1 Wise Choice Choose your parents wisely. Bertrand Russell ''He had a professorial look from the word go,'' Isobel wrote four decades later about the newborn Stephen, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight. She gave birth to him, her first child, at about 7p.m. on Thursday, 8 January 1942, having been in labour for three days. He entered the world with a thick mop of dark brown hair and in a rather worrisome silence but, as she later said, when he emerged from his quiescent state, he made up for it with ''one of the loudest voices I''ve ever heard''. Stephen weighed in at 7 lb 12 oz (3.5 kg).
The birth had been natural, though difficult for mother and baby, partly--Isobel believed--because he had ''an enormous head''. Stephen''s parents regarded him as ''the most wonderful thing that ever happened'', as his mother later recalled. She and Frank had arranged for the birth to take place in Oxford because it was less likely to be attacked by the Luftwaffe than London, frequently pummelled by German aeroplanes in the Blitz. Also, a new, well-equipped maternity unit, funded by industrialist and philanthropist Lord Nuffield, had recently opened at the Radcliffe Infirmary in the city. Frank had ensured that his wife would be accommodated in a spruce, comfortable private ward and that the birth would be overseen by John Stallworthy--nowhere in the UK could have offered better care for Isobel and baby Stephen. The hospital had a policy of keeping new mothers in for a fortnight. Isobel spent most of the time admiring her baby''s every move, feeding him and discovering ever more things about him to love. When he was asleep, she read newspaper articles about recent developments in the war, including the United States entering it a few weeks before and the beating back of German forces from the outskirts of Moscow.
The general feeling, she later wrote, was one of ''hope for the future''. She also read a book she had bought in Blackwell''s bookshop a few days before and had begun shortly before going into labour-- The Twentieth Century Atlas of Popular Astronomy . Written by mathematician, classicist and civil servant Thomas Heath, the book offered an accessible introduction to a subject Isobel knew next to nothing about. She appreciated only much later that she had been reading about the basics of astronomy when nursing a baby who would become the world''s most famous cosmologist. Frank and Isobel arrived home in Hampstead carrying him in a Moses basket. They monitored Stephen''s every move. ''One day we are worried because he is constipated and the next day because he has diarrhoea,'' Frank commented. ''Probably it doesn''t amount to anything and is just our inexperience.
'' Isobel later recalled that Stephen was ''a very enjoyable baby, though fierce, and Frank and I were both very happy parents''. She was anxious that her adored son appeared to be undernourished, ''all head and rather poor muscular development''. His parents reflected on his unusual physique and believed that this was the first sign that something about his body was not quite right. It was not only Stephen''s physique that was unusual. Aspects of his unique character--as well as his interests and tastes--bore traces of his parents'' influence and of the upbringing they gave him. He knew how much he had benefitted from being raised by two unconventional people who were quite different but were both determined to bring up children who shared their independence of mind and determination to live life to the full. * Isobel regarded herself as British, though, genetically speaking, she was proud to be ''entirely Scottish''. Her father, James Walker, was of Highland stock, her mother, Agnes, from the Borders and the Kingdom of Fife.
Both families were well respected in and around Glasgow, where Isobel spent the first years of her life. Fascinated by her ancestry, especially on her mother''s side, she learned as a child that she was the eleventh great-granddaughter of James IV of Scotland and was related to novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island . As an adult, Stephen was amused to learn that one of his third cousins on his mother''s side was acclaimed actor-screenwriter Emma Thompson, daughter of Phyllida Law, later one of Isobel''s favourite correspondents. Isobel''s parents were both high-achievers: James had been a gold medal-winning medical student at the University of Glasgow, and Agnes achieved distinction as a pianist at the Glasgow Academy of Music. Their daughter Eileen Isobel (known as a girl and young woman as Eileen) was born in March 1915, eight months after the start of the First World War. During her early childhood, her parents were prosperous, her father practising as a successful family doctor, admired in the community for charging wealthy clients high fees so that he did not have to charge his poor patients. Agnes had become a homemaker, having been denied by her father the opportunity to study abroad and so realise her considerable musical potential. Isobel was the third of James and Agnes''s eight children and was especially close to her older sister Janet.
In those days, the family was served by a retinue of staff, including a maidservant who spent much of her time tidying up after the children. Isobel was, by her own admission, by far the messiest. Isobel had a happy childhood, benefitting from her father''s view that it was the duty of parents to ensure that they went to church every Sunday and that minds were filled with the best that culture had to offer. An avid reader and a precociously talented writer, she loved going to the theatre, too, and played leading roles in her mother''s home productions of short plays, acted by all the children and accompanied by Agnes on the piano. One of the highlights of the year for her was the annual family visit to the pantomime at the Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow, where she was thrilled by the spectacle and the vigorous audience participation. In the early 1920s, when Isobel was about eight years old, her family began to struggle financially, mainly because they were living beyond their means. Desperate to maintain his family''s standard of living, James took a lucrative job working as a medical officer in West Africa, while his family travelled south to the coastal city of Portsmouth in England, so that they could greet him when he arrived home by ship on annual leave. The family eventually settled in Looe, a small town on the Cornish coast.
Isobel was ten years old when she and her sister attended St Dunstan''s Abbey, a girls'' boarding school that taught history and the arts well but paid little attention to mathematics and science. Isobel was ranked the top student in her year and also excelled as an actress in a wide range of roles, notably as the protagonist in George Bernard Shaw''s Saint Joan , the role she was born to play. In 1933, Isobel became the first pupil in the history of St Dunstan''s Abbey to win a place at Oxford University. At the Society of Home-Students--later St Anne''s College, Oxford--she cut a diminutive but already assured figure--5 feet 2 inches (1.6 m) tall, articulate, with, as she put it, a certain ''stiff-necked Scottishness''. She soon made friends with many like-minded students, all of them horrified by the mass unemployment in their country. ''My left-wing leanings led me to the Labour Club, and then to the more radical October Club, where the university communists plotted the overthrow of the capitalist system'', though with little tangible success, Isobel noted. She became a communist but did not join the party as she was primarily anti-fascist, less concerned with learning political theory than with taking effective action.
In one incident during her first year at university, she and her communist colleagues visited Tonypandy in South Wales to demonstrate solidarity with a mining village in which all the male population had been put out of work by the closure of the pit. As a result, she was nearly ''sent down'', that is, expelled from the university. Shortly before her final year in Oxford, she was poorer than ever. A grant and a loan enabled her to complete her degree in politics, philosophy and economics, in which she was awarded second-class honours. She left the university in the early summer of 1936 with every last trace of her childhood Scottish accent gone - she now sounded like a duchess. She told family and friends that she no longer wanted to be known by her given first name, Eileen, but by the more genteel-sounding Isobel. She took a series of unsuitable jobs, including an administrative post at the Ministry of Labour, and even had a spell packing jellies at Bird''s custard factory in Birmingham. In 1937, she considered taking a break and going to Spain to help victims of the Civil War but decided to stay in the UK to support her parents, who had settled in north London.
At the age of twenty-two, Isobel was living through wilderness years. At her nadir, during a walking holiday, she befriended a dog and found herself living with it in a tent on the windswept hills of Dartmoor.