Travelling to Infinity (47 page)

There were many opportunities to perform the solo repertoire in fundraising concerts for the causes which Stephen and I had espoused, and sometimes I was brought in to fill the gaps in other
programmes, which was how my singing career reached its extraordinary apogee in the summer of 1982 with a short burst of song in King’s College Chapel as an interlude in an organ recital that
Jonathan was giving for a medical conference. My confidence both in my voice and in my ability to learn music quickly had grown sufficiently for me to feel that it was time to branch out by joining
a choral society. It was just possible to contemplate such a step since I now enjoyed an unprecedented degree of freedom. While Stephen basked in the deserved glory of international acclaim, those
early years of the Eighties witnessed my own transformation. On the one hand, the team of nurses brought desperately needed relief from the unrelenting physical demands that had previously consumed
all my available energy. On the other, through Jonathan’s unwavering support, and his devotion to the family as a whole, aspects of myself, which had long been suppressed, lying dormant in a
dark corner in the daily struggle, emerged into the light. Partial living was no longer called for. I was beginning to experience the fullness of life myself, realizing that the sands which had run
through my fingers on the beach in Santa Barbara years before had not, with the passing of time, spelt the end of my individual aspirations.

At a concert in the university church of Great St Mary, I encountered the sort of choir I was looking for – a mixed bunch of people of all ages and all walks of life – performing a
wide repertoire and aspiring to a high standard. The dynamic young conductor, Stephen Armstrong, a recent graduate of the University, took me on and thereafter I found myself attending the
once-weekly rehearsals, which demanded intense application for two solid hours at the end of a long day, and a great deal of learning in the intervening week. The day of the performance, usually a
Saturday, was hectic. Concert or no, the family had to be fed and cared for, and the final rehearsal was always gruelling. Then the concert itself would be over in a flash and eight weeks’
work would vanish in a single evening, sometimes creating a wild sense of euphoria at phrases that had gone exceptionally well, sometimes leaving tinges of frustration that others had not come up
to expectation. Concert succeeded concert with quick changes of idiom and musical personality from baroque to modern via the classical and Romantic periods. From Bach to Benjamin Britten, the
exhilaration from each performance well sung was heady. I did not mind what we sang; each successive work, each successive composer became my passionate favourite for the duration of the rehearsals
and the concert, bringing about a timeless distillation of the fragile pathos of our lives, transforming painful intensity into consoling spirituality.

It was at this time, when my star was in the ascendant, that my mother fell seriously ill. Recently she and her only surviving cousin Jack had been overburdened with worry on account of Auntie
Effie, who was now well into her nineties. Nor, I knew, did one need to look further than my own household to find one very obvious cause of chronic anxiety which could have exacerbated Mum’s
illness. At least the profound change in our own circumstances, occasioned by the advent of Nikki’s nursing team, allowed me to give my parents some moral support at that most critical time
and try to repay some of the care that they had shown us for so long. The revised regime also meant that, less harassed and less haggard, I could also give the children more attention. The baby had
grown into the most irresistibly funny little child, observant, endlessly enquiring, dancing with an impish vitality. At about eighteen months, long before his encounter with doting Italian bus
passengers, he had started to develop a precocious fascination for astronomy. In the early evening he would watch the moon from his high chair in the kitchen, following its course, distracted from
the important business of his supper. As it moved across the sky – and across the window – he would grow impatient with his food, clamouring to be released from his harness. When it
disappeared from view, he would dash excitedly into the living room to await the reappearance of its white shafts through the bay windows there. Each evening was for him a triumph of expectation
– until the moon waned, abandoning him in the darkness of mystified disappointment. Then, at twenty-two months, he demonstrated a poetic though unscientific awareness of other natural
phenomena. One cold afternoon in February 1980 as huge snowflakes came drifting down in a leisurely fashion, white and delicately geometrical against a leaden sky, he raced to the living-room
window, shouting “I see tars! I see tars” –
tars
being his way of saying
stars.
He danced round the room, excitedly chanting his little refrain to the silent
music of those softly falling starry constellations.

