Hawking Jane - Travelling to infinity: my life with Stephen

Praise for Travelling to Infinity

Stephen Hawking may think in 11 dimensions, but his first wife has learnt to love in several.

The Times

Jane Hawking has written a book about what it was like to be pivotal to her husbands celebrated existence... but it is much more a shout from the outer darkness.

The Daily Telegraph

What becomes of time when a marriage unravels? And what becomes of the woman who has located her whole self within its sphere? For Jane Hawking, the physics of love and loss are set in a private universe.

The Guardian

Jane describes the final, painful years of her marriage in candid detail.

The Independent

Jane Hawkings harrowing and compelling account... rings very true.

Irish Times

This is not a vindictive book, although the agony she went through is palpable; if Stephens struggle to keep his mind clear is heroic, so is her determination to balance his escalating needs and those of their three children.

Independent on Sunday

Jane writes about her former husband with tenderness, respect and protectiveness.

Sunday Express

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Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen is a revised version (with new material) of Music to Move the Stars, first published by Macmillan in 1999
Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen first published by Alma Books Limited in 2007
First paperback edition published in 2008
This new paperback edition published in 2010
Copyright Jane Hawking, 1999, 2007
All rights reserved

Jane Hawking asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

ISBN: 978-1-84688-115-2
eISBN: 978-1-84688-285-2

Printed in Great Britain by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, Berkshire

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For my family

La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fl o nous battons des mlodies faire danser les ours quand on voudrait attendrir les toiles.

Gustave Flaubert

Human expression is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out music for bears to dance to, when really we long to move the stars to pity.

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.

Stephens 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 fathers 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.