It was a great shock to me to discover that I had motor neuron disease. (46. I had never been very well co-coordinated physically as a child. I was not good at ball games, and my handwriting was the despair of my teachers.) But things seemed to change when I went to Oxford, at the age of 17. (47.I took up coxing and rowing. I was not boat race standard, but I got by at the level of inter-college competition.)
In my third year at Oxford, however, I noticed that I seemed to be getting clumsier, and I fell over once or twice for no apparent reason. But it was not until I was at Cambridge, in the following year, that my father noticed, and took me to the family doctor. He referred me to a specialist, and shortly after my 21st birthday, I went into hospital for tests.
The realization that I had an incurable disease, that was likely to kill me in a few years, was a bit of a shock. (48. How could something like that happen to me? Why should I be cut off like this? Not knowing what was going to happen to me, or how rapidly the disease would progress, I was at a loose end.) The doctors told me to go back to Cambridge and carry on with the research I had just started in general relativity and cosmology.But I was not making much progress, because I didn’t have much mathematical background. And, anyway, I might not live long enough to finish my Phd. I felt somewhat of a tragic character.
But shortly after I came out of hospital, I dreamt that I was going to be executed. (49. I suddenly realized that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do if I were reprieved. In fact, although there was a cloud hanging over my future, I found, to my surprise, that I was enjoying life in the present more than before.) I began to make progress with my research, and I got engaged to a girl called Jane Wilde, whom I had met just about the time my condition was diagnosed. That engagement changed my life. It gave me something to live for. But it also meant that I had to get a job if we were to get married. I therefore applied for a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. To my great surprise, I got a fellowship, and we got married a few months later.
The fellowship at Caius took care of my immediate employment problem. (50. I was lucky to have chosen to work in theoretical physics, because that was one of the few areas in which my condition would not be a serious handicap.) And I was fortunate that my scientific reputation increased, at the same time that my disability got worse. This meant that people were prepared to offer me a sequence of positions in which I only had to do research without having to lecture.
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