tenancy and served us innumerable glasses of sherry in the elegant, highly polished, antique-filled living room of
her fine, whitewashed old house.
In 1965 she must already have been in her seventies, though with her straight back, dark hair and stately figure she could easily have passed for ten years younger. She combined the sparkle of a
gifted raconteur with intense practicality: once, she told us, in a moment of inspiration at a Quaker wedding, she stood up and announced that the helpers had forgotten to light the gas under the
tea urn. In a manner which would have done justice to Joyce Grenfell, she delighted in playfully deflating the pompous egos of many Cambridge academics. Her style was aristocratic and assertive,
but always supported by deeply held and sincere Christian values. A self-professed pillar of the establishment, representing everything that Stephen despised, she found her natural target in
woolly-minded liberals. In her, however, Stephen met his match, and he had to respect her for her goodness and generosity even if, politically, she and he were poles apart.
In the next few months, Thelma Thatcher took us under her wing like a mother hen. She kept a kindly eye on Stephen when I was away in London, as well as attending to the needs both of her
elderly husband who – according to her, had snatched her out of her cradle – and of her lively, independent daughter Mary, who was assembling a film archive on the domestic lives of the
British in India.
All too soon, I had to return to my final year at Westfield. Parting from Stephen each Monday was desperately painful, and the regime was hard for both of us. Stephen was just sufficiently
capable of looking after himself to be able to live in the house, but every evening, unless invited out elsewhere, he had to make the long, hazardous trek down King’s Parade on his own to eat
in College. Our Australian friend, Anne Young, unfailingly kept an eye out for him as he passed her window on the other side of the road, and generally one or other of the younger Fellows would see
him home after the meal, when he would ring me to report on the day.
My routine was exhausting. I would leave for London on Monday mornings, spend the week in Westfield and then on Friday afternoons join the commuters once again. In my anxiety to get home to
Cambridge, to Stephen – and to Nikolaus Pevsner’s Friday evening course of lectures on Renaissance architecture, which we attended together – I would bite my nails as I watched
the minutes tick by on the Underground, wondering how long the train would sit in the tunnel, fearing that I was going to miss the connection from Liverpool Street. For years afterwards, my worst
nightmares were dreams of being stuck in a tunnel on the Underground.
During the week, the pressure was on: translations into and from Spanish, essays and seminar papers all had to be submitted within deadlines, and the only time I had for doing them was in the
evening. Weekends were taken up with shopping, washing, housework and typing Stephen’s thesis, parts of which he would have written out in a scrawly, all but illegible longhand during the
week, and parts of which he dictated to me as I sat typing at our shiny new dining table in the otherwise bare living room. The trials of that pre-university secretarial course were now bearing
fruit. The shorthand had been moderately useful for taking notes in lectures, but the dreaded typing was proving to be a godsend in tabling the laws of creation, since it saved us a mint of money
in professional fees. The thesis first glimpsed at Cornell – with its equations and signs, symbols and coefficients, Greek letterings, numbers above and below the line, and infinite and
non-infinite universes – drove me to distraction. However, since it was a scientific thesis, it was blessedly short. Furthermore I derived some small satisfaction from the knowledge that my
fingers were consigning the beginnings of
her fine, whitewashed old house.
In 1965 she must already have been in her seventies, though with her straight back, dark hair and stately figure she could easily have passed for ten years younger. She combined the sparkle of a
gifted raconteur with intense practicality: once, she told us, in a moment of inspiration at a Quaker wedding, she stood up and announced that the helpers had forgotten to light the gas under the
tea urn. In a manner which would have done justice to Joyce Grenfell, she delighted in playfully deflating the pompous egos of many Cambridge academics. Her style was aristocratic and assertive,
but always supported by deeply held and sincere Christian values. A self-professed pillar of the establishment, representing everything that Stephen despised, she found her natural target in
woolly-minded liberals. In her, however, Stephen met his match, and he had to respect her for her goodness and generosity even if, politically, she and he were poles apart.
In the next few months, Thelma Thatcher took us under her wing like a mother hen. She kept a kindly eye on Stephen when I was away in London, as well as attending to the needs both of her
elderly husband who – according to her, had snatched her out of her cradle – and of her lively, independent daughter Mary, who was assembling a film archive on the domestic lives of the
British in India.
All too soon, I had to return to my final year at Westfield. Parting from Stephen each Monday was desperately painful, and the regime was hard for both of us. Stephen was just sufficiently
capable of looking after himself to be able to live in the house, but every evening, unless invited out elsewhere, he had to make the long, hazardous trek down King’s Parade on his own to eat
in College. Our Australian friend, Anne Young, unfailingly kept an eye out for him as he passed her window on the other side of the road, and generally one or other of the younger Fellows would see
him home after the meal, when he would ring me to report on the day.
My routine was exhausting. I would leave for London on Monday mornings, spend the week in Westfield and then on Friday afternoons join the commuters once again. In my anxiety to get home to
Cambridge, to Stephen – and to Nikolaus Pevsner’s Friday evening course of lectures on Renaissance architecture, which we attended together – I would bite my nails as I watched
the minutes tick by on the Underground, wondering how long the train would sit in the tunnel, fearing that I was going to miss the connection from Liverpool Street. For years afterwards, my worst
nightmares were dreams of being stuck in a tunnel on the Underground.
During the week, the pressure was on: translations into and from Spanish, essays and seminar papers all had to be submitted within deadlines, and the only time I had for doing them was in the
evening. Weekends were taken up with shopping, washing, housework and typing Stephen’s thesis, parts of which he would have written out in a scrawly, all but illegible longhand during the
week, and parts of which he dictated to me as I sat typing at our shiny new dining table in the otherwise bare living room. The trials of that pre-university secretarial course were now bearing
fruit. The shorthand had been moderately useful for taking notes in lectures, but the dreaded typing was proving to be a godsend in tabling the laws of creation, since it saved us a mint of money
in professional fees. The thesis first glimpsed at Cornell – with its equations and signs, symbols and coefficients, Greek letterings, numbers above and below the line, and infinite and
non-infinite universes – drove me to distraction. However, since it was a scientific thesis, it was blessedly short. Furthermore I derived some small satisfaction from the knowledge that my
fingers were consigning the beginnings of
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