Travelling to Infinity (48 page)

We made roughly the same points when we met General Bernard Rogers, a former Rhodes Scholar and Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, at a feast in University College, Oxford. After the
meal, Stephen barred his way with the wheelchair as he was about to leave the dinner table. The General listened considerately while, in some embarrassment, I recited my speech on behalf of Newnham
Against the Bomb. He then politely acknowledged that he himself was very concerned about the situation and had in fact been engaged in discussions with his Soviet opposite number. Within a few
years, the rapidly changing economic and political situation behind the Iron Curtain overtook our local efforts. We shall never know whether our modest individual and group protests had even the
slightest impact on the course of history, whether any of our letters ever reached their targets or whether our messages ever struck home to the heart of the political establishments of the East or
the West.

Closer to home our campaigns concerned less apocalyptic matters, though they were equally impassioned, especially when they related to the rights of the disabled. The Cambridge colleges were so
remarkably slow in implementing the Disabled Persons Act – which in its initial form had first reached the statute book in 1970 – that in the 1980s new buildings which made no provision
for disabled access were still being commissioned. One of them, Clare College, not a hundred yards from our house, was sending out an appeal to attract funds for a building containing a library and
recital room, which was advertised as a public place but had made no provision for disabled access. We campaigned vigorously in the media against this two-faced attitude and were met with comments
such as: “If Stephen Hawking wants a disabled lift, he should pay for it himself.” When finally Lord Snowdon – who had come to photograph Stephen for a glossy magazine –
took up our cause on the radio, the College was forced to capitulate.

Stephen and I – and Jonathan – had supported the fundraising activities of the Motor Neuron Disease Association since its inception in 1979. For some time, Stephen as the
Patients’ Patron and I had attended meetings and conferences. In the early Eighties he was asked to become a Vice-President of the Leonard Cheshire Foundation as well and, in October 1982, I
was invited to join the Appeal Committee to raise funds for converting a Victorian house at Brampton near Huntingdon into a Cheshire Home for the disabled. I attended monthly meetings in Huntingdon
and soon discovered that my catchment area for fundraising was none other than the University of Cambridge – each college within the University and each individual Fellow within each college.
Armed with a copy of the University register, my task was to sift through hundreds of likely donors and personally address pleading letters to each one, in preparation for the public launching of
the appeal in the summer of 1984. The launch in Hinchingbrooke House augured well for the appeal, but unluckily for the charity it coincided with a six-week postal strike, while the national
consciousness was distracted from giving to local charities by the horrendous pictures daily on television of starvation in Africa. Consequently it took many years of fundraising before the Home
was opened. For Stephen and me, however, these campaigns were a wholly positive and unifying activity which gave us a joint role – outside physics.

In the early Eighties, there were two areas of unfinished business which I had to settle. First and foremost there was the thesis. I was summoned to Westfield for my oral
examination in June 1980 in the presence of Stephen Harvey, the Professor of Spanish at King’s College and of my supervisor, Alan Deyermond. The previous evening in Cambridge, Stephen and I
had attended a performance of a Handel opera,
Rinaldo
, as part of the end-of-year celebrations in Caius. Much lauded though the performance was, it failed to make any impression on me
because music, even the famous aria, ‘
Lascia ch’io pianga
’, had temporarily lost its appeal. Like those occasions when Stephen had unwillingly found himself at the
ballet, I squirmed in my seat in impatience, resenting the misuse of valuable time. I was fraught with worry that I would never be able to remember every point, every date, every reference in the
336 pages of the thesis the next day at 2 p.m.

The next day, tense and partially sighted, having lost a contact lens on the way to London, I groped my way through the exam until, with a mischievous smile, Stephen Harvey asked if I had read a
book by the author David Lodge. Somewhat taken aback, I searched his face for clues to his meaning. Surely he wasn’t referring to
Changing Places
, the hilariously authentic account
of an academic exchange between Philip Swallow of Rummidge University (alias Birmingham) and Maurice Zapp of Euphoric State University (alias Berkeley)? I could not remotely discern any connection
between
Changing Places
and medieval Spanish poetry; nonetheless I plucked up the courage to ask whether he was referring to any of David Lodge’s novels. “No, no,” he
replied, “I mean
Modes of Modern Writing
” – which critical study, I had to admit, I had not read. After that, the exam proceeded in a more relaxed atmosphere. Later Alan
Deyermond confessed that he had not read
Changing Places.