Tim’s exuberance was enchanting but it could lead him to attempt potentially dangerous feats of independence in imitation of his brother and sister if left unguarded for the merest second.
A couple of weeks before his second birthday, I was preparing the supper in the kitchen when suddenly the house seemed unnaturally quiet. There were no sounds of childish play – toy cars
being pushed across the floor, the tin drum being thumped, chattering voices and laughter. The blood froze in my veins at the terrible silence. I rushed to the front door, only to find it wide
open. Timmie had run away.

Robert, charging at full pelt ahead of Stephen and me, had frequently run away as a small boy but always to some purpose, and he had always put himself in the position of being easily found.
Lucy had disappeared only once – on a fine day in the middle of summer when we were still living in Little St Mary’s Lane. Thelma Thatcher and I had been anxiously searching the lane
and the churchyard for her without success, when some passing Americans told us that there was a tiny girl standing with a doll’s pram on the Mill Bridge. There she was – in her Bermuda
shorts, one hand resting on the handle of the pram and the other holding up her transparent green umbrella. She was surrounded by an admiring band of undergraduates, who were clearly wondering what
to do with this very self-possessed infant phenomenon.

Some ten years later in the isolation of 5 West Road, where there were no friendly adoptive grandparents to call upon for help and where the grounds ran for acres with neither a fence nor a
gate, I stood at the open door in a frenzy of blank indecision, not knowing which way to turn. Had Timmie run out onto the road and down to the river, or round the house into the garden? The
college staff, who were closing up their workshops for the day, heard me frantically calling his name, and came to help. Eventually Pat, one of the maintenance staff, soberly advised me to call the
police. He stood by while, with my heartbeat resounding in my ears and my hands shaking, I dialled 999. I was upset that the officer who took the call did not react more dramatically. He did not
seem to register the urgency of the situation. “Hold on a minute ma’am,” he said jovially. He returned to the phone a moment later. “Can you describe your little boy and
tell me what he is wearing?” he asked, still in the same irritatingly cheerful tone of voice. “Fair hair, blue eyes, blue top and green trousers,” I replied distraught with worry.
“That’s all right then,” the policeman said. “We’ve got a little boy in one of our police cars, but as he couldn’t tell us where he lived, the officer is driving
round in the hope of finding his mother.” Timmie was brought home in a police car by a policewoman and the kind person who had picked him up just as he was about to set foot on the road
– on his way, it seemed, to visit his godmother, Joy Cadbury. That same kind person had held him on her knee until the rather damp, blond, blue and green bundle was delivered back into my
trembling arms.

Although they were less dependent on my physical presence, the two older children needed a great deal of understanding. Robert seemed destined to be a lonely child with few companions, while the
transfer to secondary school parted Lucy from her band of cherished local friends whom she had known from birth. Because Robert had received a private education, thanks to his inheritance, we felt
that we could do no less for Lucy, but she was the only one of her year to go from primary school to the girls’ Perse. We gave her a kitten to comfort her and distract her, and in the hope
that it might help pay her school fees, Stephen decided that the time had come to write a popular book, describing his science – the study of the origins of the universe – to the public
in accessible language, avoiding the barriers of jargon and equations. I had often urged him to meet the challenge of explaining his research, reasoning that I, in particular, would benefit from
reading it, and so would the taxpayers, in general, who were financing that research through government funding.

