Travelling to Infinity (22 page)

Quite apart from steps and kerbs, there were many unforeseen hazards in the course of everyday life. Once, when taking Stephen with Lucy on his knee out for a walk across the fen, the front
castor of the wheelchair stuck in a rut, jolting the frightened occupants out of the chair on to the muddy path. On another occasion, when Lucy was slightly older, we avoided the ruts but came
across a rather different obstacle in our path. To cut down on baggage, I had left the house with only my door key and no money in my pocket. As we turned through the wrought-iron gates into
King’s College, Lucy inevitably spotted an ice-cream van parked on the verge. She had begun to acquire language at ten months’ old, when, lying on our bed, she had looked up at the
light fitting and announced, “lat, lat,” so demanding an ice cream at the age of one was well within her capabilities. Refusing to take my apologetic “no” for an answer, she
slid off her father’s knee to the ground at his feet, and staged a furious infant sit-down demonstration on the pathway. I could not carry her and push Stephen at the same time so Robert and
I tried to cajole the agitated little ball of royal blue garments and auburn curls, but to no avail. The King’s Choristers paused on their way from the choir school to evensong in the chapel
and stood wonderingly round her in a circle, perturbed at the spectacle of so much anguish in such a tiny person. After an eternity an acquaintance of Stephen’s from another group in the
Department appeared on the scene and came to the rescue. While I pushed Stephen, he carried Lucy, still loudly proclaiming her indignation, home – without an ice cream.

As we had no time to read newspapers, we relied on my parents for useful snippets of information culled from theirs. Often they would send us bundles of cuttings, sometimes about discoveries in
astrophysics, sometimes about benefits for the disabled. Since in one of the latter it was suggested that disabled people could reclaim the cost of the motor-vehicle licence, we approached
Stephen’s doctor for clarification. It transpired that the information in the article was ahead of its time: in 1971 there was no mechanism yet in place for reclaiming the licence fee –
that was to follow some years later – but Dr Swan suggested that Stephen might like to apply for a disabled vehicle.

This amazing possibility began to open up exciting horizons. If he could manage the joystick controls of an electric car, Stephen would have a new, mechanical mobility in compensation for his
diminishing personal movement. An application was accepted, the bureaucratic formalities completed, but just one hitch remained: the vehicle had to be parked under cover near an electric socket to
charge its batteries overnight. As so often happened, a solution came from an entirely unexpected source when Hugh Corbett, the Warden of the University Centre at the river end of the lane,
responded to our need and unhesitatingly offered Stephen a parking space under cover by a plug.

Although disabled vehicles were criticized for their instability, the electric car – which travelled at the speed of a fast bicycle – enabled Stephen once again to be master of his
own routine, driving where he wanted and dividing his working day between the Department in the morning and the Institute of Astronomy in the afternoon. On his return home in the early evening, he
would draw up outside the house, hooting the horn, and Robert would rush out excitedly and clamber onto a ledge beside him for the final fifty yards of the journey down to the University Centre,
while I would follow on with the wheelchair to bring Stephen back home. As ever no system was completely trouble-free. The car was subject to frequent breakdowns, and often we found it hemmed in
its parking place by other vehicles. Once it overturned, giving Stephen a nasty fright, though fortunately no injuries.

In summer the children and I would sometimes take a picnic out into the grounds of the Observatory and visit Stephen in his office in the Institute of Astronomy. The children’s
high-pitched voices would race ahead of them along the plush carpeted corridors, like gusts of fresh spring air, announcing their presence to their delighted father. The expressions on
Stephen’s face were always a much more powerful measure of his emotions than his spoken words, and on these occasions it was the smile on his face that conveyed his unmistakable joy in his
children. The Observatory, purpose-built in 1823 with a dome in the centre and residential wings for the astronomers, had the appearance of an unusual but imposing country house, set in carefully
tended orchards and gardens, where we acquired a small patch in which to grow our own produce. While the churchyard was ideal for growing roses and lilies, I baulked at the thought of growing
vegetables in its soil. Out at the Observatory the children set to with a will, chatting incessantly while they dug, planted seeds and watched them grow. Then at the end of the day we would proudly
take our armfuls of beans and carrots and lettuces into the Institute to show Stephen, before setting off for home ahead of him.

