Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen by Jane Hawking

Author:Jane Hawking [Hawking, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2010-09-02T07:00:00+00:00

5

Celtic Woodland

It was obvious: we were living on the edge of a precipice. Yet it is possible even on the edge of a precipice to put down roots that penetrate rock and stone, roots that insinuate themselves into even the most meagre soils to form a sufficiently secure foundation for the branches above, stunted though they be, to produce foliage, flowers and fruit. At the end of April, on our return from Cornwall and Stephen’s from Oxford, the children went back to school as if the nightmare of the Easter holidays had never happened. Quietly philosophical and undemanding, Robert had always taken his father’s illness and disability in his stride, and fortunately he now went to a school which provided plenty of scope for doing all those physical activities that he and his father could not do together. Since Lucy followed her brother’s lead in everything, she showed few signs of disturbance at the unconventional nature of her background. Our lives appeared to have taken up their usual rhythms, though perhaps with an even greater determination to focus on each moment of each day. As Stephen and the children settled back into their routines, I grasped every spare second to jot down a few thoughts on the thesis; I redecorated, yet again, the rented house owned jointly by Robert and his grandparents, upon which we depended for paying part of his school fees; I attended the singing class whenever possible; and I cooked for dinner parties for the advancing hordes of summer visitors to the Department.

In midsummer, a BBC television crew came to make a film about Stephen, as part of a two-hour documentary on the origins of the universe. By chance, the producer, Vivienne King, had been a student at Westfield in the same year as me. Although she had studied maths, she did not adopt a hardline scientific approach to the filming but wanted to present Stephen sympathetically, as a rounded figure set against the background of his family life. This image appealed to me because I feared that a hardline scientific approach could well present him as a sinister character, like the malevolent wheelchair-bound Dr Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s film. The finished product, the first and best of its kind, contained the elements of a poetic idyll – albeit in a scientific context. Stephen was, of course, seen at work in the Department, interacting with his students, conducting seminars, expounding his latest theories. He was also interviewed at home against the backdrop of the two children playing in the summer sun among the flowers in the garden. When the film was broadcast worldwide the following winter as part of a major BBC documentary – The Key to the Universe – a school friend of Lucy’s, the daughter of a visiting scholar, watched it back home in Japan. The mother wrote to tell us that her daughter had stood transfixed in front of the television screen when she saw Lucy sitting on her swing under the apple tree. “Lucy, Lucy…” was all that she could say as the tears poured down her cheeks.

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