Both Robert and Lucy sometimes came with me to St Mark’s where, ever inventive, Bill Loveless continued to cater for all ages and tastes. Not only did he keep the congregation of Newnham
morally and intellectually awake with his monthly reviews of the state of the nation, he also put a prodigious effort into attracting families to the church by means of the family service. This
service, always entertaining, sometimes unpredictable in the responses it could provoke, influenced a whole generation of children in an increasingly secular age. Lucy, who always had a part to
play, whether lighting the altar candles or snuffing them out, reading the lesson, participating in the quizzes or performing in various dramatizations, loved it. One Sunday when I had left the
children lazily dozing at home, Bill announced the inaugural session of a new youth club to be led by ordinands from the local theological college; it was to combine games, fun and serious
discussion. Robert showed little interest when I told him about it, but reluctantly agreed to go that evening just to please me. At seven o’clock I drove him to the vicarage, promising to
wait outside for ten minutes in case he did not like it. He liked it so well that I went home alone after the ten-minute wait, and thereafter he never missed a session. He met old acquaintances
from primary school and made new friends, both girls and boys. They formed a cohesive and loyal group from that day onwards, encouraging Robert to develop the self-assurance and sociability which
previously he had found so difficult. Only two weeks later, he met Bill Loveless as he was cycling home from school, and told him that he wanted to be confirmed. Bill became the trusted friend and
mentor to both Robert and Lucy. He often reassured them and gently explained the complexities of adult life to them when the anomalies of their background – whether the scourge of
Stephen’s illness or the unconventional nature of Jonathan’s presence in the family – disturbed their preconceived idealized notions of how family life and parents should be.

The atmosphere of those years was generally so much more relaxed that I was able to resume contact with my school friends again. They would come with their husbands and families for a Sunday
visit once or twice a year. After a leisurely lunch during which many a topic – political, environmental, scientific, literary or musical – would be intensively discussed, the adults
would amble round the garden and join the children for a game of hide-and-seek in among the glades and bushes of Harvey Court, the Caius property next door. This game became a tradition. With
Stephen acting as lookout, the rest of us shed our adult reserve and recaptured for just an hour the intense excitement of childhood.

In the comparative harmony of that period, my relationship with Stephen entered a new phase where the tendency for us to slip into the roles of master and slave was arrested. We were companions
and equals again – as we had been in our campaigning in the Sixties and early Seventies. The CND badge, which Stephen regularly wore on his lapel in television programmes, was but one
indication of the several causes which we championed jointly. The inexorable increase in nuclear weapons, of which Rob Donovan had chillingly warned us in the early Seventies, had developed into a
fully fledged arms race, a mad, uncontrolled competition between East and West to reach Armageddon as soon as possible and annihilate all living creatures on the planet. The Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament once again became a national force and local groups sprouted all over the country.

Our group, Newnham Against the Bomb, met once a month in the house of Alice Roughton, a retired doctor. A figure of immense and generous energies, trenchant convictions and fabled eccentricity,
she was reputed to serve stewed squirrel and nettles at dinner parties. Her husband was known to prefer the garden shed to the house. We dozen or so members of Newnham Against the Bomb would sit
round her smoking fire warming our hands on a glass of mulled wine, while we listened to presentations by knowledgeable but pessimistic speakers. Then we would plan strategies, discussing what we
could do to stop the arms race. The prospects were not encouraging. We were after all pitting ourselves against the military industrial complexes of the two superpowers. There was some slight
consolation to be derived from the fact that we were at least making an effort – and in any case, Stephen and I were used to playing David against many a monolithic Goliath.

Together he and I composed a letter and sent it off to all our friends around the world, particularly to those in the United States and in the Soviet Union. We urged them to protest at the
escalation in nuclear weapons, which threatened to destroy the population of the northern hemisphere and produce so much radiation that the prospects for remaining life elsewhere would be
negligible. We pointed out that there existed four tons of high explosive for every man, woman and child on the planet, and that the risk of a nuclear exchange being set off by miscalculation or
computer failure was unacceptably high. Stephen used the same theme in his address to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia when he was awarded the Franklin Medal in 1981. He remarked that it had
taken about four billion years for mammals to evolve, about four million years for man to evolve and about four hundred years to develop our scientific and technological civilization. In the
previous forty years, progress in understanding the four interactions of physics had advanced to the state where there was a very real chance of discovering a complete unified field theory, which
would describe everything in the universe. Yet all that could be wiped out in less than forty minutes in the event of a nuclear catastrophe, and the probability of such a catastrophe occurring,
either by accident or design, was frighteningly high. He concluded that this was the fundamental problem facing our society and was much more important than any ideological or territorial
issues.