardy: he had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and it was he, not the Russians, who had threatened a military confrontation. What’s more, Stephen declared, it was preposterous for the United States to claim a victory, because Kennedy had agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey to appease Kruschev. Despite the force with which he expressed his ideas and his difficulty in walking, Stephen was indefatigable, so, from the Wallace Collection, we made our way down Regent Street in search of a restaurant. We were just crossing Lower Regent Street when, in the middle of the road, as the lights were turning green, he stumbled and fell. With the help of a passer-by, I dragged him to his feet and thereafter gave him my arm to lean on. Shaken, we hailed a taxi for Sadler’s Wells.
The opera for which Stephen had tickets was The Flying Dutchman. It was magnificent, sweeping us away in the power of its music and the drama of its legendary tale. The Dutchman, cursed to roam the seas through storm and wind until he could find someone who would sacrifice herself for love of him, was a wild, hounded figure, loudly lamenting his fate from the rigging of his tossing ship. Senta, the girl who fell in love with him, was pure and innocent. Like most Wagnerian sopranos, however, her weight kept her pretty firmly moored to her spinning wheel. Sensing that Stephen identified closely with the hero, I began to understand his demonic driving tactics. His father’s car was the vehicle for his fury at the trick that Fate had dealt him. He too was flying hither and thither in search of rescue – in a manner that could only be described as foolhardy.
After that evening, I felt that I needed to find out more for myself about Stephen’s condition. I made several sorties into London, searching out old acquaintances who had become medical students, and investigating the poky offices of various charities dealing in neurological illnesses. Everywhere I drew a blank. Perhaps it was better not to know. Was Stephen’s fate any worse, I wondered, than the fate which loomed over us all? We lived under the shadow of the nuclear cloud, and none of us could count on our full threescore years and ten.
In the lull of the bleak winter days between Christmas and the New Year, I called on Stephen at home in St Albans. He was on the point of leaving for London to go to the opera with his father and sisters. However he was so obviously delighted to see me that I readily accepted his spontaneous invitation – to accompany him and his father in a week’s time to yet another opera, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. The opera seemed to be an established family pastime in the Hawking household, whereas I, a newcomer, was still assessing this hybrid art form. Though undoubtedly it could exert tremendous emotional power through the combination of music and drama, it could also appear ludicrous if for the merest second one’s concentration lapsed. During the next term Stephen seemed to have access to an inexhaustible supply of opera tickets and was forever coming to London to take me to Covent Garden or Sadler’s Wells. I once ventured to suggest that I would rather like to go to the ballet, as the ballet had been my passion since the age of four, but that suggestion was quashed with withering scorn. Ballet was a waste of time, and the music was trivial, not worth the effort of listening, I was told. Chastened, I refrained from telling Stephen when I managed to get myself a ticket for Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, with Fonteyn and Nureyev, through the student union. We went in a party of girls and sat in the cheap seats, far back and high up in the amphitheatre at Covent Garden, way above the Grand Circle where the Hawkings usually sat. That performance was sublime, and it left me deeply moved.
Stephen was still coming to London frequently for seminars or for dental appointments and, increasingly, I found myself travelling to Cambridge to visit him on Saturdays or Sundays. Those visits, though urgently awaited, often proved disappointing to both of us. The fare – at ten shillings return – made quite a hole in my allowance of ten pounds a month, and the course of love did not run at all smoothly. It did not need much imagination to realize that Stephen could not contemplate embarking on a long-term, stable relationship because of the dismal prognosis of his illness. A quick fling was probably all he could envisage, and that was not what I – in my innocence and in the puritanical climate of the early Sixties, when the fear of an unwanted pregnancy was a potent constraint – dared imagine. These opposing perspectives led to such tension between us that I often returned to London in tears, and Stephen probably felt that my presence was rubbing salt into the wound of his trauma. He revealed little where emotional matters were concerned and he refused to talk about his illness. For fear of hurting him, I tried to intuit his feelings without forcing him to voice them, thus unwittingly establishing a tradition of non-communication, which eventually would become intolerable. I met him yet again in Harley Street later that winter, after an appointment with his consultant. “How did you get on?” I asked. He grimaced. “He told me not to bother to come back, because there’s nothing he can do,” he said.