Those carefree afternoons spent on the verge of the country proved to be a respite from the increasing trials of life in Little St Mary’s Lane. When we had chanced upon it in 1965, the
lane was a haven of tranquillity. By the early Seventies, it was becoming a busy and dangerous thoroughfare to the University Centre, Peterhouse College and the Garden House Hotel on the river
bank. Not infrequently a ten-ton lorry would misguidedly come down the lane intending to deliver its load to the Centre or the hotel, only to find itself stuck halfway where the road narrowed. The
lorry would then have to back up to Trumpington Street, narrowly missing the façades of our houses and filling our front rooms with fumes.

If this was the main problem by day, by night our ears were assaulted by a barrage of thudding pop music from the Peterhouse so-called music room. The Fellows of Peterhouse had cleverly situated
their music room – where regular pop sessions were held – as far away from the main body of the College as possible, in a room overlooking the churchyard. Perhaps they thought that it
did not matter if the slumbers of the dead were disturbed. Unfortunately they gave little thought to the living of the neighbourhood – especially the very elderly and the very young –
for whom the nocturnal wailings, poundings and crashings were intolerable. Advance warning of an imminent session could be detected in the afternoon with the whistling of speakers, the occasional
chord on a guitar, the crash of a lone cymbal. On one such afternoon, Thatcher nodded in the direction of Peterhouse, “Isn’t it lovely, dear,” she said, “I think
they’re having a
thé dansant
.”

More campaigning – this time not about disabled issues – was an urgent necessity. A succession of letters to the Governing Body of Peterhouse, anguished telephone calls in the middle
of the night to the porters and even, on one occasion, to the Master himself, eventually produced a compromise, curtailing the hours for full-decibel power and reducing the volume after
midnight.

The traffic, a real danger for the three small children, Robert, Lucy and Inigo, who liked to ride their tricycles up and down the road and pay social calls on the neighbours, was a more
intractable problem and one which demanded a more organized campaign of meetings and many more letters, most of which did not meet with an encouraging response. However the complexion of the issue
changed dramatically on account of a devastating fire which struck the Garden House Hotel in 1972, a couple of years after it had been targeted in a student protest for appearing to support the
military regime in Greece.

By the end of the day of the fire, the scene of so many happy family gatherings was nothing more than a charred smoking shell, from which there soon arose ambitious plans for greatly enlarged
premises. Architectural considerations apart, a horrendous volume of traffic would certainly ensue, so we, the residents of the lane, opposed the plans unanimously. Just as both sides were heading
for a confrontation, we realized that the two apparently conflicting aims were not as incompatible as they had seemed. The managers wanted a new hotel, and we wanted the lane closed and its peace
and safety restored; by joining forces instead of opposing each other, both objectives could be achieved, and this was in effect the final result of a tense meeting of residents and managers
expertly chaired by the Thatchers at number 9.

If in Cambridge Stephen and I had begun to find ways of adapting and controlling our environment, elsewhere it was more difficult. On their return from Louisiana late in 1970, Stephen’s
parents decided to buy a country cottage. I hopefully suggested that a cottage on the east coast would be a wonderful asset for our family. In both Norfolk and Suffolk, though the sand was soft,
the terrain was level and manageable, allowing Stephen to be pushed to the very edge of the beach from where he could watch the children at play. My idea was curtly dismissed. “The east coast
is much too cold for Father; he would hate having a cottage there,” Isobel remarked. This was puzzling, since Frank Hawking spent most of his time working in the garden in all seasons and all
weathers – just like the hardy Mr McGregor in
Peter Rabbit
– and indoors he wrapped himself in a dressing gown for warmth rather than install more heating appliances, leaving
everyone else to freeze in the sub-arctic conditions.

