Free Travelling to Infinity by Jane Hawking

quite straightforward: the ideals of romantic love, marriage, a home and a family. The difference for Stephen and me was that we knew that
we had only a brief space of time in which to achieve those goals.
    Against all odds, the Fellowship application was actually delivered on time, and Stephen then waited to be called to an interview. It was not however to be quite as simple as that. On the
strength of the notoriety of his startling intervention in the Hoyle lecture, Stephen had approached Professor Hermann Bondi at the end of one of the regular fortnightly seminars at King’s
College, London, to ask him if he would be willing to act as a referee for the Fellowship application. As Hermann Bondi was a neighbour in Hampshire of Stephen’s Aunt Loraine and her husband
Rus, the Harley Street dentist, a formal letter did not seem necessary. Some weeks later, however, Stephen received an embarrassed message from Gonville and Caius College. In reply to the
College’s request for a reference for Stephen Hawking, Professor Bondi had disclaimed all knowledge of any candidate of that name. Given the circumstances and the casual nature of
Stephen’s approach to him, it was perhaps understandable that he should have forgotten. The situation was rectified by means of hasty phone calls, and Stephen was duly summoned for an
interview, where he had plenty of scope for impressing the members of the committee with his powers of intellectual argument, the more so since none of them were cosmologists, however eminent their
reputations in other disciplines.
    The novel idea of admitting a cosmologist to their midst must have appealed to the Fellowship Committee, while for us the appearance of Stephen’s name in the list of Fellowship awards was
a cause for jubilant celebration. Everything was working out just as we had dared hope, and the date for our wedding could be fixed, as planned, for mid-July. Oblivious to the gloom of medical
prognosis and ecstatic in the happiness of love and the promise of success, we glided into that summer through a series of further celebrations, with only a cluster of small bothersome clouds, such
as my second-year exams, the question of accommodation and the hitherto unfamiliar evil of income tax, gathering on the horizon.
    To our indignation, an unseasonably chill wind of hostile reality blew one of these small clouds all too quickly across our path, temporarily dampening our elation. Flushed with the success of
his Fellowship application, Stephen went – within what we in our youthful impatience considered to be a reasonable lapse of time, a fortnight or so – to call on the Bursar of Gonville
and Caius (generally pronounced in Cambridge as Keys, the name of the second founder of the College, but written Caius because of the Latinizing tendencies of the Renaissance). The Bursar coldly
informed the newly appointed Research Fellow that, as he was not due to take up his post until the following October, it was highly presumptuous of him to seek a consultation six months in advance.
As to Stephen’s query, a matter which was uppermost in our minds, he certainly was not disposed to tell him how much salary he could expect to earn from the Fellowship. For good measure he
decreed categorically that the College did not, furthermore, consider it a duty to provide accommodation for its Research Fellows. Smarting from such high-handed treatment, we were left to surmise
roughly what Stephen’s income would be and to find somewhere to live. Since there were plenty of married Research Fellows in Cambridge, we assumed that they managed somehow. As for
accommodation, we rather liked the look of some new flats which were being built near the market square, and put our name down for one of those with the agent.
    So confident were we in ourselves, and so impatient for our future to begin, that we did not allow such mundane problems to bother us for long. Indeed the attitude of the Bursar and those of his