Stephen Hawking Read Free Page B

of the 1950s had little time for girls in their busy program, and parties were single-sex affairs until the age of fifteen or sixteen. It was only then that they would have the inclination and parental permission to hold sherry parties at their houses and practice the dance steps they had learned after school games on Saturdays at a dance studio in St. Albans city center.
    Until they had graduated to such pleasures, the boys often went on long bicycle rides in the Hertfordshire countryside around St. Albans, sometimes going as far afield as Whipsnade, some fifteen miles away. Another favorite hobby wasinventing and playing board games. The key characters in all this were Stephen and Roger Ferneyhaugh. Hawking, the embryonic scientist and logician already emerging, would devise the rules and laws of the games, while Ferneyhaugh designed the boards and pieces. The group would gather at parents’ houses during school holidays and on weekends, and set up the latest game on the bedroom floor or with glasses of orange squash on the sitting-room carpet.
    First there was the War Game, based on the Second World War. Then came the Feudal Game, devised around the social, military, and political intricacies of medieval England, with the whole infrastructure meticulously developed. However, it soon became apparent that there was a major flaw in their games—Stephen’s rules were of such labyrinthine complexity that the enactment and consequences of a single move turned out to be so convoluted that sometimes a whole afternoon would be spent sorting them out. Often the games moved to 14 Hillside Road, and the boys would traipse up the stairs to Stephen’s cluttered bedroom near the top of the house.
    By all accounts the Hawkings’ home was an eccentric place, clean but cluttered with books, paintings, old furniture, and strange objects gathered from various parts of the world. Neither Isobel nor Frank Hawking seemed to care too much about the state of the house. Carpets and furniture remained in use until they began to fall apart; wallpaper was allowed to dangle where it had peeled through old age; and there were many places along the hallway and behind doors where plaster had fallen away, leaving gaping holes in the wall.
    Stephen’s room was apparently little different. It was the magician’s lair, the mad professor’s laboratory, and the messyteenager’s study all rolled into one. Among the general detritus and debris, half-finished homework, mugs of un-drunk tea, schoolbooks, and bits of model aircraft and bizarre gadgets lay in untended heaps. On the sideboard stood electrical devices, the uses of which could only be guessed at, and next to those a rack of test tubes, their contents neglected and discolored among the general confusion of odd pieces of wire, paper, glue, and metal from half-finished and forgotten projects.
    The Hawking family was definitely an eccentric lot. In many ways they were a typically bookish family, but with a streak of originality and social awareness that made them ahead of their time. One contemporary of Hawking’s has described them as “bluestocking.” There were a lot of them; one photograph from the family album includes eighty-eight Hawkings. Stephen’s parents did some pretty oddball things. For many years the family car was a London taxi which Frank and Isobel had purchased for £50, but this was later replaced with a brand-new green Ford Consul—the archetypal late-fifties car. There was a good reason for buying it: they had decided to embark on a year-long overland expedition to India, and their old London taxi would never have made it. With the exception of Stephen, who could not interrupt his education, the whole family made the trip to India and back in the green Ford Consul, an astonishingly unusual thing to do in the late 1950s. Needless to say, the vehicle was not in its original pristine condition upon its return.
    The Hawkings’