Travelling to Infinity by Jane Hawking Page A

relatives. They
also knew all there was to know about Spain, since she and the children had spent three months living in close proximity to Robert Graves’s household in Deià, Majorca, in the winter of
1950, when Frank was away in Africa, engaged on research in tropical medicine. Beryl Graves was a friend of Isobel’s from her Oxford days, and Robert Graves was regarded as an icon in the
family.
    When the supper table was cleared away, we, the younger generation, would settle down to play a board game. A fanatical games player since his early childhood, Stephen had, with his close friend
John McClenahan, devised a long and complicated dynastic game, complete with family trees, landed gentry, vast acreages, bishoprics for younger sons and death duties. This game unfortunately had
not been preserved, so we were reduced to playing games such as
Cluedo
,
Scrabble
and occasionally the notoriously difficult Chinese game, mah-jong, with its delicately carved
ivory tiles. Not only had I already been exposed to Stephen’s prowess at croquet but I had also received similar treatment when he offered to teach me to play chess. However, when it came to
Scrabble
, I did not need a mentor as I was confident of being reasonably competent at word games, an art learnt as a very small child from numerous games of
Lexicon
with my
loquacious and inventive Great Aunt Effie when we lived in her house in north London.
    If there were not a quorum for board games, Stephen and I would sit by the fire after supper while his mother regaled us with episodes of family history. I enjoyed listening to her and admired
her as a role model. An Oxford graduate and, before her marriage, an income-tax inspector, she was intelligent and witty, yet totally devoted to her family, appearing to have no ambitions for
herself at all. At the time she was teaching history in a private girls’ boarding school in St Albans, where her very considerable intellectual qualities were definitely underrated. With a
bemused detachment, she took upon herself the task of introducing me to her own past and that of the Hawking family. The second child of seven, she was born in Glasgow, where her father, the son of
a wealthy boiler maker, was a doctor. Although her family moved by boat to Plymouth when she was still a young child, she had vivid memories of her grandfather’s austere house in Glasgow,
where family prayers in the parlour, attended by every member of the household staff, constituted the only form of diversion. On her mother’s side, she claimed descent from John Law of
Lauriston, who after bankrupting France in the seventeenth century took himself off to Louisiana. In the telling, multifarious and far-reaching family feuds came to light, most of them concerned
money, for it appeared that cutting a miscreant out of one’s will was considered an automatic and quite acceptable means of expressing profound and puritanical displeasure.
    Stephen’s father’s family were of God-fearing Yorkshire-farming stock. Their claim to distinction had come through an ancestor in the early nine-teenth century who had been steward
to the Duke of Devonshire. In recognition of this elevated position he had built himself a sizeable house in Boroughbridge in Yorkshire, and had called it Chatsworth. The family fortunes had
fluctuated somewhat since those days, with the consequence that, in the twentieth century, Stephen’s grandfather’s farming ventures had led to financial ruin and it was left to his
grandmother to rescue her family of five children – four boys and a girl – from penury. This she did by opening a school in her house. Its success was said to be a measure of her
strength of character. Money, wealth and its creation and loss were prominent elements in Isobel’s story-telling, as was her marked tendency to judge others by their intelligence rather than
by their integrity or kindness. Charm was regarded as a severe flaw in character, and those