The following spring Jonathan and Stephen – who bought me the flowing red robes of a Doctor of Philosophy – accompanied me to the Albert Hall and patiently sat through the mammoth
degree ceremony. It was the end of a long and arduous journey. The fact that it ended in a blind alley was not significant. I had certainly not entertained any great hopes of a teaching post or
even of hourly paid supervisions at the University of Cambridge, since my tentative enquiries as to whether there might be some teaching in the Spanish Department were politely ignored.

The chance to begin an occupation, if not a career, came unexpectedly and centred upon my other language, French, the language I had first encountered with some puzzlement on the side of HP
Sauce bottles at the age of three or four. Fortunately the fascination for French engendered by the HP Sauce – together with sympathetic teaching in early childhood – had been strong
enough to outweigh the powerful disincentive of Miss Leather, the gaunt, feline senior French mistress who regularly meted out “fifty French verbs” as her preferred form of punishment.
It was said in her obituary that she could keep a classroom in absolute silence, even in her absence.

In the early Eighties, just as I had finished the thesis and Lucy and her contemporaries were looking forward to learning French in primary school, language teaching was summarily removed from
the curriculum, a victim of the Tory government’s economy measures. One of my much valued friends from the school gate, Christine Putnis, the Australian mother of a large family of clever
children, prevailed upon me and Ros Mays, another of the mothers, to teach French to a group of children after school hours. With some trepidation, we began a project which was to last for ten
years. Every Monday afternoon we would greet our pupils with drinks and biscuits, and then subject them to an hour’s worth of intensive learning, artfully concealed in puzzles, games, songs,
drawings and stories.

A year or two later I found myself obliged to revise French for GCE O level with Robert. It was his school report, just before the O-level term, which spurred me into action. “He is
unlikely to pass the exam,” it said of his French. The thought of a child of mine failing French was so terrible that drastic measures were called for. Robert’s friend Thomas Cadbury
was brought in to provide some competition and to ensure seriousness of purpose, and a minimum of fifty verbs were conjugated in all persons in all tenses. This linguistic onslaught struck its
target so successfully that after the exam results it was actually suggested that the chip off the old scientific block might consider French for A level, a suggestion given only frivolous
consideration as he had been earmarked from birth for physics, chemistry, maths, more maths and, of course, computing.

Just as I was beginning to feel confident enough to take on further teaching more formally, in either French or Spanish, another meeting at the school gate provided a golden opportunity. One of
the mothers put me in touch with a recently established private sixth-form college where she worked, the Cambridge Centre for Sixth-Form Studies (otherwise known as CCSS). The startling conclusion
of an informal interview with the Principal was that I found myself agreeing to teach candidates for Oxbridge entrance, a challenging proposition, and one which I suspected to be some sort of
initiation test. If I could get students into Oxbridge, then I myself would probably be taken on. The advantages were that I could choose my hours and, as the organization had only limited
premises, I could teach at home.

I spent hours looking up old entrance papers in the university library, devising teaching programmes and ruminating on the moral and philosophical questions set in the general paper, which
revolved in some way or other around those philosophical and linguistic brain-teasers so beloved of Bertrand Russell such as: “There is a barber in Athens who shaves everyone who does not
shave himself. Who shaves the barber?” or “Generalizations are false”. Epigrammatic quotations were also a favourite of the examiners, who found an ample supply in the works of
Oscar Wilde: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple”, for example. Such formulations rubbed shoulders with essay titles inviting discussion about the ethics of nuclear deterrence or
the positive and negative values of science, as for instance, “The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima”. All these topics and many others like them were food to my starving brain.