At Westfield, Margaret Smithson, my room-mate, came with me to the meetings of the Christian Union, where I hoped to gain some supportive insights for a situation which was becoming very confusing as I became more and more involved in it. Like his parents, Stephen had no hesitation in declaring himself an atheist, despite the strong Methodist background of his Yorkshire grandparents. It was understandable that, as a cosmologist examining the laws that governed the universe, he could not allow his calculations to be muddled by a confessed belief in the existence of a creator God, quite apart from the confusion his illness might be creating in his mind. I was quite glad to get away from the tedium of regular Sunday church-going, but was not inclined to abandon my beliefs completely. Even then, possibly under my mother’s influence, I was convinced that there had to be more to heaven and earth than was contained in Stephen’s cold, impersonal philosophy. Although by this stage I was completely under his spell, bewitched by his clear blue-grey eyes and the broad dimpled smile, I resisted his atheism. Instinctively I knew that I could not allow myself to succumb to such a negative influence, which could offer no consolation, no comfort and no hope for the human condition. Atheism would destroy us both. I needed to cling to whatever rays of hope I could find and maintain sufficient faith for the two of us if any good were to come of our sad plight.
The meetings of the college Christian Union were not well attended, and soon they were to be even less so. The topic for the term’s discussions was the nature of divine grace, but it quickly transpired that the leaders of the group, including the young chaplain, whose name we irreverently traduced to the Revd P. Souper, were firmly of the opinion that only baptized, confessed, practising Christians could receive divine grace, salvation or whatever else they liked to call it, and only they had the right qualifications to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Margaret and I were so indignant that we walked out, furiously compiling lists of all those dearly loved – good people, friends and relations – who did not fulfil all the correct criteria, and held our own long discussions on these topics, which we continued into the vacations, when I went to stay with her and her family in Yorkshire.
Language students nowadays regularly spend a whole year abroad. In the Sixties it was a luxury to be able to spend even a term in the country of one’s target language. We Westfield students set out by train and boat in late April to spend the summer on a pre-arranged course at the university of Valencia. We arrived to find that no such course existed and that all the university could offer us was a few classes in Spanish on Shakespeare. The only obligation on us was to collect our certificates of attendance at the end of the term, whether we attended the lectures or not. We went to just one class, which made a travesty of Macbeth, and decided that enough was enough. I had had a lifetime’s education in Shakespeare at school and could not bear the thought of having a supplementary dose in Spanish. My companions agreed, so, thereafter, we went to the beach instead.
Only two weeks later, though the others still went to the beach, I was forced to stay at home, confined to my room in the seventh-floor apartment with a blinding headache which at first I thought was sunstroke but which developed into a severe case of chickenpox. I was already feeling wretchedly miserable. I missed Stephen badly: communication by telephone was out of the question in those days, and he did not write to me although I sent him many letters. The only comfort was afforded by my Westfield friends, whose visits kept me in touch with the outside world, and by my landlady, Doña Pilar de Ubeda, and her middle-aged daughter Maribel, who were kindness personified. As I slowly started to regain strength, I wandered into the kitchen, where Doña Pilar gave me lessons in Spanish cookery, a far more useful accomplishment than studying Shakespeare in Spanish. She taught me how to peel an orange tidily in quarters, how to make gazpacho and paella and she took me shopping with her. Luckily, with a spotty face and in the presence of such an august matron, I was spared the approaches of the men idly lounging around in the streets. Back in the flat, I sat in the living room listening ad nauseam to the two records I had bought myself – Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and excerpts from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. The latter reduced me to an exquisitely painful state of woe. At last the longed-for moment came. Setting out by train for Barcelona on the first leg of the journey home, I was glad to leave Valencia behind: despite the succulence of its oranges and the all-pervasive perfume of its citrus groves, it left the nasty taste (of constant sexual harassment and the bitterness) of a repressive regime that thought nothing of flinging students into jail overnight and removing uncomplimentary pages from imported copies of the Times.
