Professor Stephen Hawking and former wife Jane. Photos / AP, Getty Images
The story of my life with Stephen Hawking began in the summer of 1962. My friend Diana and I had decided to drift into St Albans for tea. We had scarcely gone 100 yards when a strange sight met our eyes: lolloping along in the opposite direction, was a young man with an awkward gait, his head down, his face shielded under an unruly mass of straight brown hair.
"That's Stephen Hawking," said Diana. "I've been out with him. He's strange but very clever, he's a friend of Basil's [her brother]. He took me to the theatre once, and I've been round to his house. He goes on 'Ban the Bomb' marches."
Diana invited me to a party at the start of 1963. There, slight of frame, leaning against the wall in a corner with his back to the light, gesticulating with long thin fingers as he spoke - his hair falling across his face, over his glasses - and wearing a dusty, black velvet jacket and red velvet bow tie, stood Stephen Hawking. He was talking to an Oxford friend, explaining that he had begun research in cosmology in Cambridge.
I listened in amused fascination, drawn to this unusual character by his sense of humour and independent personality. His tales made very appealing listening, particularly because of his way of hiccoughing with laughter, almost suffocating himself, at the jokes he told, many of them against himself.
Clearly here was someone, like me, who tended to stumble through life and see the funny side of situations. As the party drew to a close, we exchanged names and addresses, but I did not expect to see him again. A couple of days later, a card came from Stephen, inviting me to his 21st birthday party. His friends were very different from mine, and I, a bright but ordinary 18-year-old, felt intimidated. I settled in a corner and listened to the conversation, not attempting to participate.
It was some time before I heard of Stephen again. I was busy in London following a secretarial course. One Saturday, I met Diana, now a student nurse. Suddenly she asked, "have you heard about Stephen?" "What do you mean?" I asked. "Well, apparently, he's been in hospital for two weeks. He kept stumbling and couldn't tie his shoelaces. They did lots of horrible tests and have found that he is suffering from some terrible, paralysing incurable disease. They reckon he's probably only got a couple of years to live." I was stunned.
A week or so later, as I was waiting for the train to London, Stephen came sauntering down the platform. He looked perfectly cheerful and pleased to see me. Daylight revealed his broad, winning smile and his limpid grey eyes to advantage. Behind the owlish spectacles, there was something about the set of his features which attracted me.
We sat on the train talking happily, though we scarcely touched on his illness. My mother met me on my return home one evening, excitedly waving a message from Stephen, who had telephoned to invite me to a Cambridge May Ball. In Trinity Hall, bands were sending their strains out on the night air. "I'm sorry I don't dance," Stephen apologised. "That's quite all right - it doesn't matter," I lied. Later we discovered a jazz band secreted away in a cellar. In the darkness, I persuaded Stephen to take to the floor. We swayed gently to and fro, laughing at the dancing patterns of purple light until the band packed up. I decided that I really rather liked him.
It was about the time of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963 that I heard from Stephen again. We went to the opera. He walked haltingly, lurching from side to side. Curiously, as his gait became more unsteady, so his opinions became more forceful and defiant. He announced that he did not share the hero-worship of the assassinated president. We were crossing Lower Regent Green when he fell. With the help of a passer-by, I dragged him to his feet and thereafter gave him my arm to lean on.
Stephen and Jane Hawking in 1989. Photo / Getty Images
After that evening, I felt that I needed to find out more about Stephen's condition. I searched out acquaintances who had become medical students and investigated the offices of charities dealing in neurological illnesses. Everywhere I drew a blank.
Stephen was coming to London frequently, but the course of love did not run at all smoothly. It did not need much imagination to realise that Stephen could not contemplate a long-term stable relationship because of the dismal prognosis of his illness. A quick fling was probably all he could envisage, and that was not what I dared imagine.
He revealed little where emotional matters were concerned and refused to talk about his illness. I met him yet again in Harley St that winter, after an appointment with his consultant. "How did you get on?" I asked. He grimaced. "He told me not to bother to come back because there's nothing he can do."
Stephen's personality was increasingly overshadowed by a deep depression. This revealed itself in a harsh, black cynicism, aided and abetted by long hours of Wagnerian opera played at full volume. He was even more terse and uncommunicative. It was as if he were deliberately trying to deter me from further association with him.
We were soon parted: Stephen to Germany on a pilgrimage to the Wagnerian shrine, the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, while I was with my parents in Venice.
Stephen was pleased to see me on my return. Intuitively I understood that he had begun to view our relationship in a more positive light. Back in Cambridge, one dark wet evening in October, he hesitantly whispered a proposal of marriage.
We sailed through the next year, carried high on a tide of euphoria. The illness assumed the proportions of a minor irritant. Ours was the last generation for whom the prime goals were quite straightforward: the ideals of romantic love, marriage, a home and a family. The difference for Stephen and me was that we knew we had only a brief space of time in which to achieve those goals.
Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as Stephen and Jane Hawking in The Theory of Everything.
No longer subject to savage black moods, Stephen's placid, more philosophical, nature promised a quieter lifestyle, but he could be highly critical of people. While I applauded his refusal to be drawn into small talk, I was nervously aware that his arrogance was in poor taste and was putting me in danger of losing my friends. He revelled in the opportunity to tell my university supervisor [she was reading English and thinking of doing a PhD] that the study of medieval literature was as useful an occupation as studying pebbles on the beach.
With endearing Yorkshire directness, Stephen's father warned me that his son's life would be short, as would be his ability to fulfil a marital relationship. He advised me that if we wanted to have a family, we should not delay, assuring me that Stephen's illness was not genetically inherited.
Stephen's mother also thought that I should be fully informed of all the horrific developments that could be expected as his condition degenerated. I replied that I would prefer not to know the details, because I loved Stephen so much that nothing could deter me from wanting to marry him.
In return, with all the innocence of my 21 years, I trusted that Stephen would cherish me. After the civil-marriage ceremony on July 14, 1965, intoned by the registrar at the Shire Hall in Cambridge, my mother-in-law came up to me and with her wry smile said: "Welcome Mrs 'awkins, because that's how you'll be known from now."
Felicity Jones, Professor Stephen Hawking, Jane Hawking and Eddie Redmayne attend the UK Premiere of 'The Theory Of Everything' in London. Photo / Getty Images
The Hawkings: a brief history
The Hawkings had three children, Robert, Lucy and Tim.
Jane was his main, and sometimes only, carer as the paralysis caused by his motor neurone disease spread.
They separated in 1990, soon after the publication of Stephen Hawking's best-selling A Brief History Of Time. There was a period of estrangement after both remarried - Stephen to one of his nurses, Elaine Mason, and Jane (now a professor of Romance languages) to Jonathan Hellyer Jones, whom she had met singing in a church choir.
Since Stephen's divorce in 2006, the pair have resumed a close relationship and attended together the London premiere of The Theory Of Everything in December.
Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen by Jane Hawking (Alma Books $25) is out now. The Theory of Everything opens at cinemas on February 4.
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