My appetite whetted by university entrance papers, I next devoured the stuff of the A-level syllabus. Grammar, translations, comprehensions, literary texts – all required hours of thought,
preparation and revision, but provided a sumptuous feast on which to feed my hungry intellect. What’s more, I actually found that I enjoyed teaching and I liked the age group of sixteen- to
eighteen-year-olds who were put into my charge. As my pupils were always about the same age as one or other of my own children at some stage of their education, I felt a natural affinity with that
adolescent age group and quickly found that even the most difficult pupils would respond to a friendly approach. Many of them had been placed in boarding school at the age of six, and by the age of
sixteen had demonstrated their frustration in some dramatic way or other and had accordingly been expelled. Now they had a second chance and had to be eased into taking it. There was also a clutch
of overseas pupils, often multilingual, whose parents wanted their offspring to benefit from an English education within the security of supervised accommodation. These pupils were usually the most
highly motivated and the most stimulating, though often, because of their multinational backgrounds, they were uncertain of their true national identity, and lacked written fluency in any of their
languages. The strength of the A-level course was that it taught pupils to think analytically and critically for themselves and it introduced literature to people who might never have read a book
in their lives. It was particular gratifying when, after two years of study, a pupil would come and thank me for opening his or her eyes to the delights of reading.

The pleasure was the more intense when one of those appreciative pupils was dyslexic. Through my own family I had such wide-ranging experience of the multitude of problems associated with the
condition that I knew I could offer special encouragement. In an uncomprehending educational system, whether state or private, the dyslexics in a class, like my own sons, would typically be told
that they were slow, stupid or lazy and would be sent to sit at the back of the class. Dyslexics are not stupid. Generally their intelligence quotient is higher than the rest of the population but
their overdeveloped brain has squeezed out some other facility, usually associated with language or short-term memory. An intelligent child whose powers of communication are limited and who is sent
to sit at the back of the class becomes a frustrated child who needs patient and considerate teaching to recover his self-esteem and express his latent intelligence.

Teaching at home for a few hours a day at my own convenience was the perfect arrangement. Kikki’s successor, Lee Pearson, a gentle, reliable girl, took charge of Timmie in the mornings
while I taught. My pupils would arrive as Stephen was leaving for work and when the bell rang, I had only to shed my apron before answering the door. I felt intensely happy: the skills that I had
to offer were being mobilized. I won the respect of my pupils, and gradually discovered a professional identity for myself as I awoke from an intellectual coma.

Although through teaching, first at primary-school level and then later for A level, I was beginning to find some sense of my own worth, there remained the other area of
unfinished business, the one major barrier to the recovery of my true self: the fear of flying. Flying phobia, the black consequence of that fateful trip to Seattle so soon after Robert’s
birth when I nursed my small bundle on aeroplanes the length and breadth of the United States, had deprived me of many an exciting opportunity to accompany Stephen – to California in
midwinter, to Crete in spring or to New York on Concorde. It had forced me to invent patently feeble excuses, because every suggestion of travel by air sent cold shivers down my spine, putting me
immediately on the defensive. It had caused tension in the home and it had made me very unhappy. The anxiety had started to produce physical symptoms so marked that, before the trip to Rome in the
autumn of 1981, I was actually sick. I was desperate to find a cure.

It was with great excitement that, while idly thumbing through a magazine in the dentist’s waiting room later that winter, I came across a reference to a clinic where flying phobia was
accepted without embarrassment as a treatable condition. Enquiries and a letter from my GP eventually put me in touch with the York Clinic at Guy’s Hospital where Mr Maurice Yaffe, a senior
psychologist, treated sufferers, either privately or in groups on the National Health Service, with a variety of techniques. There was nothing clinical about Maurice Yaffe: his personality and
manner were absent-mindedly donnish rather than medical; he never mentioned the word “phobia”, only “difficulty”. As he enthused over the delights of cheap air fares, we,
his patients, became adjusted to a perspective which encouraged us to concentrate on the pleasures of Paris, Rome or New York instead of on the agonies of getting there. Then a very basic course in
aerodynamics left no doubt in the minds of the sceptical that aeroplanes were meant to fly. Finally Maurice Yaffe unveiled his own brainchild, a simulated aircraft cabin, housed in a small room in
the basement of Guy’s Hospital. Within minutes of taking our seats in the simulator, we found ourselves soaring away to Manchester – Manchester because the video film which appeared in
the cabin window was of a flight to Manchester with all the appropriate sounds and sensations of take-off and flight: the announcements, the revving engines, the crying babies, the floor tilting,
the undercarriage jolting and slight turbulence as the plane supposedly passed through cloud. After an initial feeling of panic followed by twelve or so flights to Manchester, the whole business
became so boring that I forgot to be frightened and began to relax. The culmination of the course was a weekend in Paris, arranged in fine detail by Maurice Yaffe, though not of course paid for by
the National Health Service.