Travelling to Infinity (29 page)

In Devon, not far from Joy’s family home, I had other allies in my brother and his wife Penelope. After Chris’s first temporary job in Brighton, they had moved to Devon when Chris
joined a dental practice in Tiverton. Artistic by nature and interested in character and relationships, Penelope understood my need to talk about personalities, influences and emotions and the ways
people communicated with each other – subjects which in the Hawking family were virtually proscribed. In Chris and his wife I found a deep well of understanding and support; the drawback was
that they lived so far away.

Not all new acquaintances could afford to bring me the encouragement which I found in Caroline, Joy and my relations. Some of my new friends were as marginalized as I was, though in different
ways. Often they themselves needed support and turned to me for help. From the vantage point of the physical illness which dominated our lives and which was so immediately obvious and clearly
defined, I had only occasionally in the past glimpsed other tragedies. With greater maturity I began to awaken to the many causes and complications of suffering. Some people were struggling with
their emotions and with poverty after a traumatic divorce, others were alienated from their families, others were simply a long way from home. These situations and many others I could regard with a
certain objectivity, and I tried to give some sort of sensible encouragement to the people experiencing them. Ironically the situations which were closer to my own were much harder to deal
with.

Some well-intentioned friends promised to introduce me to a nurse whose husband was suffering from multiple sclerosis. I looked forward to this meeting, hoping that we might be able to bring
each other the consolation of shared experience. It was hard even to mention the problems – the crushing responsibility, the emotional strain, the aching fatigue of bringing up two small
children unaided at the same time as caring for a seriously disabled person who was wasting away before one’s very eyes – without pangs of disloyalty. Stephen never talked about the
illness, but nor did he ever complain. His heroic stoicism increased my sense of guilt at even giving voice to the slightest misgivings. But it was the very lack of communication that was hardest
to bear, sometimes harder than all the physical stresses and strains combined. Whereas I had originally hoped that there would be fulfilment in unity of purpose, in fighting together against the
odds stacked so heavily against us, it seemed that now I was little more than a drudge, effectively reduced to that role which in Cambridge academic circles epitomized a woman’s place.
Fundamentally I knew that I needed help – physical help and emotional support – in keeping my beloved family going.

Just once I summoned the courage to broach my woes – with the utmost caution – to Thelma Thatcher. Her response, if not a rebuff, was decisive in its severity. “Jane,”
she said, “I say to you what I always say when things cannot be altered: count your blessings.” Her answer was honest and she was right. I had much to be thankful for – not least,
my family and Stephen’s dedicated hard work and courage. I was not destitute and I had no alternative but to accept my chosen lot, keep faith, work hard and make the best of it – as, I
found out, Thelma herself had to do on losing her two infant sons. After all I was not unhappy: I derived intense happiness from the two most beautiful and enchanting children anybody could wish
for – Robert with his silvery blond hair, neat round face and wide enquiring eyes, and Lucy, auburn-haired with a pink and white skin as soft as swansdown. I was just tired, exhausted from
broken nights, backbreaking physical strain and the constant nagging sense of worry and responsibility. I was ashamed at having even attempted to unburden myself, and slunk away to count my
blessings.

Practical as ever, Thelma called by the next day. “I’ve been thinking, dear, you must have more help. I’m just going to call on Constance Babington-Smith, shall I ask her to
send her cleaning woman along to you?” Constance Babington-Smith’s cleaning lady, bustling Mrs Teversham, was a treasure of the first order, as was her successor a year or so later,
tall, angular Winnie Brown. Once a week, cleanliness and order were restored to our household. However, the housework was but a part of the problem. I still needed a sympathetic listener, someone
who would patiently listen to my intimate anxieties with understanding and without reprimand. I was not expecting the flourish of a magic wand suddenly to put everything to rights, but I did
cherish the hope that perhaps the new contact, the woman with the disabled husband, would be the person who would listen and respond with more understanding than anyone else, and possibly might be
able to suggest ways of dealing with some of the practical difficulties of caring more or less single-handedly with severe disability. It was not to be. By the time we met she was on the point of
departure for the USA with a new partner, leaving her husband in a home for the disabled.

