Professor Stephen Hawking’s first wife Jane Hawking shared the inside story of their extraordinary marriage in a rather personal account published in the Newsweek magazine.
She recalled her first interaction with Hawking at St Albans High School in the 1950’s when she helmed her last name as Wilde, “The story of my life with Stephen Hawking began in the summer of 1962, though possibly it began 10 or so years earlier than that without my being aware of it,” she shared.
Even though Hawking was a pupil at the school for only a term before going to preparatory school a few miles away, Jane said Hawking kept catching her eye, “There was for a short spell a boy with floppy, golden-brown hair who used to sit by the wall in the next-door classroom”.
A still from The Theory of Everything, in which Jane Wilde is played by Felicity Jones and Stephen Hawking by Eddie Redmayne.
Hawking was pointed out to Jane by her school friend Diana King in the summer of 1962, when they both were enjoying the period of semi-idleness before the end of term. Jane described herself feeling intrigued after seeing Hawking on the street and couldn’t get him out of her mind. “Perhaps there was something about his very eccentricity that fascinated me in my rather conventional existence. Perhaps I had some strange premonition that I would be seeing him again. Whatever it was, that scene etched itself deeply on my mind,” Jane wrote.
Both of them met again for their first interaction at Diana’s New Year’s party. “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 stood Stephen Hawking, the young man I had seen lolloping along the street in the summer”.
While Hawking captivated the audience at the party by telling them that he had begun research in cosmology in Cambridge and that he had applied to join the Civil Service and had passed the preliminary stages of selection, Jane said, “I listened in amused fascination, drawn to this unusual character by his sense of humor and his 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.”
Conversing with Hawking, Jane felt they were more similar and different than she could have concluded. “Here was someone, like me, who tended to stumble through life and managed to see the funny side of situations. Someone who like me, was fairly shy, yet not averse to expressing his opinions; someone who unlike me had a developed sense of his own worth and had the effrontery to convey it,” she said.
Jane concludes that she and Hawking exchanged numbers but had no expectation of seeing him again. “The floppy hair and the bow tie were a façade, a statement of independence of mind, and in future I could afford to overlook them,” she said.
The couple got married in 1965 only to be separated in 1990 and were later divorced.
The complete story of the scientist and his wife can be read in the book Travelling to Infinity: The True Story behind The Theory of Everything written by Jane Hawking.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 10th, 2014.
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