My parents brought Stephen to meet me, and the initial moment of reunion was happy but short-lived. I soon became aware that in my absence he had changed: his physical condition had not altered markedly, except that he now regularly walked with a stick, but his personality was overshadowed by a deep depression. This revealed itself in a harsh black cynicism, aided and abetted by long hours of Wagnerian opera played at full volume. He was even more terse and uncommunicative, apparently so absorbed in himself that when he offered to teach me to play croquet on the Trinity Hall lawn, for example, he seemed to forget that I was there. Throwing the stick, which had become his constant appendage, to one side, he gave out curt instructions as I aimed my ball towards the first hoop, missing it. He then took up his mallet and, croqueting my ball round the whole course, reached the finishing post before I had even had a second turn. I stood open-mouthed, amused and perturbed at one and the same time. This was indeed an impressive tour de force, in which he scarcely bothered to veil his hostility and frustration, as if he were deliberately trying to deter me from further association with him. It was too late. I was already so deeply involved with him that there was no easy or obvious way out.
It was painful but perhaps beneficial that we were soon to be parted again: Stephen was about to set out for Germany, with his sister Philippa, on a pilgrimage to the Wagnerian shrine, the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, with tickets for the complete Ring Cycle. Thence they were to travel by rail behind the Iron Curtain to Prague. Meanwhile I was to accompany my father to an international governmental conference in Dijon, where I was to stay with a local family, an elderly couple with a highly sophisticated twenty-five-year-old daughter who had a job and a boyfriend. I was not at a loss for diversion however, because Dad’s conference, after a day or two of lectures and study sessions, generated its own entertainment in which I was privileged to share. Since we were in Bourgogne, that naturally revolved around the vineyards, the famous Clos of the region. Consequently there began yet another stage, arguably one of the most enjoyable of my education – the cultivation of a discerning palate in the course of which I was pleasurably introduced to the great names and the great bouquets of Bourgogne, Nuits-Saint-Georges, Côtes de Beaune, Clos de Vougeot. The advertising slogan for Nuits-Saint-Georges aroused my innocent curiosity: tantalizingly the deep velvety wine was said to resemble “la nuit des noces, douce et caressante…”
From Dijon we drove to Geneva airport to meet my mother and then spent a couple of days in our favourite retreat, high in the Bernese Oberland, at Hohfluh, a tiny village atop the Brenner Pass overlooking the valley of the Aare at Meiringen and enjoying the most spellbinding scenery. Before we left Switzerland for Italy, Dad took us to Lucerne, the medieval city on the edge of the lake, and showed us the sequence of paintings of the Dance of Death, in the roof beams of one of the wooden bridges which spanned the river. He pointed out the white-clad figure of Death, selecting its victim and capturing him in a deadly embrace and then whirling him faster and faster to his doom.
Italy was ravishing, a feast for the mind and the senses. Art, history, music, light and colour met us and pursued us everywhere we went – Como, Florence, San Gimignano, Pisa, Siena, Verona, Padua – in a vertiginous display of florid exuberance. One evening in Florence, after a day in the presence of Michelangelo, Botticelli, Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, my mother and I were leaning out of the hotel window, looking across the Arno to the Pitti Palace, where we were to attend a concert. It was then, in an expansive moment, that she confided to me her reasons for marrying my father at the beginning of the War. If he were wounded, she said, she wanted to be able to care for him herself. That remark was prescient for, only a few days later, when we arrived at our hotel in Venice, the Hotel Della Salute on a secluded canal behind the church of the same name, the manager produced a postcard addressed to me. It was a view of the castle at Salzburg and it was from Stephen.