Isobel went prospecting for a cottage with Philippa, who had come back from a two-year period of study in Japan, and returned rapturously enthusing over their find – a stone-built cottage
overlooking a bend in the river Wye above a village called Llandogo in Monmouthshire – a place of lovely walks and views, with streams and woods for the children to play in and explore. I had
never been to Wales and was easily infected by their enthusiasm, the more so because in April 1971 we had acquired a large, shiny new car, a replacement for the ailing Mini, financed by
Stephen’s First Prize in the annual Gravity Competition for an essay which he had run off just after Christmas.

Despite its size – about three times larger than the Mini – even the new car was barely adequate for all our luggage, as I found when I experimented with various ways of loading it
for the exploratory trip to Wales in the autumn of 1971. Once the wheelchair, the pushchair and the travel cot were stowed away in the capacious rear section, there was little room for the
suitcases. The next expedient was a roof rack, but that created its own set of the problems: by the time I had packed for the four of us, closed the house, eased Stephen into the front seat of the
car, folded the wheelchair and lifted it into the back, strapped the children into their seats, loaded their luggage, including the travel cot and the pushchair, and then heaved four heavy cases
onto the roof rack, I was so exhausted that the 220-mile journey, three times as far as the distance to the Suffolk or the Norfolk coasts, became an ordeal rather than an adventure. Even when the
M4 opened just shortly after our first trip, the distance still proved to be a major drawback.

Nevertheless, when we stopped across the Welsh border for a tea break and saw the road signs in a foreign language and smelt the tingling damp air, our sense of excitement returned. At last we
could truthfully tell Robert, who had been asking how much further ever since we left Cambridge, that we were nearly there. Some miles of open hill roads and then winding, leafy lanes brought us at
last to our destination. The description we had been given of the cottage was undeniably accurate. Its position above the river Wye was breathtakingly beautiful, commanding an uninterrupted view of
the river, the valley and the tree-covered hills on the opposite bank, where in a glow of radiant colour, autumn reigned in all its glory. A stream ran down the hillside beside the house, and a
path through the beech woods at the back climbed up over damp peaty undergrowth to the waterfalls at Cleddon. Not so very far away, on the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons, a chill wind raged
incessantly, testing the stamina of even the toughest hillwalker. The house itself was certainly picturesque – whitewashed, slate-roofed, set into the green hillside, blue wood smoke curling
gently upwards from its chimney – and its attractions were undeniable.

This faithful description had omitted several important details, however, such as the fact that the hillside was little short of vertical, so that the only possible movement was up or down, and
the only stretch of horizontal surface suitable for a wheelchair was a track a mere hundred yards long to the blackberry thicket at the edge of the wood. Moreover the house itself was reached by a
flight of a dozen steep stone steps, slippery with moss and lichen, while inside a long, steep staircase led up to the bedrooms and the only bathroom. It could not have been more inappropriate for
Stephen. Although his father stood by, it took him ten minutes to get up or down the stairs to the bathroom and more than ten minutes to get up or down the treacherous steps to the road. All
excursions had to be made by car because there was nowhere else for him to go.

The children loved the place and a part of me shared their enjoyment. The changing colours were mesmerizing and the clear air refreshing. I relished my mother-in-law’s meals. She was an
excellent cook, except on those occasions when she chose to economize by serving us fresh-ground elder or brackish nettles from the garden. Unlike Stephen, who would wrinkle his nose in disgust, I
also enjoyed my father-in-law’s home-made wine, especially the luscious, golden mead which he fermented from the honey produced by his own bees. After supper we would spend long, lazy
evenings in front of the open fire, playing board games until the children’s heads started to loll sleepily. But on those occasions when I went out walking or climbing with Robert, I felt
very unhappy at leaving Stephen behind, sitting sadly indoors or out on the terrace. Nowhere could more effectively or more cruelly have emphasized the limitations of his disability. I was upset
and baffled. It seemed that the Hawkings considered themselves free of all basic responsibility for Stephen. If we visited them, they would be prepared to help, but otherwise they appeared to
disregard the inconveniences of motor-neuron disease.