The world-famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has always been regarded as a man apart, both for his enormous intelligence and because the effects of motor neurone disease forced him to communicate with an electronic voice synthesiser.
But for his son Tim, the famous monotone drawl of the speech box was not the obstacle to a loving bond that many might expect – in fact it proved to be the key.
Indeed, as he admits in a rare interview, he spent his earliest years unable to understand his father’s deteriorating speech.
‘My dad was able to speak with his own, natural voice for those first years, but it was incredibly difficult to understand what he was saying – particularly for me at such a young age,’ says Tim.
‘As a three-year-old, I had no understanding of what he was saying. I didn’t really have any communication with him for the first five years of my life.
‘It was only when he got his voice synthesiser that I was actually able to start having conversations with him. It was somewhat ironic that Dad losing his voice was actually the start of us being able to form a relationship.’
Tim, the third of Hawking’s children with his first wife, Jane Wilde, makes the disclosure as part of a BBC documentary on the world’s most famous physics professor.
A fascinating glimpse into Hawking at home, at work and with his family, the documentary reveals that his life could be a boisterous and mischievous affair despite his illness. Tim, 36, would jump into his father’s wheelchair to use it as a go-kart – and programme swear words into the famous voice machine.
Father and son shared a passion for motor-racing and would often join Formula 1 supremo Frank Williams, who was also in a wheelchair, watching the races from the Williams team pit. But it was a piece of advice given to him by his father when he was 12 that Tim has treasured the most.
‘I remember asking him a question which I think at the time I thought was a bit silly. I wanted to know if there were lots of other tiny universes dotted around.
‘He gave me the answer and then he told me never to be afraid to come up with an idea or a hypothesis no matter how daft it might seem,’ says Tim, a languages graduate from Exeter University who now works in marketing for the toy firm Lego.
‘He said that the most important thing was to have the confidence to follow it through, and I think that has been a great lesson for me.’
Their relationship was also characterised by fierce competitiveness at board games. ‘There was no compassion at all,’ Tim recalls with a wry smile. ‘My father is hugely competitive and he certainly wasn’t the easiest opponent at any game, particularly chess.’
Hawking first achieved mainstream fame with the publication of his bestselling popular science book A Brief History Of Time in 1988. But last year’s acclaimed biopic The Theory Of Everything – Eddie Redmayne won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Hawking – increased his profile even further.
‘Watching the film for the first time was a lot more emotional than I thought it would be,’ Tim continues. ‘I’ve never known my dad as an able-bodied person [Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease 16 years before Tim was born]. So to actually see him as a young man – that was one of the really lovely things about the film for me.’
It is a sentiment echoed by Tim’s sister Lucy, 45, an author who has co-written five children’s books with her father.
‘The bit that was most moving for me was when Eddie Redmayne, playing my dad, gets up out of his wheelchair during a lecture to pick up a pen,’ she tells the documentary, to be screened this week.
‘I have never seen my dad walking and I wanted that bit to last for ever because it was like seeing our father as he would have been without motor neuron disease. That was the bit that really broke my heart.
‘I see my friends, particularly male friends, pick up their small children and it reminds me of what my father could not do. I find it quite poignant and painful because it would have been nice.’
For his part, Hawking, whose eldest son Robert, 48, works for Microsoft in the United States, reveals the thing he has missed most in his life is being able to swim.
‘When my children were young, I missed not being able to play with them physically,’ he says.
Hawking, 73, was given just two years to live when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1963. He suffered a life-threatening bout of pneumonia in 1985 and was given a tracheotomy which removed what remained of his speech.
Since then he has communicated by dictating to his speech synthesiser with tiny movements of his cheek muscle. It can take him a minute to write each word on his voice synthesiser, ten minutes per sentence, and he admits it can be lonely.
‘People are generally afraid to talk to me or don’t wait for me to write a response. I am shy and tongue-tied at times and I find it difficult to talk to people I don’t know. I’m not good at small talk,’ he admits.
Hawking requires round-the-clock care by a team of four carers, who work in shifts at his £1.5 million chalet-style home near Cambridge’s Newnham College.
He also has help from technical assistant Jonathan Wood, who looks after everything from his computer and car to booking his holidays, and a stylist who helps him choose which clothes to wear for his many public appearances.
In the BBC programme, the professor is interviewed in his Cambridge office by comedian Dara O’Briain, a self-confessed science nerd and Hawking fan – on the wall is a much-treasured cartoon from The Simpsons, in which Hawking was first a guest in 1999.
Although divorced from Jane, the woman who wrote the book upon which The Theory Of Everything is based, they remain close.
Hawking divorced his second wife Elaine Mason, one of his former nurses, in 2006. Those who know him claim he is a flirt but he confesses: ‘Women are a mystery to me – that is the fun part about it.’
Though the disease is progressive, he has lost none of his impish wit. As the BBC film crew prepares to leave his home, he asks O’Briain: ‘What is a black hole?’ After a dramatic pause, Hawking quips: ‘Something you get in a black sock.’
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