I was overjoyed. Could Stephen really have been thinking of me as I had been thinking of him? It gave me grounds for daring to hope that he was looking forward to seeing me at the end of the summer. The postcard was uncharacteristically full of news. He had arrived in Salzburg for the tail end of the Festival, which was quite a contrast to Bayreuth. Czechoslovakia had been wonderful and remarkably cheap, a good advertisement for communism. He did not mention that a bad fall on a train in Germany had deprived him of his front teeth and that many hours of painstaking dentistry by his uncle in Harley Street would be required to replace them. In the glow of romance, albeit conducted at a distance, Venice, its canals, lagoon, palaces, churches, galleries and islands – became even more gloriously scintillating – yet, impatient for the possible opening of a new chapter in my life, I was not sorry to leave it and return to Switzerland. From Basle we were to fly home with the car on board an aeroplane, in a well justified stroke of extravagance after the many thousands of miles my father had driven single-handedly across the Continent over the years.
Stephen was pleased to see me on my return. Intuitively I understood that he had begun to view our relationship in a more positive light and had perhaps decided that all was not lost, that the future did not have to be as black as his worst fears had painted it. Back in Cambridge, one dark wet Saturday evening in October, he hesitantly whispered a proposal of marriage to me. That moment transformed our lives and consigned all my thoughts of a career in the Diplomatic Service to oblivion.
Release Date: January 1, 2015
Release Time: 124 minutes
Director: James Marsh
Cast:
Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking
Felicity Jones as Jane Hawking
Charlie Cox as Jonathan Jones
David Thewlis as Dennis Sciama
Simon McBurney as Frank Hawking
Emily Watson as Beryl Wilde
Maxine Peake as Elaine Mason
Harry Lloyd as Brian
Guy Oliver-Watts as George Wilde
Abigail Cruttenden as Isobel Hawking
Charlotte Hope as Phillipa Hawking
Lucy Chappell as Mary Hawking
Christian McKay as Roger Penrose
Enzo Cilenti as Kip Thorne
Georg Nikoloff as Isaak Khalatnikov
Alice Orr-Ewing as Diana King
Stephen Hawking provides his own, Equaliser-computerised voice
Frank Leboeuf as Swiss doctor
Michael Marcus as Ellis
Adam Godley as Cambridge Doctor
Awards:
2014 Academy Awards
Best Achievement in Music(Original Score) - Johann Johannsson - Nominated
Best Motion Picture of the Year - Tim Bevan, Lisa Bruce, Eric Fellner, Anthony McCarten - Nominated
Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role - Eddie Redmayne - Won
Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role - Felicity Jones - Nominated
Best Writing(Adapted Screenplay) - Anthony McCarten - Nominated
2015 BAFTAs
Best Adapted Screenplay - Anthony McCarten - Won
Best Costume Design - Steven Noble - Nominated
Best Director - James Marsh - Nominated
Best Editing - Jinx Godfrey - Nominated
Best Film - Tim Bevan, Lisa Bruce, Eric Fellner, Anthony McCarten - Nominated
Best Leading Actor - Eddie Redmayne - Won
Best Leading Actress - Felicity Jones - Nominated
Best Make Up & Hair - Jan Sewell - Nominated
Best Original Music - Johann Johannsson - Nominated
Outstanding British Film - Tim Bevan, Lisa Bruce, Eric Fellner, Anthony McCarten - Won
2015 Golden Globes
Best Motion Picture-Drama - Nominated
Best Original Score-Motion Picture - Won
Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture-Drama - Eddie Redmayne - Won
Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture-Drama - Felicity Jones - Nominated
Dr Jane Hawking, who was Stephen Hawking's wife for over twenty years, is a writer and lecturer. Her book At Home in France was published in 1994, followed by Music to Move the Stars in 1999. She lives and works in Cambridge.
KOBO / iTUNES / iTUNES AUDIO / AUDIBLE
Film
B&N / FOCUS FEATURE / WIKI