Thelma Thatcher’s stark philosophy of counting one’s blessings was the only valid course open to me. I had pledged myself to Stephen. In so doing I had committed myself to trying to
provide him with a normal life. It was beginning to appear that that pledge meant keeping up a façade of normality, however abnormal life might become for the rest of us in the process. I
had no intention of reneging on my pledge, but isolated glimpses into the lives of others – such as the one I had just experienced – served to emphasize rather than alleviate my
consuming isolation. Long ago we had discovered that there was no organization, no medical authority to whom we could turn for enlightened advice and assistance. Now, since there was no one to whom
I could turn for personal support in finding a path through the maze of problems, I resolved to trust my own counsel, steering well clear of unsettling people and situations, pretending more than
ever that ours was just a normal family, beset with a difficulty which was best kept confined to the background.

One dark, windy evening – 14th February 1974 – I drove Stephen over to Oxford to a conference at the Rutherford Laboratory on the site of the Atomic Energy Research
Establishment at Harwell. We stayed in the Cozener’s House at Abingdon, an old country house on the banks of the Thames, which that winter was in flood. The rain pouring from heavy skies did
not dampen our spirits, for Stephen and I – and a handful of his students – were tense with excitement, anticipating a momentous occasion: Stephen was about to produce a new theory. At
last he had reached a resolution of the black-hole mechanics versus thermodynamics paradox which had been troubling him since the summer school at Les Houches. He had been spurred into obsessive
calculation by the vexatious doubts cast on his earlier conclusions by a Princeton student of John Wheeler’s – who had been so struck by the similarity between the laws of
thermodynamics and Stephen’s 1971 black-hole result that he claimed that the laws of thermodynamics and the laws governing black holes were actually the same laws. In Stephen’s opinion,
this claim was absurd, since to obey the laws of thermodynamics, black holes would have to have a finite temperature and would have to radiate; that is to say, the two sets of laws would have to
coincide in all aspects, not just one. In his resolution of the question, Stephen’s elaboration was innovative beyond all expectation.

Those intense periods of total concentration, which the children and I had witnessed, had led him to the conclusion that, contrary to all previously held theories on black holes, a black hole
could radiate energy. As the hole radiates, it evaporates, losing mass and energy. Proportionately its temperature and surface gravity increase as it shrinks to the size of a nucleus, still
weighing between a thousand and 100 million tons. Finally, at an unimaginable temperature, it disappears in a massive explosion. Thus black holes were no longer to be considered impenetrably black
and their activity could be seen to obey, rather than conflict with, the laws of thermodynamics. The long gestation of this particular infant had been cloaked in secrecy. For my part, I felt a
certain vested interest in attending its birth since its rivalry for Stephen’s attentions had already caused me much heartache. Bernard Carr was to act as assistant midwife, projecting a
transcript of Stephen’s lecture on slides to the audience.

On the morning of the lecture, I sat outside the lecture hall in the tea room, idly flicking through a newspaper while waiting for Stephen’s session to begin at 11 a.m. My concentration
was interrupted by the raucous chatter of a gaggle of charladies in the far corner. Their spoons clinked noisily against the side of their cups as they stirred their coffee, and their cigarettes
filled the room with smoke. Irritatingly their gossip was as pervasive as the smoke from their cigarettes, and I found myself compelled to listen as they mulled over the conference and the
delegates. To my bewilderment, one of them observed to her two companions, “And there’s one of them there, that young chap, he’s living on borrowed time, isn’t he?”
Momentarily I could not think whom they meant. “Oh, yes,” one of her companions agreed, “a right state he’s in, looks as if he’s falling apart at the seams, can hardly
hold his head up.” She laughed a light callous laugh, amused at her own comic invention. It reminded me of a comment Frank Hawking, already white-haired and seventy years old, had once made
in my hearing to the effect that Stephen was likely to die before he did. That had shaken my sense of security and then as now, the offhand condemnation of Stephen behind his back and the dismissal
of our vision for the future had made me smart in silence.

When Stephen came rolling out of the lecture hall in his wheelchair, ready for a quick coffee before embarking on his lecture, I scrutinized him carefully from head to foot. He was alive
certainly – alive with excitement and anticipation – but I had to ask myself if he really looked as if he were living on borrowed time, and if he were really falling apart at the seams.
I had to concede that, to a casual observer, he probably did, and that concession to outside perceptions made me very sad. Fortunately such concerns could not have been further from his mind.
Firmly rooted in the physical world and as unaware as Don Quixote of unkind scepticism at his appearance and purpose, he was ready to charge into battle accompanied by his faithful Sancho Panza,
Bernard Carr. Still shaken, I followed them into the lecture hall. I comforted myself with the reflection that those cleaning women had only seen the pitiable state of the frail body and were
ignorant of the power of the mind and the strength of the spirit, conveyed so eloquently in that imperious cranium and those fine, intelligent eyes. My conviction that Stephen was immortal was
nonetheless reeling from yet another blow.

With exquisite irony, Stephen reaffirmed his immortality in that very lecture, although at the time the chairman and some of the audience gave the impression that they thought that he had taken
leave of his senses. I sat on the edge of my seat as I listened to Stephen, hunched in his chair under the lights on the stage, and read the slides which Bernard brought up on the overhead
projector, clarifying the substance of Stephen’s faint whispering speech. In effect the lecture was given twice, once by Stephen himself and again by the slides, so there was not the
slightest doubt about the message: black holes were not as black as they seemed.

Despite the clarity of the presentation, silence reigned as the lecture came to an end. The audience seemed to be having difficulty digesting that simple message. The chairman, Professor John G.
Taylor, of King’s College, London, did not remain silent for long however. Aghast at this heretical attack on the gospel of the black hole, he sprang to his feet, blustering, “Well,
this is quite preposterous! I have never heard anything like it. I have no alternative but to bring this session to an immediate close!” His behaviour seemed to
me
to be quite
preposterous, reminiscent in fact of Eddington’s attack on Chandrasekhar in 1933, except that Eddington had used “absurd” rather than “preposterous” to describe
Chandrasekhar’s theory. Not only is it usual for a chairman to allow time for questions after a lecture, it is also a commonly accepted courtesy that he should thank the speaker for his
“extremely stimulating talk”. J.G. Taylor (not to be confused with Professor J.C. Taylor, the particle physicist who, with his wife Mary, was to become a close friend some years later)
extended neither of these courtesies to Stephen; rather he gave the impression that he would willingly have had him burnt at the stake for heresy. This conscious insult to Stephen was as
intolerable as the cleaning ladies’ mindless remarks. It implied a deliberate attempt to belittle him, suggesting that he had now proven himself to be incapacitated mentally as well as
physically.

Whereas in the lecture hall one could have heard a pin drop, in the refectory after the lecture there was uproar. It was as if particles from radiating black holes were spinning in all
directions, knocking the delegates sideways like skittles. Bernard settled Stephen quietly at a corner table while I went to queue at the counter for food. Still blustering and indignantly
muttering to his students, J.G. Taylor stood behind me in the queue, unaware of my identity. I was rehearsing a few cutting remarks in Stephen’s defence when I heard him splutter, “We
must get that paper out straight away!” I thought better of drawing attention to myself and went to report what I had heard to Stephen. Although he shrugged in a good-humoured way, he sent
his own paper off to
Nature
immediately on our return to Cambridge. Since it was reviewed for the magazine by none other than J.G. Taylor, it was no surprise that it was rejected. Stephen
then requested that it should be sent to an independent referee and, on the second time of asking, it was accepted. J.G. Taylor’s paper was also accepted but died a natural death, while
Stephen’s marked the first step along the road towards the unification of physics, the reconciliation of the large-scale structure of the universe with the small-scale structure of the atom
– through the medium of the black hole. Undoubtedly the Rutherford experience served also to reinforce Stephen’s determination to fight against all odds, whether physical or in physics.
The same experience left me proud but perturbed by the many hidden undercurrents it had revealed. The theory of the evaporation of black holes paved the way for Stephen’s election to the
Royal Society the following spring at the unprecedentedly early age of thirty-two. In the seventeenth century Fellows had been elected as young as twelve years old, but that was in the days when
privilege rather than merit ensured election. In the more recent past a Fellowship was an honour to which scientists aspired towards the end rather than the beginning of their careers, usually
after acquiring a handful of honorary doctorates and serving on a few advisory scientific committees along the way. It is the crowning glory of a scientific career, second only in prestige to a
Nobel Prize.